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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘DOSBox’ Category

Running DOS Programs on an Apple Silicon based Mac

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/11

I’m vintage, so I have some old machinery but also want to be able to run old software on newer hardware.

TL;DR: Since Apple Silicon (which is based on ARM) uses Intel Emulation for regular Mac binary programs, VMware Fusion# on Mac M* series cannot run Intel based operating systems, after some research there basically were these options:

  • use VMware Fusion and run inside a Windows on ARM VM by using
    • a dos emulator like DOSBox or DOSBox-X, since modern 64-bit Windows lacks the NTVDM:

      Since virtual 8086 mode is not available on non-x86-based processors (more specifically, MIPS, DEC Alpha, and PowerPC) NTVDM is instead implemented as a full emulator in these versions of NT, using code licensed from Insignia’s SoftPC. Up to Windows NT 3.51, only 80286 emulation is available. With Windows NT 4.0, 486 emulation was added.

      NTVDM is not included with 64-bit versions of Windows or ARM32 based versions such as Windows RT or Windows 10 IoT Core. The last version of Windows to include the component is Windows 10, as Windows 11 dropped support for 32-bit processors.

    • an NTVDM replacement like NTVDMx64 or winevdm (sometimes calles otvdm)
  • use a specific emulator like DOSBox-X directly on MacOS
  • use a more generic emulator like QEMU based UTM

I have a VMware background on bare metal, Windows and MacOS, so I prefer it over Parallels

Links: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in DOSBox, DOSBox emulator, Emulators, MS-DOS, Power User, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »

86Box is a cool IBM PC emulator: it even supports modem emulation and SLiRP. Serial BBS galore over the internet all over again!

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/25

[Wayback/Archive] 449cf11779a0e8d7.png (694×311)

A while ago, I learned about 86Box an “IBM PC emulator for Windows, Linux and Mac based on PCem that specializes in running old operating systems and software that are designed for IBM PC compatibles.”

Until then, I mostly used DOSBox for emulation (which I had known after Windows 2000 dropped DOS support), but sometimes DOSBox doesn’t cut it as it emulates DOS (now mainly for gaming), not a full x86 based PC.

The toot pointing me at 86Box was [Wayback/Archive] mr_daemon: “So, 86box has gotten General Modem Emulation… internet over SLiRP…” – untrusted.website (with the image that is on the top right in this blog post)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 86Box, DOSBox, Emulators, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »