em-dosbox VS open-watcom-v2

Compare em-dosbox vs open-watcom-v2 and see what are their differences.

open-watcom-v2

Open Watcom V2.0 - Source code repository, Wiki, Latest Binary build, Archived builds including all installers for download. (by open-watcom)
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em-dosbox open-watcom-v2
113 23
1,194 914
- 3.7%
0.0 9.9
over 1 year ago 5 days ago
C++ C
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

em-dosbox

Posts with mentions or reviews of em-dosbox. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-12.

open-watcom-v2

Posts with mentions or reviews of open-watcom-v2. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-17.
  • Djgpp
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2024
    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.

  • Popularity of DOS/4GW made Win95 game compat easier, but with higher stakes
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Aug 2023
    > 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

  • #pragma once / header guards / C++ committee.
    2 projects | /r/cpp | 31 May 2023
    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.
  • Rust is Boring
    6 projects | /r/rust | 13 Mar 2023
    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.
  • Build C/C++ programs to run on homebrew 286?
    1 project | /r/homebrewcomputer | 24 Feb 2023
    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.
  • "My Reaction to Dr. Stroustrup’s Recent Memory Safety Comments"
    11 projects | /r/rust | 2 Feb 2023
    I have recently found out that Watcom C still exists. And not just exists, but there are plenty of commits.
  • Win16 Retro Development
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2022
    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

  • Rendering like it's 1996 - Baby's first pixel
    1 project | /r/programming | 16 Dec 2022
    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.
  • Falsehoods programmers believe about undefined behavior
    7 projects | /r/rust | 28 Nov 2022
    GCC, clang or maybe watcom? You wouldn't find it there (before invention of AGI, but that would be entirely different can of worms).
  • Having trouble setting up whonix on Mac OS
    1 project | /r/Whonix | 8 Nov 2022

What are some alternatives?

When comparing em-dosbox and open-watcom-v2 you can also consider the following projects:

86Box - Emulator of x86-based machines based on PCem.

gcc-ia16 - Fork of Lambertsen & Jenner (& al.)'s IA-16 (Intel 16-bit x86) port of GNU compilers ― added far pointers & more • use https://github.com/tkchia/build-ia16 to build • Ubuntu binaries at https://launchpad.net/%7Etkchia/+archive/ubuntu/build-ia16/ • DJGPP/MS-DOS binaries at https://gitlab.com/tkchia/build-ia16/-/releases • mirror of https://gitlab.com/tkchia/gcc-ia16

QEMU - Official QEMU mirror. Please see https://www.qemu.org/contribute/ for how to submit changes to QEMU. Pull Requests are ignored. Please only use release tarballs from the QEMU website.

DOOM - DOOM Open Source Release

pcem - PCem

MS-DOS - The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0, for reference purposes

dosbox-staging - DOSBox Staging is a modern continuation of DOSBox with advanced features and current development practices.

emu2 - Simple x86 and DOS emulator for the Linux terminal.

scummvm - ScummVM main repository

abrash-black-book - Markdown source for Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book

winevdm - 16-bit Windows (Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, etc.) on 64-bit Windows

awesome-dos - Curated list of references for development of DOS applications.