> I run Win3.1 inside DOSBox
Out of curiosity: What is the avantage of DOSBox compared to QEMU for your use case?
> The keymap differences do take some getting used to when swapping between everyday things and WP though: F1->Escape, F3->F1, etc.
Can't you just define different mappings in your virtualization tool? (DOSBox)
[1] Except for large institutes like banks, air traffic control, etc. working with huge legacy systems, which is perhaps the other extreme.
> Out of curiosity: What is the avantage of DOSBox compared to QEMU for your use case?
None, for the most part. DOSBox is a little better documented around things that might break.
I chose DOSBox a few years back, because I still had my Windows 3.1 disks, but I didn't have any DOS disks anymore. Which gave me the option of Virtual Machine + FreeDOS, or Dosbox. And FreeDOS was very unstable at the time.
I know lots of publishers for DOS-era software are gone, and so people do tend to choose to pirate if they want to get hold of that sort of thing, but I have and continue to contract to the government for very sensitive areas, so I always have to walk a legal tightrope. So, I can only use my old software.
Thankfully, I've never thrown out my floppy disks. I imaged them all in about '02, being in a country that allows you to transfer your owned data into half a dozen different mediums as you see fit.
I have actually been having some mounting issues with Dosbox recently, so I might think about tearing it down and building a VM with FreeDOS instead sometime soon. (Though thanks to DOS' super simple structure, that doesn't mean reinstalling everything from scratch).
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> Can't you just define different mappings in your virtualization tool? (DOSBox)
You could. But it's just WordPerfect. They decided to ignore the standard, and go with a keymapping that made a little more sense, because of keyboard designs back then. However, I've got a couple dozen programs I use, and I'd rather not have WordPerfect with it's own keymapping and a restart to switch between it and the default. It isn't particularly onerous, just requires a bit of mental task switching.
I've written two novels in WP, so the keymappings are ingrained, I just have to get into the "flow" of things before my mind stops hitting the wrong key.
I still run WordPerfect. No other writing software has come close to making that same experience.
Til Win8.1, I was able to get it running natively with a little bit of effort, but it became too much of a hassle at that point.
Now, I run Win3.1 inside DOSBox, with WordPerfect installed. It's more stable than the my old IBM PC was, so I'm fairly happy, though crashes do still occur. The keymap differences do take some getting used to when swapping between everyday things and WP though: F1->Escape, F3->F1, etc.
Getting files from WP to the rest of the world isn't entirely straight forward, and I've found a lot of the WP->DOCX converters fail with typesetting and other issues, so I just print to PDF now.