MS-DOS on a Mac?

[mtakaich]

I have an archaic, but still functional, program that runs in MS-DOS. Can I run DOS through Boot Camp (or VM Fusion?) on my Macbook? Has anyone tried this?

Thanks

 

[GGJstudios]

If you use MRoogle to search the forums, you'll usually find the answers you seek.

 

[bnut]

The best thing I've found for this is an app called boxer, which is essentially a Dos Box wrapper:

Boxer

 

[Intake]

Boxer looks interesting. but I can't tell if it gives you full DOS access or not.

If that doesn't work, try Sun's VirtualBox; it's free. It runs Windows7 just fine, can't imagine that DOS would be any great challenge.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

 

[bnut]

Boxer looks interesting. but I can't tell if it gives you full DOS access or not.

I'm not sure what you mean by full dos access, but I believe it is fully functional, with things like hardware emulation using some kind of passthrough thing to the native drivers. It has worked with everything I've ever tried it with, and runs more or less instantly, so is I prefer it to a fully fledged virtual machine. It takes the usual OSX minimal installation, so I guess try it and see, if you can use dos you can use this

 

[jzuena]

I have an archaic, but still functional, program that runs in MS-DOS. Can I run DOS through Boot Camp (or VM Fusion?) on my Macbook? Has anyone tried this?

Thanks

I was going to suggest DOSbox, but it looks like bnut's recommendation of Boxer is a wrapper that takes what little command-line configuration DOSbox requires away (and even that isn't very involved). Even though DOSbox was originally written to play DOS games on newer hardware running Windows or Linux, it should work fine for other types of software as well. One nice feature it has over virtualizers like VMware Fusion or Parallels is that it is an emulator so you won't have to find your old DOS disks and a floppy drive to load DOS into a virtual machine.