![]() You need a vacation from anything, really. Personally, I need to take breaks from the project every once in a while so I don't get burned out. That was probably the first time I'd realized how long we've been working on FreeDOS.Ī lot of us are just really into programming, and we like working on DOS because it's a great little system that people still use for things. Someone pointed out to me that I have been working on FreeDOS for longer than MS-DOS was a thing. How do you avoid burnout and attract new contributors to the project? You've been working on this project for over two decades. They don't aim to run DOS programs on Linux, for example. Wine allows you to run Windows programs on Linux (and other Unix, like BSD) by translating the Windows calls to Unix calls. If you aren't able to play the game in DOSBox, you might try it on FreeDOS. ![]() It depends on what you need.ĭOSBox has been making great progress in supporting DOS games, but there are still a few that don't run well or at all (yet) on DOSBox. For these, you'll need an actual DOS system, either running inside a virtual machine like DOSEmu, QEMU, VMWare, and others, or running on actual hardware. But DOSBox is really geared for playing games it doesn't do as well with many business applications. There are certainly a number of people who choose to use DOSBox to play classic DOS games. How does FreeDOS fit into the ecosystem of other projects enabling users to run legacy programs, like DOSBox and Wine? At least one developer contacted me a few years ago to say the embedded system he writes for is running on FreeDOS. So if you support an older embedded system, you might be running DOS. DOS used to be a very popular platform to run embedded systems. We installed FreeDOS on a computer and downloaded a 1990s DOS shareware program that could read that kind of file, and were able to export the data into a text file. One of our faculty had a 3.5-inch floppy that had some old research data on it, and the modern Windows programs couldn't read it. Actually, we did that at my previous job, at the University of Minnesota Morris. Over the years, I've heard from a few other individuals who say they used FreeDOS at work to bring up an old DOS program so they could grab data from an old data file. Martin (author of the 'Game of Thrones' series) writes all his books and manuscripts on a DOS computer, running the WordStar word processor. Probably my favorite example is author George R.R. There may not be as many of these people in 2016, but they're still there! We don't know if these are FreeDOS or some other DOS, but there's the car company that uses an old Compaq laptop running DOS software to service luxury McLaren F1 cars and the South Australian Government is still running their electronic health records on a DOS-based system. People who run legacy business applications.That's often how I play some of the old DOS games I loved. ![]() Sure, you can play DOS games in something like DOSBox, and some classic games have been ported to Linux (for example, DOOM) but there are a large number of us who still like to play DOS games on a DOS system. ![]() We did a survey a few years ago, and found there are three types of people who use FreeDOS today: I caught up with Jim to learn more about the FreeDOS project and where it's headed in this interview. FreeDOS has proved to be an important tool to numerous legacy applications powering critical systems which were never migrated to a more modern operating system. And more than simply an existing code base, FreeDOS is still being actively developed and is approaching a new release in the near future ("When it's ready," according to Jim). ![]() But in the free software world, DOS is still alive and well in the form of FreeDOS, an open source operating system maintained by Jim Hall and a team of dedicated developers who are keeping the DOS legacy alive well into the twenty-first century. ![]()
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