History of Wine on DOS

Some history of Wine on DOS. How it began.

At the beginning of far 2012 year, some months before doomsday, I explored DOS extenders with support of Win32 apps: WDOSX, Phar Lap 286, DosWin32 and HX-DOS Extender. I was admired by these creations and decided to develop one of them, HX-DOS Extender, by myself.

In the beginning I tried to develop WDOSX and got nothing (it just stopped work). Later I started to develop HX-DOS Extender with source code from Wine and ReactOS. Yes, I just copied source from ReactOS and Wine to HX-DOS (not only, of course, bu it wast most of my job). Next I compiled copied source with Watcom C compiler... and it worked! Almostly. This job was complicated, because:

1) All HX's source code was written on assembler. This was hard to connect it with C code on Watcom (but was possible). Small DLLs (like SHELL32.DLL) I connected easily, but large DLLS (like KERNEL32.DLL) I could not merge quickly.

2) ReactOS and (especially) Wine Win32 functions were based on lots of other functions (in ReactOS) and on POSIX calls (in Wine). So copying of source code changed into copying of source files.

Despite of these two points, Far Manager 1.75 started to work correctly.

You can watch my developments on sites http://winedos.ucoz.ru (in Russian, most preferred as most of my posts are stored here) and http://winedos.ucoz.com (in English, I've posted only some words).

Discovering DJGPP and EMX were next step of my developments. I turned my gaze into these extenders. They represented POSIX API in DOS. So these programs gives a chance to port one of the most popular products in Unix world - Wine. Of course, this is not about versions 1.2.3 and later, but about old versions from previous millenium - Wine from 1995 (started win32 support) to 1999 (started threading support, which is not implemented in EMX/DJGPP).

So what we have now:

1) Wine-980315 (19|98 year, 03 month, 15 day|) - compiles, links, but fails to work due to SIGSEGV in assembler command "movw %fs, $something". Don't know how to solve it.

2) Wine-960811 (96-August-11) - I've started to build it. It should be much more easier. Development in progress now.