It used to be buy the product , keep it and get bug fixes for 3 years. Upgrades would be introduced every couple of years, and users could get the upgrade at a discount, same as there were competitive discounts if you sent in the title page from the competitors user manual.
What you bought didn't stop working (heck, dBASE still runs fine in DOSbox if I feel nostalgic). Same with games (SimCity 2k in DOSbox let me finish it and yes, your city launches into space).
Well, you certainly managed to hit a nerve. Several times a month I actually run an ancient dBase II application on DOS. It's the back-end of a database app that I've never ported, though the primary front-end is PERL/CGI accessed via JavaScript... Crufty old stuff but I can't get up the incentive to rewrite it one more time in a properly integrated way.
By the way, I never could get dBase II to run in DOSbox or any other emulator. It apparently needs a physical hard disk with the old FCBs. Therefore one of
It does more accurate emulation than normal dosbox. Lots of custom patches in its source tree. It can do real network card emulation, does better IDE controller emulation, and thinks like that.
Dosbox has been able to boot real dos disk images since forever.
Dosbox-x would be able to do more interesting things, since it can emulate real network cards (and thus could mount dos-era friendly SMB shares and pals, using dos lanman utilities and co), and does better hard disk emulation (so you could attach it to an iscsi device if you wanted, especially on linux), and for those "timings critical" programs from that era, it offers lots of knobs and options to tweak in the conf file.
Don't remember trying it, so thanks for the tip, though I really think I should break down and just rewrite the entire thing in Python. I'm just too lazy in my retirement to find a good source to mangle, and the old systems work "well enough" for my purposes.
There's a reasonable chance it would support dbaseII, given the level of effort that's been put in. It's worth at least a trial run. It would let you virtualize that system if it does the task, and as stated prior, dosbox-x supports virtual network cards, and can load DOS NDIS/ODI driver stacks, so it could look and feel like a real old-fashioned clunker to your software stack, without actually being a real old-
Everybody wins solution (Score:0)
Here's a reasonable compromise that doesn't screw all customers out of rights, so naturally it almost never gets adopted:
Buy once = get the product
Want updates? Support? = Pay as you go. Stop paying? You get to keep the product to the point where you stopped paying.
Re: (Score:5, Interesting)
It used to be buy the product , keep it and get bug fixes for 3 years. Upgrades would be introduced every couple of years, and users could get the upgrade at a discount, same as there were competitive discounts if you sent in the title page from the competitors user manual.
What you bought didn't stop working (heck, dBASE still runs fine in DOSbox if I feel nostalgic). Same with games (SimCity 2k in DOSbox let me finish it and yes, your city launches into space).
Would you buy a solitaire game as a servi
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you certainly managed to hit a nerve. Several times a month I actually run an ancient dBase II application on DOS. It's the back-end of a database app that I've never ported, though the primary front-end is PERL/CGI accessed via JavaScript... Crufty old stuff but I can't get up the incentive to rewrite it one more time in a properly integrated way.
By the way, I never could get dBase II to run in DOSbox or any other emulator. It apparently needs a physical hard disk with the old FCBs. Therefore one of
Re:Everybody wins solution (Score:2)
Have you tried dosboxX?
http://dosbox-x.com/ [dosbox-x.com]
It does more accurate emulation than normal dosbox. Lots of custom patches in its source tree. It can do real network card emulation, does better IDE controller emulation, and thinks like that.
Re: (Score:2)
Dosbox has been able to boot real dos disk images since forever.
Dosbox-x would be able to do more interesting things, since it can emulate real network cards (and thus could mount dos-era friendly SMB shares and pals, using dos lanman utilities and co), and does better hard disk emulation (so you could attach it to an iscsi device if you wanted, especially on linux), and for those "timings critical" programs from that era, it offers lots of knobs and options to tweak in the conf file.
More specifically, the
Re: (Score:2)
Don't remember trying it, so thanks for the tip, though I really think I should break down and just rewrite the entire thing in Python. I'm just too lazy in my retirement to find a good source to mangle, and the old systems work "well enough" for my purposes.
Re: (Score:2)
The recent release notes show MANY FCB implementation bugfixes.
https://github.com/joncampbell... [github.com]
There's a reasonable chance it would support dbaseII, given the level of effort that's been put in. It's worth at least a trial run. It would let you virtualize that system if it does the task, and as stated prior, dosbox-x supports virtual network cards, and can load DOS NDIS/ODI driver stacks, so it could look and feel like a real old-fashioned clunker to your software stack, without actually being a real old-
Re: (Score:2)
I thought I would give it a try for you;
Nope, not good enough FCB support. Unexpected end of file, and disk full errors. :(
Possible work-arounds though if you abuse its network support, and boot real dos.