A fork of DOSBox 0.74 for a personal project.
This switches project generation switched to Premake and by default generates for Visual Studio 2017.
It is bundled with SDL 1.2.15 and zlib 1.2.11 and builds with no further steps required. Run premake and build.
Note that in Debug, we build with the full DOSBox visual debugging component, hence the inclusion of pdcurs.
The focus of the project is "slave" mode, where a calling process can dispatch a silent, renderless DOSBox instance with a stream of CMD operations, eg:
- mount local paths to C:\
- run a build process, eg. HIGHC or MASM 6 on files inside that mount point
- capture and extract the results of any operations, passing back to the owner process
In this way, we can use DOSBox as an automatable DOS executable container:
DOSBox -conf common.txt -conf autoexec.txt -slave > results.txt
A new shell command, EMIT [ON|OFF], is added to control what gets exported to stdout. By default, everything is silenced.
Example autoexec.conf
[autoexec]
REM attach local storage as C drive
mount c S:\DOSBOX\MountC
REM add Pharlap and Metaware High C to the PATH
path Z:\;C:\phar386\bin;C:\HIGHC303\BIN
C:
CD NX_SDK\\KXP
mkdir 386
REM start capturing output, run compiler
EMIT ON
hc386 BOUNCE.C -c -o 386\BOUNCE.obj -w2 -f387 -Hloclib -I..\INCLUDE
exit
Using the example execution above, DOSBox will run through this command set with no display or pop-up, writing the last fragment and execution results into results.txt
C:\NX_SDK\KXP>hc386 BOUNCE.C -c -o 386\BOUNCE.obj -w2 -f387 -Hloclib -I..\INCLUDE
MetaWare High C Compiler R3.03 Serial 1-799999.
(c) Copyright 1987-92, MetaWare Incorporated
w "BOUNCE.C",L52/C2(#67): switch statement has no cases.
No errors 4 warnings
.. which can then be trivially parsed by a calling process