dustbox-rs

A Rust x86 emulator aimed at running MS-DOS games on Windows, macOS, and Linux, honest about its early status and now semi-abandoned.

dustbox-rs is an early work in progress PC x86 emulator with a clear goal: easily running MS-DOS games on Windows, macOS, and Linux. In its current state it runs some demos and is still in the early stages. The README labels it semi-abandoned, and it does not sugarcoat that. For a more complete DOS emulator, it points you to dosbox-x instead, which is about as honest as a project description gets.

A rough status table from June 2019 gives a snapshot of where the components stood. The 16 bit CPU was at 95 percent with interrupts still incomplete. The 32 bit CPU sat at 20 percent, the mouse at 25 percent, and most other pieces were at 1 to 5 percent. Sound, CD-ROM, and harddrive support were listed as not started. The table reads like a log of what one person got working before moving on.

For the build environment the README lists the Ubuntu packages you need: nasm plus the GTK and Cairo and Pango development packages, along with the SDL2 packages. The list is specific enough to copy into an apt install command. Nothing about it suggests the project expects a broad contributor base; it is a from source setup for the few who will try.

There is a tests section with a catch. Some additional tests are expensive, and they also generate the render demo images. To run them you need to check out the dos-software-decoding repository in the parent directory and pass the ignored flag to cargo. So the normal test run skips the heavy rendering checks, and only a motivated setup enables them.

• Source 1 · Project repository
• Source 2 · README