DOSEMU Version 2 has been Released ([email protected])

Aloha DOSEMU Users!

I want to info everyone that DOSEMU has been released and is no longer abandonware. Feel free to contribute to the new DOSEMU team and help DOSEMU compete with DOSbox.

https://launchpad.net/dosemu-reborn

Mahalo,

Devyn Collier Johnson
[email protected]

Hi,

What makes yoou believe that DOSemu is 'abandonware' ?

Looking at the code repository I see a pretty intense activity.
http://sourceforge.net/p/dosemu/code/ci/8a7cad79ae6797ef4f36abea728903a4bc5a4cca/log/?path=

Sure, there was no public release for quite a while, but it's only a matter of packaging I guess.

Do you have any reasons to believe that forking a new branch of DOSemu would be more beneficial to the project than contributing to the already existing code base?

cheers,
Mateusz

09.07.2013 17:42, Mateusz Viste пишет:

Wikipedia. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosemu
Well, this mostly is true, because the releases
were not made (enough to call it abandonware),
but there were the unofficial releases to mitigate
the problem; both fedora and debian packages
do exist on the net.
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DOSEMU isn't abandonware, You are perhaps not inform and not keep track with it. DOSEMU evolves and bugs are solved - You can see bug tracer. If You want help to further improve it, You can and IMO will be welcome in its developer team - there is no need and perhaps no reason fork it.
I remember case of wodim - unfortunate fork of cdrecord. Although some distros was accepted this fork, wodim *was* (and maybe is still) abandonware, moreover with lot of bugs and degraded functionality contrary to original (well maintained) cdrecord. Thus I think, most of forks are foolish and inefficient dissipation of energy and time.

My two cents, cheers,
Franta Hanzlik

09.07.2013 17:11, Devyn Collier Johnson пишет:

Have you had a look into this already?
https://launchpad.net/debian/sid/+source/dosemu/

If you create a fork, you should probably package it
as dosemu-reborn-2.0.tar.gz and not dosemu-2.0.tar.gz
to not create an unnecessary confusion.
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Hi,

I feel I should clear up the confusion a bit, as official DOSEMU maintainer.

Yes, it is true that life has changed quite a bit for me since 2007 and I am now chasing two small children after work which does not leave as much energy or time to work on DOSEMU. There has however been some activity, after 1.4.0 in SVN, the 1.4.0.1 patch release in 2008, and quite a bit of development in git since Stas returned last year. The distributions now release based on git that we tried to keep in a stable state (the devel branch in git is allowed to change more).

So, if somebody skilled with more time than me puts in all the effort to release a new version of DOSEMU I should welcome that.

However, this is not the case here:
1. "dosemu-reborn" is practically the same as dosemu 1.4.0 but with licensing changes, some formatting changes and adds "#DOSEMU was reborn by Devyn Collier Johnson" at various places. A "2.0" should be instead (IMHO) based on git, be heavily tested, and come with a proper list of user-visible changes (and not a deleted NEWS file).
2. The license was changed from GPLv2-only to GPLv3-only. Sorry, you cannot do that in a fork. While I personally have no problem with GPLv3, you would have to ask all copyright holders to make such a change, or replace all code by those copyright holders (the dosemu files that say "GPLv2 or later" are the exceptions). (Quite similarly you cannot fork the Linux kernel under GPLv3 either).

So while I have no problems with people forking, in the way it is done here I stronly object, and will only confuse people. But I will gladly pass maintainership to somebody who can release a "DOSEMU 2.0" that truly deserves that title.

Regards,
Bart Oldeman

10.07.2013 06:13, Bart Oldeman пишет:

But not the case right now.
"master" appeared to have the nasty regressions (like the insufficient HLT handlers and more), a nasty bugs (like broken shift in wolf3d and some other games) and a license-incompatible code like mame's opl3 ("devel" gets most of that covered already). I mean, not good for even an unofficial release, but the guys who do the unofficial releases, likely do not know about that. If this can't be urgently resolved, dosemu is abandonware. :))

This was supposed to be true, but, for the reasons mentioned above, I think this is not sufficient for a 2.0.
Do you have any plans to bring "master" in a state where at least an unofficial (and eventually 2.0) releases are possible? Otherwise debian or fedora guys will soon import it, if not yet. --
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I will delete the project.

10.07.2013 14:16, Devyn Collier Johnson пишет:

You are always welcome to help bringing dosemu
out of the "abandonware" state by the different means
though. No one says that it is in a good shape right now
so there are many ways of doing that.
There are trackers and mail lists to discuss a new
things, post patches.
I guess the only thing people do not like to discuss is a forks. :)
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That's right! Don't throw the towel Devyn! Bart and Stas are cool
guys (together with many others in this mailing list) and they will help you out getting around knowing the code, guiding you to implement the improvements you may have in mind.
You may just start by telling what would you think would be good to
implement, etc.
A new stable 1.4.x tarball would be a nice thing though, if
somebody could help with that...
Thanks for not forking it and I hope to see you around!!!
Happy coding!

Ivan Baldo - [email protected] - http://ibaldo.codigolibre.net/
From Montevideo, Uruguay, at the south of South America.
Freelance programmer and GNU/Linux system administrator, hire me!
Alternatives: [email protected] - http://go.to/ibaldo

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DOSEMU Fans:

I removed the package from the DOSEMU_Reborn project. I asked
Launchpad how to delete the whole project, so that project will be closed sometime soon. I convinced the Wikipedia users to change the abandonware status to active, so the DOSEMU Wikipedia page now shows that DOSEMU is active.

I would like to help DOSEMU in some way. I do not know C/C++/C# very
well, so I cannot do too much programming. I was hoping to attract programmers to my project that could do some programming.

I have some ideas that can help DOSEMU:
1. We should probably try to gather up some programmers to help.
2. I noticed that the SourceForge pages for DOSEMU are old. DOSEMU has not received any updates in years. Maybe if some of these areas got updates, that would help.
3. What is we spoke with the DOSbox developers about merging the two projects? Why have two DOS emulators for Linux? Why have to separate communities when we can have one large one? Open-source software is based off of collaboration, so we should merge the to groups and have collaboration. Competition will not help either of us; it seems to be killing DOSEMU. Plus, DOSEMU will not last long in my opinion. If we can convince the DOSbox developers to merge the projects then both emulators will do better and last longer. If this idea is successful, we should probably come up with a new name for the merged program/project. I would suggest PhoenixDOS - two projects disappear and one newer and better one forms.

Mahalo,

Devyn Collier Johnson
[email protected]

Dear Devyn,

I am not very sure about how DOSbox is implemented, but I think they have rather different approaches to the issue of running DOS applications under alternative operating systems. There is also the option of booting MS-DOS, etc, in a VMware virtual machine, etc, to add to the list of options for DOS software.

However, in our case the attraction of dosemu for Linux comes down to two points:

1) The option for direct hardware access, thus allowing old software to communicate with old hardware, but under the management of a secure networked system (e.g. access to NFS drives, remote log-in via SSH, time keeping accurate using NTP, etc).

2) Good emulation of file system access, so DOS applications can work with Linux file systems and see them in a reasonably sensible manner (e.g. all file names mapped to lower case on the Linux side, upper on DOS side, etc). VMware's shared folders do not work very well in this aspect (though using Samba you can get something reasonable, but then with Windows networking, so not really a DOS solution).

These are not generally requirements for running an old DOS game, but they are exceedingly useful for keeping tried & trusted hardware & software going where the alternative of a new system involving a complete re-write may be either impossible (no source code, etc) or simply impractical.

Regards,
Paul

Dr. Paul S. Crawford
Satellite Station
Dundee University
Small's Wynd, Dundee,
DD1 4HN, U.K.
Tel: +44 (0)1382 38 4687
Email: [email protected]
The University of Dundee is a Scottish Registered Charity, No. SC015096

I am hoping that whatever is decided, that the result is an emulator that works properly in a 64 bit, particularly AMD, environment. I have an old reliable accounting package which I rely on, that crashes with op code errors under the 64 bit environment.

I have given up sometime ago with running it under x86_64,and have resorted to using another machine with 32 bit hardware and OS just so I can run the accounting package via a remote ssh session. I have been using Fedora Linus, but recently tried a Ubuntu linux (64 bit) and have the same problem.

I think I tried DOSbox, but I remember a show-stopper, maybe lack of printer support.

DOS emulation is not just for running games. There are legacy business packages such as the one I use, that require a good emulator. These packages were typically written in assembly language. In my case, switching to a modern accounting package is not a just a matter of the cost of software. The greater cost is the huge amount of time I would need to spend to manually convert about 10 business general ledgers to a new accounting package.

Fred

That's cool - it will avoid any further confusion among the (already sparse) user base.

That's cool too! :)

You could test - see the DOSemu bug tracker. It's a tool to report bugs, propose features.. Feedback is important for development, and testing is the best way to provide feedback.

good luck with that :)
I don't think programmers can be 'attracted' like, say, bees. programmers are vicious animals that usually like to do whatever they like most - if it's coding DOS emulation layers, then I believe they will find DOSEMU by themselves.

This is probably not such a good idea like it could sound like. DOSBox and DOSEMU are quite different. DOSBox is targeted to be multiplatform, while DOSEmu is specific to Linux (and that's one of the reason it's SO much faster than dosbox). There are probably some areas where both could meet (like sound emulation, vga stuff maybe?) but the cores are quite different, so I don't think a merge is possible.

Mateusz

11.07.2013 17:58, Mateusz Viste пишет:

IMHO wiki was fine, and whoever did the release (if ever), could update it with all the necessary info. Doesn't matter now though.

You can - with money for instance, but there are the other ways too.
There is probably no good howto about contributing ideas, wishes and the management, but it is all possible, and not only with the money.

In any case, I wonder if this guy is even subscribed to this list. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:DOSEMU&action=edit&section=5
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