Enthusiast Runs DOSBox on OpenVMS for Alpha Processors

The website astr0baby.online, dedicated to the OpenVMS system, has published a piece about running the DOSBox emulator on the OpenVMS platform running on Alpha processors.

DOSBox is a well-known emulator of x86-compatible DOS systems, originally created to run old computer games and programs on modern hardware. OpenVMS, in turn, is an operating system developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) back in the 1970s that later passed to HP and then to VMS Software Inc. The Alpha architecture is a line of RISC processors that DEC produced in the 1990s and early 2000s and that OpenVMS supported alongside VAX and, later, Itanium and x86-64.

Porting or running DOSBox on a platform as atypical as OpenVMS/Alpha is of interest primarily to the retrocomputing enthusiast community and to administrators of legacy systems, where OpenVMS is still in use in industrial and corporate environments. Projects like these demonstrate how classic emulation tools can be adapted to non-standard environments that go beyond the familiar Windows, Linux or macOS.

The implementation details — including how the emulator was built and launched in the OpenVMS environment for Alpha, as well as how well the resulting setup works — are given in the original source.

Source: Lobsters