All About Symbian - Symbian, Nokia and S60 unwrapped.
DOS on your S60 phone (enables Windows 3.1 too)
Published by Rafe Blandford at 19:32 UTC, February 26th 2009
Thanks to a clever developer DOSBox, a DOS emualtor, has been ported to S60. This could potentially give you access to an essential applications from the past as well as a variety of games such as Tank Wars or Prince of Persia. Less usefully, given the speeds involved, it also means is now possible to run Windows 3.1 (and possibly Windows 95 too) on your phone.
We have heard many times that today's smartphones have the equivalent processing power and resources of standard desktop PC's from the early 90's, but it's not often you see this illustrated in such an obvious way. It's even more impressive when you consider this is all running in an emulated system on top of the Symbian OS.
The best place to start is the VOGONS forum, where the developer has been detailing the on going development of the port. There's also an active community discussing what you can do with the emulator.
There is also a thread in this forum showing how DOSBox can be used to run Windows 3.1 on an N95.
Real geek stuff, but how much practical application really. And it only makes you question even more:
- why a 400Euro Nokia smart phone does not have word document editing ability out of the box
- why it track handle simple organisation such as Outlook categories
- why Nokia Active Notes remains so lame and not synced to a desktop
Menneisyys
Let me disagree. Particularly on a high-resolution device like the 5800 or the N97, you can gain access to loads of high-quality games unmatched; for example, those of Legend Entertainment.
What is more, at mere 320*200, there is still a lot to emulate - for example, pre-80286 games. I've posted a lot of comparative pictures of DOSbox running on Windows Mobile mobile phones / PDA's to my DOSbox bible at, say, http://www.mobilitysite.com/boards/e...ion-guide.html .
While the linked bible is for WinMo, you can still get a picture of what you can emulate and what you should expect.
Unregistered
Win 3.1, it's shockingly nostalgic to see it on there.
Unregistered
Skagen going off topic to have a dig at Nokia again, what a surprise.
Why don't you ask Nokia to custom make you a cellphone to your precise requirements? Probably still wouldn't be satisfied because the thing wouldn't be able to levitate using anti-gravity.
Unregistered
Well, Its certainly beside the topic at hand, but he does have a point...
skagen
Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
Skagen going off topic to have a dig at Nokia again, what a surprise.
Why don't you ask Nokia to custom make you a cellphone to your precise requirements? Probably still wouldn't be satisfied because the thing wouldn't be able to levitate using anti-gravity.
Only surprise here is why AAS allows unregistered losers aka cowards, to post. Only thing you do here is underline that you are a loser with no guts.
If the device can run windows, even an older version of windows, it sure is underachiving compared to what it is capable of doing for users.
Kazutoyo
These news are so awesome! :D
Windows 3.1 is totally uninteresting here as far as I'm concerned, what matters is the DOS games. There are a lot of excellent games available for DOS, and the vast majority of them use a 320x200 resolution so they fit well into the QVGA screens of today.
I can't really imagine anything better on a longer bus/train ride, than to play UFO: Enemy Unknown and Master of Magic on the phone. Thanks to DOSBox, I can, albeit slowly, but fortunately that doesn't matter much since they are turn-based.
There are also a lot of great old adventure games that are now possible to play, which ScummVM doesn't support, like Dune & Dreamweb.
Now I just hope that someone will port UAE to S60 too, and I will be extremly content :) DOSBox and UAE has been the software I've wished for the most on S60 for years, and now we are half-way there, hooray! :D
Also a big kudos to the AAS staff that gave proper credit to kolijoco who ported DOSBox to S60 3rd. Most news sites instead gave credit to Marcin-prv who only ran Windows 3.1 in DOSBox which has been done many times before, although on other platforms. Symbian-Freak (who corrected themselves after being told) went as far as saying he was a wonderful developer, writer and hacker, but he didn't write a single line. He just took what kolijoco had done and replaced the original readme.txt file with his own. Sorry, a bit of an off-topic rant there :tongue:
EDIT: kolijoco already made a lot of speed improvements since the last release, so the next release will probably be noticeably faster.
EDIT2: Another new emulator worth mentioning is AntSNES.
ashu
Windows 3.1, hmmmmm
Windows 7???
;)
ILoveGadgets
Ahhh, it's like bumping into an old friend you haven't seen for years...and then realising why you haven't seen them for years :)
ILG
Rafe
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kazutoyo
Also a big kudos to the AAS staff that gave proper credit to kolijoco who ported DOSBox to S60 3rd. Most news sites instead gave credit to Marcin-prv who only ran Windows 3.1 in DOSBox which has been done many times before, although on other platforms. Symbian-Freak (who corrected themselves after being told) went as far as saying he was a wonderful developer, writer and hacker, but he didn't write a single line. He just took what kolijoco had done and replaced the original readme.txt file with his own. Sorry, a bit of an off-topic rant there :tongue:
EDIT: kolijoco already made a lot of speed improvements since the last release, so the next release will probably be noticeably faster.
EDIT2: Another new emulator worth mentioning is AntSNES.
Thanks. I've been watching DOS box for a while and will probably end up writing more about if with the first 'proper' release, but since everyone else was doing some coverage it seemed sensible to comment as accurately as possible. And yes I'm keeping a close eye on AntSNES as well.
HAIL_ACME
there is a video on youtube of n82 running windows 95 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Menneisyys
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kazutoyo
Now I just hope that someone will port UAE to S60 too, and I will be extremly content :) DOSBox and UAE has been the software I've wished for the most on S60 for years, and now we are half-way there, hooray! :D
Let's hope the port won't be faced the same problems as the WinMo version - on WinMo, UAE is plain useless for serious gaming (compared to, say, DOSbox) - see http://www.mobilitysite.com/boards/e...ore-amiga.html . That is, I don't expect much - emulating other,less demanding vintage platforms on mobile phones seems to be easier.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kazutoyo
EDIT2: Another new emulator worth mentioning is AntSNES.
there is 98 running too. its not by any means perfect. hard to make out very slow and hardly anything works but the fact it works is cool. iphone you can kiss my a*se lol
Frolf
Seems like gaming on phones is really no longer limited by cpu/memory performance and capacity. It wont be long until we see full Windows XP or such running on some Nokia model...
Unfortunatelly there is still inadequate controls that prevent any serious gaming on phones. Unless they invent some external joystick that you are willing toake with you .....
Kazutoyo
Quote:
Originally Posted by Frolf
Seems like gaming on phones is really no longer limited by cpu/memory performance and capacity. It wont be long until we see full Windows XP or such running on some Nokia model...
Umm, it's very much limited by the CPU. Windows 3.1 in DOSBox runs much too slow, not to mention Windows 98. Even DOS games from 1992 runs too slow.
Emulation is very demanding.
rdcinhou
The DOS emulators that I have seen usually have a common problem.
They use POLLED I/O for the user interface so they really bog down the CPU and use up the battery quick.
The better implementations provide for the tuning of the cycles so that you can make it as robust or as slow as you want.
Another way to run DOS on a mobile platform is with JPC (Java PC emulator).
The mobile version of this has been run on some Nokia phones.