Aerospace Software Ltd.

Objective Real-Time Software on the ADSP21XX

ADSP Tools Wine and DosEmu/DosBox Howto Guide

Herman Oosthuysen

27 August 2001

Scope

Linux has evolved into a reliable and easy to use operating system and is now my operating system of choice, not only for Engineering development work, but also as an embedded OS for real-time applications, being cost effective and stable - a good combination of features. I consequently decided to add a chapter on how to make Linux work for you.

This is a mini how to guide for DosEmu, the DOS Emulator and Wine the Windoze API for Linux.

Dosemu or Dosbox can be used to execute DOS programs under Linux and can run the older DOS based Analog Devices DOS based DSP tools on a Linux box.

Wine can be used to execute Windoze based programs such as the Mycomm msim21xx DSP simulator.

As with most things Linux, it is really trivial once you know how, but to figure it out can consume many hours of happy howto guide reading...

Wine

Download the latest version of Wine from CodeWeavers at http://www.codeweavers.com.

Follow the default installation method - it works. From now on, when you click on a .exe file, Wine will attempt to launch the program for you, as simple as that. Some programs will work and some won't - MS programs especially tends to fall in the won't category, but who wants to run MS programs anyway...

Installing Mycomm msim21xx

Copy the Mycomm stuff to a subdirectory in your home directory. Click setup.exe to let Wine launch the installation program.

The trick here is to select the directory where you want to install msim21xx, since the default will tell you that the disk doesn't have sufficient space or something.

If you browse for a directory to install in, you will see a whole bunch of DOS disk drives. This is the method Wine uses to map the Linux installation to DOS for the benefit of Windoze programs. This takes some getting used to.

After browsing around a bit, you should be able to identify a disk drive that is actualy your home directory on Linux. Select it and type a subdirectory name such as msim21xx. Continue the installation. It will stop during an attempt to create windoze icons. At this point reboot X by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace and log in again. Maybe, it will continue if you selected a directory where to create icons earlier in the installation, same as for the install directory - I did not bother, so I don't know.

Your simulator should be in your home directory as specified and clicking on the sim21xx.exe program will cause Wine to launch the simulator for you and everything should work as in Windoze!

DOSBox

The Dosbox emulator comes with Mandriva Linux. Simply run rpmdrake and install it. Using it is simple. Run dosbox from a command prompt, mount a Linux directory to a drive letter and off you go:

$ dosbox

Z:\> mount h /home/hacker
Z:\> h:
H:\> cd sopwith
H:\sopwith\> sw.exe

Enjoy the flight with the red Baron...

If your distro doesn't have dosbox, get it here: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

DosEmu

DosEmu seems to be unsupported nowadays. See DOSBox above.

Download the latest version of DosEmu from http://www.dosemu.org.

It is recommended that you grab the binary distribution and follow the default installation method - it works.

Download the following files:

README.bindist
dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz
dosemu-1.0.2-bin.tgz

Installing DosEmu

While logged in as an ordinary user, make a DOS directory in your home directory and copy the above files there. Unzip and untar the files. Run dosemu for the first time exactly as specified from the dosemu directory to configure it. From then on it is supposed to work from anywhere in the directory tree, but not for me - Oh, well, what the hell...

$ mkdir ~/dos
$ cd dos
$ tar -zxf dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz
$ tar -zxf dosemu-1.0.2-bin.tgz
$ cd dosemu
$ ./dosemu

Type Enter and yes and O'l Bob's your uncle...

Using DosEmu

Open a console and type

$ cd ~/dos/dosemu
$ ./dosemu -home

DosEmu will mount and boot DOS from a Linux file mounted somewhere and designate it as drive C:, while your Linux home directory will be mounted as drive D: and will present you with the familiar old clunky 25 line DOS screen - yuk! You can experiment with loading ansi.sys, it should work and give you a better screen, but I have not bothered to try that yet.

Now you can access files in your home directory from DOS or Linux and run DOS tools using batch files exactly the same as on a native DOS machine.

Stability and Usability

This simple setup should be sufficient to get even the most horrid DOS tools going.

DosEmu is quite stable and fast and as a tour de force can even boot Windoze 3.1, but you can't do much once you have done that - Wine is better for Windoze programs.

Wine can run most DOS programs as well, but the old DOS based ADI tools may generate page faults on Wine, while they work perfectly on DosEmu.