DOSEMU2 Pre9

I remember those not being broken. It's a lower ask then a video game, sure. But it seemed to work.

I seem to remember playing Commander Keen under DOSEMU seamlessly on a p200mmx with 64mb of ram. If this mail from 1999 is anything to go by, others were able to play similar vintage games:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000118171326/https://www.mail-...

In the early 2000s I worked for a company selling a DOS-based 4GL product, which was part of an "embedded" system running Novell DOS. This became hard to continue with due to lack of support for e.g. SATA, USB, new networking hardware. So I moved the product onto Linux+DOSEMU with Samba and CUPS replacing the DOS network drives and printing facilities. It took some time to configure DOSEMU correctly such that raw access to the video hardware, serial ports, parallel ports etc. worked as needed. But once done, it worked perfectly, and last I heard it was still in use, so it kept a company with a niche product in business for an additional decade at least. For all I know, it's still in use today, nearly two decades later.

I have also run games with it, but only older stuff like Keen. As you say, for gaming purposes, DosBox is a better choice. But if you want a full emulation with real hardware access, then DOSEMU is (or was) better.

That said, I know nothing about what the aims of DOSEMU2 are, the documentation is rather sparse and it looks like it's had big regressions from DOSEMU (1) looking at the changes. Region locking is a big deal, I required this for running multiuser 4GL database applications. Looks like that was broken for a significant period of time. I'm also unsure what the purpose of "64-bit DOS" is, particularly within an emulator used to run legacy applications. Hard to know without knowing what the requirements are that drove this, but I do wonder if this isn't an itch being scratched rather than being useful for real-world end use.

That has plenty of issues of its own. Using something emulating a modern PC like QEMU does not quite work compatibly enough. Which is why both DosBox and DOSEMU and DOSEMU 2 have problems.

86box does the virtualization the oldfashioned JIT compiling way together with virtualized devices, cycle compatible as much as possible. PCem, its precursor, is even slower and has a bit less supported virtual hardware.