Application support for Win32 programs (ie programs for Windows 9x/Me and Windows NT+)

The FreeDOS kernel itself does not support Windows programs, neither Win 3.x nor Win32 ones. If you try to run such a program you get only a short and rude message like "This program can't run in DOS mode". However, there are several methods how to run some Win-32-PE programs in FreeDOS:

• Windows 3.x with win32s support (untested)
• Winem - by Chris Jones (LFNDOS author), ?no longer available?
• WdosX - Wuschel's DOS eXtender by Michael Tippach, no longer maintained - Anyone tested it / compared with HX-DOS ?
• DosWin32 - Anyone tested it / compared with HX-DOS ?
• HxDOS - by Japheth - see below

• add others here

HxDOS

This is a combination of a DPMI kernel (DPMI provider, DPMI host, DPMI "server", ...) called HDPMI32? and Win32 API emulation software (the Win32 emulation support can be statically linked (??) or used to run standard Win32 PE files). Presently most of the support is for running console applications (see compat.txt on HxDOS site for a list of known working programs). HXDOS, HXGUI, etc is Copyrighted by Japheth but free to use. Source is mostly available, incl. HDPMI, API DLL's and some other detail files like VESAMTRR and some utils. It is written completely (!!! excl. WSOCK32?.DLL) in assembler.

It could be used to run AbiWord on DOS one day, but there is no public release at this time.

Making Win-32 GUI software running in DOS is anything else than trivial, even if the console support is quite mature now. The GUI API is huge and complicated, and strong acceleration of graphics accesses is needed for many programs, so latest huge games with very high system requirements probably will NOT work soon in DOS.