[Wine] Re: Is DOSBox replacing native DOS support in Wine?

[vitamin]

flerchjj wrote:
> My understanding is that when Wine can't even attempt to run DOS programs itself (MAC OSX, 64bit OSes, etc) that it will attempt to run using DOSBox. Is this correct?

Correct.


flerchjj wrote:
> Is the plan to replace native Wine DOS support across the board with DOSBox, use DOSBox only on certain OSes/chipsets, allow use of DOSBox on a program by program basis using config files, or use DOSBox only as a failure mode?

No, AFAIK there are no plans to completely remove DOS support from Wine. But there are also no active work to make it work better. The reason to keep DOS mode in Wine is to support multi-platform applications, that have pieces that run in DOS, win16, and win32.


flerchjj wrote:
> The move to 64bit OSes and lack of 16bit support worries me about Wine's internal method for interpreting DOS & Win 3.2 executables.

Don't confuse 16-bit protected mode and good old vm86 (aka real mode). Even 64-bit systems still do support 16-bit protected mode, used in win3.1 and supported by older Windows.

Almost the same applies to real mode. You can't remove it, that's how the system starts. CPU enters 16-bit real mode after power on and used by BIOS. The problem is, you can not switch to vm86 from protected 64-bit mode...