Can anyone tell me the system requirements for glulx interpreters that run in MS DOS?
I’m looking at things like Dos Git and Glulxe compiled for DOS and wondering what version of DOS they require. My understanding is that Glulxe is 32-bit, but DOS is 16-bit. Do these interpreters thunk to 32-bits or are they really intended for something like the Win32 console and not MS DOS?
Thanks for any clarification!
Ethan
The DOS builds of Git and Glulxe on the IF-Archive all use some form of DOS extender, so they’re really 32-bit programs running under DPMI (Dos Protected Mode Interface): the only important requirement these have is at least an 80386 processor.
That said, all the DOS builds on the IF-Archive are of old versions of the interpreters, and will probably cause problems with recent games that make use of newer Glulx and Glk features. It wouldn’t be impossible for you to create more up-to-date builds if you really want to, though.
As an aside, it wouldn’t be impossible to create a 16-bit DOS interpreter for Glulx games: the fact that the VM itself is 32-bit doesn’t preclude it being implemented on an underlying system that is not. A more significant problem would be the 16-bit DOS memory architecture, with memory allocation blocks limited to 64k, though even that could be dealt with. It would be a huge amount of work, though, for not much result.