Originally started by Kevin Lawton, the bochs project - whose motto is “Think inside the bochs” - maintains the bochs emulator. Bochs aims to emulate - at a reasonable speed and with a fair degree of accuracy - an x86-based 32-bit PC with the AMD 64-bit extensions. It can run most operating systems inside it (as “guest operating systems”, if you prefer the VMWare term), such as Windows (3.1, 95, Vista…), Linux, Minix or one of the BSDs. (They even collect disk images as well). In addition, Bochs also runs on loads of operating systems as well - Windows, BeOS, OSX, Irix, Solaris… (more…)

Fabrice Bellard’s excellent QEMU is up to version 0.9.0 (a Windows port is in alpha stage).

So far, QEMU is the first thing I’ve found that runs Windows 98 and Dungeon Keeper properly.  Virtual PC was fast but couldn’t run anything other than the DOS version, and had problems with screen refresh.  Bochs was slow and clunky.  VritualBox couldn’t run the DirectX version either, and wouldn’t run the DOS version at all.  DOSbox was fine - but had problems with the integrated graphics on the laptop.

QEMU was fast, especially with the kqemu acceleration layer (which works fine on Windows Vista Home Premium, folks).  Couldn’t get the networking going, but it wasn’t really too much to worry about - getting the main game going was the main priority. 

It’s always nice, when using a new operating system in a virtual machine, to have some apps to look at in it.  So I thought I’d compile a list of some, where to get them, and the usual suspects: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird and Opera.  Here, then, after a quick scan through my bookmarks is all that I can find.  Use and enjoy. (more…)

Is either of them irrelevant to this blog? .Net looks irrelevant, Java doesn’t.

Before you think I’m an anti-Microsoft stormtrooper, I’d like to explain why.

Java works by using bytecode. It’s interpreted (or, more likely, converted into native machine code by the Java Runtime Environment) as being machine code targeted to a specific design of machine: a particular non-existent (well, when it was invented, anyway) processor and hardware set designed by one of Sun’s best cowboys, James Gosling.

.Net, however, works more like the GNU compiler collection, where everything is compiled to an intermediate language, that is kind of a meta assembler language which works on any processor. There is, actually, precedence for this - the famous Spectrum game Pyjamarama was written that way, and the programmer went on to create TeeOS around the same idea.

So, to come back to why Java is relevant and .Net isn’t, here’s the bottom line: Java is emulated, .Net is compiled.

Except that I also plan to write about obscure programming languages as well. So I suppose .Net, being a compiler inside, is relevant on those grounds.

One all.