Tag Archives: virtualbox

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Finding other bugs, that I cannot fix

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It’s bound to happen. When looking for your own crap, you find someone else’s crap :)

Serial device I/O is probably not at the top of the list for any product these days. But when you’ve reached a version level of 5.x, you’d expect the product to be at least “mature”. Enter VirtualBox which seems to have problems when transporting data between the Host and the Guest. I’m not sure this is entirely related to “Serial I/O” or “UART” as VirtualBox likes to call it. But since that’s where I ran into it, that’s what I’ll label it as until they tell me different :)

There are, obviously, ways to get serial I/O working in VirtualBox. But this particular scenario, where I wanted to run NetSerial on the Windows 10 Pro (64-bit) host, and access the virtual COM ports in a Guest OS, does not seem to be the optimal way of doing things in VirtualBox. (Moving NetSerial into the Windows XP Guest solves the issue, but that sort of defeats the purpose, since I want to be able to use the emulated COM ports from any Guest OS, and not just Windows-based OSs).

The VirtualBox bug filing is here:
www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17093

 

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There’s something going on …

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So I guess I took another three years to think about this, judging from the previous post(s) :-) But this time, I have actually managed to make some “progress”. That is, if you consider reviving a 30 year old DOS program progress.

I have been able to get FreeDOS up and running under VirtualBox. I have been able to locate my old copies of Borland Pascal, TASM, MASM, VirtualPascal, and Watcom. I was also very glad to see that there’s something called Open Watcom these days. That may prove to be very useful for this mission. The OS/2 stuff will have to wait for just a bit, I need to compile all the DOS stuff and see that the code actually still works.

The first version of FrontDoor was released in 1986 (and I managed to locate the original announcement). If I’m not mistaken, the first version of FrontDoor with mailer capabilities was out in 1987. That’s 30 years ago!