DOS ain't dead

The Bochs Project released version 2.3.6 on 24 December 2007.

Brief summary of changes:
+ More than 25% emulation speedup vs Bochs 2.3.5 release!
+ Up to 40% speedup vs Bochs 2.3.5 release with trace cache optimization!
- Lots of bugfixes in CPU emulation
- Bochs benchmarking support
- Added emulation of Intel SSE4.2 instruction set

Home page: http://bochs.sourceforge.net/
Announcement: http://bochs.sourceforge.net/getcurrent.html
Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=12580

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Forum admin

I love it, it's definitely noticeably faster :)

> I love it, it's definitely noticeably faster :)

I can see there's P4 and P4-SMP optimized version. Does it also utilize new virtualization instructions of C2D or is it in future plan?

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> The Bochs Project released version 2.3.6 on 24 December 2007.
> More than 25% emulation speedup vs Bochs 2.3.5 release!
> Up to 40% speedup vs Bochs 2.3.5 release with trace cache optimization!
> Lots of bugfixes in CPU emulation

Looks promising ... but doesn't really work

[++] No compatibility break with HX - still loads and runs
[+?] Can no longer reproduce the "EIP=0 bug" , while it still "works" on 2.3.0 - fixed (one of the "many fixes in CPU") ?
[-?] My HD images are no longer recognized (they are still fine for BOCHS 2.3.0 and QEMU 0.9.0)
[-?] Got 40% slowdown, not speedup compared to 2.3.0 (PKZIP 2.50 -exx on HDPMI32)

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This is a LOGITECH mouse driver, but some software expect here
the following string:*** This is Copyright 1983 Microsoft ***

> [-?] My HD images are no longer recognized (they are still fine for
> BOCHS 2.3.0 and QEMU 0.9.0)

That's an old hat, see http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=903

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MS-DOS forever!

Japheth wrote:

> That's an old hat, see

Thanks for pointing ... but the old "hat" is still unfixed

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=12580&atid=112580
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=deta...;aid=1824189&group_id=12580&atid=112580

What about the "speedup" ? I couldn't test anything except PKZIP because of the pretty limited space on a 1.4 MiB floppy

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This is a LOGITECH mouse driver, but some software expect here
the following string:*** This is Copyright 1983 Microsoft ***

> Thanks for pointing ... but the old "hat" is still unfixed

Maybe because nobody made a proper bug report.

> What about the "speedup" ? I couldn't test anything except PKZIP because
> of the pretty limited space on a 1.4 MiB floppy

I tried to prove this speedup by running several old DOS benchmarks (streamd, speed600, ...) in Bochs 2.3/2.3.5/2.3.6, but I always get the same results. Maybe I (we?) misunderstood something?

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Forum admin

> I tried to prove this speedup by running several old DOS benchmarks
> (streamd, speed600, ...) in Bochs 2.3/2.3.5/2.3.6, but I always get the
> same results. Maybe I (we?) misunderstood something?

Maybe you could try this?

http://rugxulo.googlepages.com/paq8o8z-jan6.7z

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Know your limits.h