jhauffa / dos32 Goto Github PK

In the era of the 486 and early Pentium CPUs, DOS was platform of choice for game developers. To circumvent the limitation to 1 MB of RAM, so-called "DOS extenders" acted as a translation layer between the 32-bit application code and the 16-bit DOS system calls. Emulators like DOSBox are often too slow to properly play these games, and virtualization solutions like QEMU or VirtualBox do not fully emulate the required legacy hardware (VGA/SVGA, SoundBlaster 16, etc.)

This project is an attempt to run 32-bit DOS applications natively (i.e., without resorting to CPU emuluation or virtualization) on modern operating systems. This is done by intercepting system calls and direct access to hardware via MMIO or ports. It is very much a work in progress: currently, it requires MacOS as the host system, only runs applications written for the DOS/4G family of extenders, and only implements a small subset of DOS system calls. In its current state, it is only capable of running small toy examples.