One of my crowning achievements(?) was using DOSbox for actual work purposes.
In 2010-14 I worked at large retailer that still did almost half their development in RPG running on IBM iSeries.
Part of onboarding for new devs was this series of training software modules that went over the fundamentals of the RPG language. It was boring, but very thorough. It clearly had been purchased in the late 90s and kept in use since not much had really changed.
I think it was with Windows 8 that it finally stopped working. My supervisor, in charge of intern program, started stressing after none of the built-in compatibility options worked.
I immediately thought of DOSbox, and sure enough, it worked like a charm. For the next couple years I was there, one of the first things all new devs did was install DOSbox and it gave me a smile every time.
Can you tell me what RPG is? I assume a language that runs on mainframes??
Whenever I see a DOS thread, I like to remind people of eXoDOS, one of the most impressive archival efforts of every DOS game ever. Complete with manual scans, extras, and all neatly sorted in a launcher.
DOSBox has many many forks https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/DOSBox
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/wiki/DOSBox...
Personally I use DOSBox Pure with RetroArch
I found DOSBox-ECE more stable than DOSBox-X. I believe they provide similar set of features.
EDIT: Oops, talked too soon. Apparently DOSBox-ECE has been EOLed :(
My experience with dosbox-x is similar. dosbox-staging is probably the most stable and it's still updated.
86box is also great, especially for retro PC gaming support. I can run Windows 98 with a Pentium 233 MMX and Voodoo3 on relatively modest hardware. (AMD 7840HS)
Also PCem, which is has a faster dynamic recompiler and supports a few more hardware configs afaik. But hasn't been updated in a couple of years.
There's also UniPCem, which I think is a fork/port of PCem, and more recently updated. But I haven't tried it.
It's too bad that DOSBox-X doesn't have the Chrous/Reverb feature found in Dosbox Staging. This was a feature of the Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card, and it really enhanced the sound of Adlib music, almost making it sound like a wavetable.
DosBox-X runs really well out of the box on my Mac M1, and it has some built-in shaders that try to simulate curved CRT geometry that are pretty fun to play with.
Heads up though - it has some coloration/palette issues around using the built-in capture tool to record video, but this is specifically related to Macs.
One feature of DOSBox-X I've come to really appreciate when reverse engineering is that you can toggle the debug log on and off. Additionally, it can display the current VGA palette in the main window.
I'm a big fan, have been using it for years to play games. It's got a GUI that covers most of the DOSBox config, save states, and can run things like Windows 3 and 95 without much fuss.
The fact that this has DOS host support is pretty wild to me…
Other than “because we can”, which is great, is there a use to that?
For example could you run DOS 7 apps on a DOS 5 host that way (taking slowdown and hardware needs into account)?
Sounds really promising. especially 3dfx emulation...