Wengier
commented
3 years ago Thanks for the suggestion! At this time DOSBox-X already allows you to customize the contents of the Z drive, by putting your own programs in the drive_z directory to either replace or complement the existing files. So if the users already have such files then they should be able to customize DOSBox-X very easily. For the suggestion I think we can first try to try to find some software that are considered useful for DOSBox-X, and then either provide their download links in the DOSBox-X Wiki or perhaps include some of them in DOSBox-X directly if they are indeed very useful.
It might be useful to create a separate DOSBox-X "extension pack" (like the one supplied with Virtual Box) with programs that might be useful to replace some of the readily supplied DOS commands, and along those lines I'm thinking of programs like
RPSORT, a public domain (with full assembler source) replacement for SORT, with options to sort many different types of fields (and without a 64K filesize limit) (rpsrt101/102/103.zip)
LIST, the "ultimate" DOS file viewer by the late Vernon Buerg (list96y1.zip was the last one, no results on Google...)
GRDB, David Lindauer's DEBUG replacement @ https://ladsoft.tripod.com/grdb_debugger.html
or, if not an actual extension pack, a page on the wiki with links to these programs, and potentially more restricted ones, like some of the old Turbo Pascal compilers made available by Borland @ https://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/antiquesoftware
I myself would be happy to put up a copy of my registered version of Buerg's List Enhanced (v2.4m) (with patched registration info) on my own website, and even a 32 year old DOS version of SuperC, the IBM z/OS workhorse compare program, which is capable of comparing files on file, line, word, or byte level, and also contains an option to search for (up to) five strings. (Shareware versions that still run under 64-bit versions of Windoze can be found at https://dlsuperc.com/ )
And I have a disassembled version of the Turbo Pascal (6.00) command-line compiler that could (potentially) be reassembled with an extended BASM opcode table! (I myself use it with just a patched BASM opcode table to give me access to a few useful 386(+) instructions...)