Do we really need another DOS emulator?

I touched on my reasons for starting this project on my project site, but since this is a blog and all this seems like a good place to elaborate. Of course at the time I started this last year, there were already plenty of solutions available for someone looking to run a DOS program/game on Windows. Windows itself will run most simple DOS applications just fine (if it’s one of the 32-bit editions). In cases where this fails, DOSBox has been around for quite a while and can run just about anything.

So clearly I’m not trying to solve a problem with this that isn’t already solved. Aeon started out as an experiment to see if I could get acceptable performance out of C# for emulating an entire PC from the early 90’s. It was also an outlet for me to work on a challenging project completely under my control.

Great, so those are perfectly valid reasons for me to write another emulator, but why put it on the Internet and blog about it? Well, I learned a lot of stuff since I started, and I thought other developers might find it interesting – so that’s where the blog comes in. As for posting it on the net, that’s much easier to answer – to show off, of course!

That’s about it for introductory posts. I’ll be talking more next time about Aeon’s architecture and some of the crazy, uh, *features* of the x86 architecture that caused me a lot of grief.

Cheers!