I haven't tried QEMU but I have successfully run D86 under an MS-DOS instances running in Virtual Machine and Parallels. However, these environment aren't well tuned for games and sound emulation is more or less useless.
My guess is that the author of D86, Eric Issacson (http://www.eji.com/), made use of some of his inside knowledge from his Intel days. Specifically, I know he liked to use encodings of the AAM instruction with bases other than 10. Intel didn't document the opcode properly so history records it as only supporting base 10, but it in fact can support quite a few number bases. Anyhow, I would speculate that DOSBOX doesn't support such a flexible interpretation of the encodings and that's why it's throwing illegal instruction exceptions. Maybe I should patch DOSBOX on stream sometime and submit the patch to the maintainers.
My guess is that the author of D86 ... made use of some of his inside knowledge from his Intel days.
I continue to be amazed at the amount of backward-compatibility inside the average Intel x86 CPU. If something stays out of long mode, it can still do all of that. Impressive, really.
And... I hadn't thought through to the point of considering what you were using D86 for :)
I agree, things like sound emulation leave a lot to be desired. I only use QEMU for its networking and HW-accel virtualization - DOSBox runs rings around it with eg Win3.1...
Have you tried PCem and 86Box?
Maybe I should patch DOSBOX on stream sometime and submit the patch to the maintainers.
Comments
I haven't tried QEMU but I have successfully run D86 under an MS-DOS instances running in Virtual Machine and Parallels. However, these environment aren't well tuned for games and sound emulation is more or less useless.
My guess is that the author of D86, Eric Issacson (http://www.eji.com/), made use of some of his inside knowledge from his Intel days. Specifically, I know he liked to use encodings of the AAM instruction with bases other than 10. Intel didn't document the opcode properly so history records it as only supporting base 10, but it in fact can support quite a few number bases. Anyhow, I would speculate that DOSBOX doesn't support such a flexible interpretation of the encodings and that's why it's throwing illegal instruction exceptions. Maybe I should patch DOSBOX on stream sometime and submit the patch to the maintainers.
I continue to be amazed at the amount of backward-compatibility inside the average Intel x86 CPU. If something stays out of long mode, it can still do all of that. Impressive, really.
And... I hadn't thought through to the point of considering what you were using D86 for :)
I agree, things like sound emulation leave a lot to be desired. I only use QEMU for its networking and HW-accel virtualization - DOSBox runs rings around it with eg Win3.1...
Have you tried PCem and 86Box?
Now that would be really awesome. :D