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Thread ID: 97239	2009-02-08 22:17:00	Virtual Newb	TonyTech (14603)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
746102	2009-02-08 22:17:00	I'm new to virtual machines and struggling a bit here. What I want to do (briefly): * create a virtual machine running MS-DOS 6.22 under Windows XP host. * enable the DOS VM to access hardware, i.e. a pair of Digigram DSP cards. * Be able to transfer files from the XP host to the VM HDD. Do-able? cheers, Tony	TonyTech (14603)
746103	2009-02-08 22:51:00	www.techgremlin.com	pctek (84)
746104	2009-02-08 23:10:00	www.techgremlin.com Thanks! I'll give it a shot.	TonyTech (14603)
746105	2009-02-08 23:57:00	* enable the DOS VM to access hardware, i.e. a pair of Digigram DSP cards. Short answer is NO! Although you'll have no trouble installing DOS on a VM, you'll almost certainly not be able to access any (non-standard) hardware on the host. The VM server software creates a virtualised hardware environment that the guest OS uses, but it just simulates a standard PC-type environment. For instance, the VM "sees" the virtual network adapter & graphics adapter (on VMware Server, these are an AMD network chip & a simple [Trident from memory?] VGA graphics card). The VM server captures accesses to this virtual silicon & translates it to requests to the host's hardware. The closest you can get to doing this is to have the VM server present a virtual USB interface to the client VM & translate requests to that device through to a USB device on the host, but for other hardware, forget it.	MushHead (10626)
746106	2009-02-09 21:13:00	Short answer is NO! <snip> The closest you can get to doing this is to have the VM server present a virtual USB interface to the client VM & translate requests to that device through to a USB device on the host, but for other hardware, forget it. Dang! Looks like I'm back to a two-box solution. The issue now is how to transfer files from an XP to a DOS machine, and manage files in the DOS box via XP. The background to this is that I have some proprietary software that runs under DOS, which does clever things with audio and time via a pair of ISA-bus DSP cards. This software is rock-solid reliable and there is nothing else around that can do the job it was written for. I didn't write it and I don't have access to the source code so porting it to a more modern environment is out. Currently, audio and schedule files are uploaded to the DOS box via a dial-up modem and yet another DOS machine; the two DOS boxes being connected via thin-net using ancient Novell hardware & drivers The system has worked very well for at least 12 years but it's starting to have hardware reliability issues so there is a need to upgrade - which delightful task has fallen to me. :-/	TonyTech (14603)
746107	2009-02-09 21:17:00	I cant believe there isnt another product out there that is an updated version of the software you are currently running.....!?	SolMiester (139)
746108	2009-02-09 22:01:00	I cant believe there isnt another product out there that is an updated version of the software you are currently running.....!? Believe it. This code was written for a specific application, and while there are products around that do some of the stuff we need, none that I have found are capable of meeting all of the requirements of the job at hand. Personally I'd like nothing better than to rebuild the damned thing from scratch, using modern hardware and techniques - probably in a Linux environment - but I have neither the time nor the funding to do so.	TonyTech (14603)
746109	2009-02-09 22:15:00	Man would be good to run a quad core on dos with heaps of ram, would take longer to get through the bios post than it would to boot, haha	Gobe1 (6290)
746110	2009-02-10 01:46:00	You may want to check out something like FreeDOS - an open-source DOS replacement. As its under active (?) development, you may find that networking is reasonably well-supported, so you could use standard drive mapping from XP to get files off the DOS box.	MushHead (10626)
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