Question on using DOS emulation on an iOS device

Submitted by John on Monday, March 10, 2014.
Forum
iOS & iPadOS Gaming
Hi to All, I found a great application which is able to emulate an old small, Hungarian talking computer's total operation. This emulation application works under DOS on my PC. I am curious and excited if there is any kind of solution for emulating the DOS environment on an IOS device. And plus, it would be great that the emulation solution would be accessible. If there is any solution like this, I could use my DOS-based computer emulation software and I could carry atleast 150 old, talking games in my pocket. Thanks in advance if you had any idea for me. Kind regards, John

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Submitted by Laszlo on Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Hmmm, that is not easy. I know about two DOS emulators for IOS: Dospad and IDOS. Both of them are derived from the open-source Dosbox emulator, which is also available for e.g. a Windows PC. I know the application you'd like to run in a DOS emulator, and I also know that it works fine in Dosbox under Windows, so your idea is really thrilling. But neither Dospad, nor IDOS is available in theItunes appstore. IDos used to be for a short period, but it was pulled. And if an app is not in the appstore, you can't really install it unless you jailbreak your device. That is one of the serious restrictions IOS contains and that many people including me do not really like. Jailbreaking is not hard, and it can be done accessibly, but not every Idevice/IOS version combination can be jailbroken. I happen to have a jailbroken Iphone, and I tried Dospad on it, partly for the same reason as you'd like to, but its interface was totally inaccessible. I haven't got hold of Idos yet, so I don't know whether it is accessible or not. And there's another problem: you need to transfer the DOS application to your Idevice, which is also not trivial, and not easy to do in an accessible manner.

Hi, Laszlo, thanks for your thoughts you shared concerning my question. To tell you the truth, I don't want my phone to be jailbroken, so this possibility is not playing for me. Idos seems to be available in Appstore, so I could purchase and give it a try. But then your question is still here: how could i transfer my dos-based material to the Iphone? Is there any way to do it? I was thinking whether the surface of DOS emulation should be accessible at all. It is not that important if I could use my external keyboard to handle dos commands. If this might work, the only thing is how I could mount a directory or folder into the IDOS app? If mounting could be done in an logic manner, there should be no more barrier. I am still excited and looking for solutions. If any of you have some more ideas, let us know. John

Submitted by Laszlo on Monday, March 17, 2014

Yeah, surprise to me, IDos is in fact in appstore. Last time Google somehow seems to have missed it. Version 2.0.1, 5 February 2013, costs $0.99 (it used to be free), requires at least IOS 4.0 (not a problem). Now I know this is the third reissue of IDos for the appstore, it was removed by Apple twice. The author is Chaoji Li, unfortunately his webpage has gone ("Server not found" error). So no recent docs and info. Here's an article that explains how to transfer Dos material to IDos: http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-copyload-and-install-apps-or-games-exe-to-idos-dosbox-emulator-on-iphone/ Sorry, I don't know how to linkify URLs here, so if it isn't done automatically, please just copy & paste. Please note however that this process is for the second reissue of IDos (in early 2011), which was pulled from the appstore shortly afterwards just like the first version. Chances are that this process won't work with the current IDos on appstore any longer. If it doesn't, then that would probably mean that IDos on appstore deliberately blocks transferring Dos material from your PC, and allows to run only those Dos games that are packaged with the emulator (graphical ones of course, like Wolfenstein 3D). In that case you're out of luck, since the author has turned unreachable and there doesn't seem to exist any other recent info. Please also note that the article links to a tool called Iphone Explorer, an alternative file manager for Idevices. But you can't download it from that link anymore, because it's broken. You have to google for it. Iphone Explorer was free, I don't know whether this is still so. I also don't know how accessible Iphone Explorer is. I presume from the nature of it that it should be at least somewhat usable with screen readers. Two more remarks: -at least the 2011 version of IDos supported bluetooth keyboards, but only in text "games". Fortunately Mikrobi is a text-based emulator. -If you succeed with the transfer, please only try to run mikro486.com with the br option. mikrobi.com is for Pentium Pro and above, and even regular Dosbox for Windows doesn't handle it. The hl option requires the legacy Brailab PC adapter, which is of course not emulated by any DOS emulator.