86Box VS open-watcom-v2

86Box crashes on startup without showing any message, no matter the hardware or operating system being emulated and 86Box build, either stable, experimental or old/new dynamic recompiler. Created an issue on GitHub but the dev who replied said he couldn't reproduce it.

For emulation, you can look into PCem/86Box

Unsurprising, of the 300 staffing agencies in our area only 23 are actually licensed to legally operate as a service. Trying to authenticate which are "fake" or "real" is a thread most companies/applicants rather not pull.

There is also the fake-hire scam: where staff are lured away with a lucrative compensation packages, data-mined by the competitor, and finally jettisoned before the evaluation period expires (typically 6 to 10 months).

A few infected PDFs from various bad actors are also floating around out there with exaggerated promises.

Keep safe, and note 86box supports read-only backing images and sessions Like Bochs/kvm:

https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

(works on Apple M1 laptops, but is slow)

https://86box.net/#downloads | https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

Features are implemented much, much faster, especially if you use nightly builds. Always adding hardware. You can look at the changelog: https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

Shaders are a rather young feature in 86box and very incomplete (only single pass shaders supported for now). I am not surprised they crash. Please report the bug to https://github.com/86Box/86Box/issues

Another solution is to emulate a win95 old pc. It works great and the compatibility is very very high. Try out 86Box. There is a process to set it up and install Windows, but it is worth it for playing stubborn games.

You want 86Box, a full PC emulator as opposed to a virtual machine.

https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

In terms of ISO-complianceness, perhaps don't expect much. It basically C89 (the C99 support is still incomplete), and for C++... most likely not even C++98 - compliant.

> You will also want to start with a 16-bit C compiler like Borland Turbo C or Microsoft C

The parent post mentioned they're going to use OpenWatcom which is an actively developed[0] C and C++ compiler that targets 16bit DOS (among others).

[0] https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

Despite the lack of feature support, the compiler is still updated to this day, and still does support DOS, Windows, Linux, and OS/2, so it's modern in the sense of maintenance, just not really standards support. If you got further questions, I can send you the Discord link. They are pretty friendly.

My advice is, when you feel you need that challenge, install DOSBox or DOSBox-X and Open Watcom C/C++, DJGPP, or gcc-ia16 and do some retro-programming. You'll also get the fun of being able to do low-level hardware twiddling and rely on DOS being so simple that it's effectively an RTOS.

If you want to build under Linux, I would recommend you look at Open Watcom. It's the best open source 16-bit x86 C compiler, IMHO.

I have recently found out that Watcom C still exists. And not just exists, but there are plenty of commits.

I should note, that OpenWatcom 2.0[1] is far better for supporting more recent C and C++ code, modern hosts and tooling, but still able to compile into 16 bit code. It is also actively maintained. Instead of MASM I recommend JWasm[2] + Jwlink[3]. Back in time I did a fork[4] of JWasm that has cleaner build system (CMake).

[1] https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

[2] https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/JWasm

[3] https://github.com/JWasm/JWlink

[4] https://github.com/JWasm/JWasm

If you want to run this in DOS: the code under src/should actually compile with this OpenWatcom fork via the -za99 flag. MiniFB however will not compile. You'd have to palettize the output pixel buffer to 256 colors and then blit it to 0xa000if you fancy that.

GCC, clang or maybe watcom? You wouldn't find it there (before invention of AGI, but that would be entirely different can of worms).