Arca Noae "Blue Lion" Nearing Release, Letting OS/2 Live On

[staalmannen]

Or just use an emulator. Not like OS/2 was known for its hardware acceleration.

Are there any good OS/2 emulators? I remember searching for if someone had tried to make an OS/2 "personality" for Wine since ReactOS had an idea to also include an OS/2 sub-system. It might require a specific WINEARCH to be invoked when the prefix is made.

https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/rossubsys/os2

I think this is the perfect use-case for Wine - legacy support (Windows 3.11 is not a moving target so should be possible to get 100% supported, if 16-bit can be handled gracefully - same thing with OS/2 v1 (16-bit) and v2 (32-bit)). This does not exclude efforts to keep up with the current stuff (directX 11 etc).

[schmidtbag]

Are there any good OS/2 emulators? I remember searching for if someone had tried to make an OS/2 "personality" for Wine since ReactOS had an idea to also include an OS/2 sub-system. It might require a specific WINEARCH to be invoked when the prefix is made.

Well, wine isn't an emulator. But semantics aside, to my recollection, eComStation runs in Virtualbox, and I'd be surprised if it didn't run in QEMU.

[danielnez1]

I'll raise my hand and admit I like OS/2 and I'll probably buy a copy of ArcaOS when it comes out. I'm sure they must have a few corporate clients interested with legacy OS/2 installs as I don't think it would work financially as solely a hobbyist OS.

[gamerk2]

Or just use an emulator. Not like OS/2 was known for its hardware acceleration.

OS/2 is damn near impossible to emulate, due to it's use of Ring 2. Hell, it isn't even able to be Visualized beyond booting last I checked.

It's a shame OS/2 failed; it was a well designed OS.

[schmidtbag]

OS/2 is damn near impossible to emulate, due to it's use of Ring 2. Hell, it isn't even able to be Visualized beyond booting last I checked.

I guess that depends on where you're looking:

http://sites.mpc.com.br/ric/qemu/

https://trac.netlabs.org/vbox

[edwaleni]

Why does anyone pick and use any operating system? There is some robust code in OS/2 that isn't exploited anymore unfortunately. This isn't some sentimental drivel (I used to use OS/2). I think any OS that can bring value (even if it isn't free) through incremental levels of innovation is a good thing. Their implementation of Windows on Windows (released in Ferengi) is the only one done with a cross license with MSFT. It really did run Win apps better and less crashing.

Hard to believe, but there are still some boxes out there running legacy VRU's with OS/2 and paying IBM for maintenance. It runs, it runs and it runs. What more can you ask for?

[starshipeleven]

Hard to believe, but there are still some boxes out there running legacy VRU's with OS/2 and paying IBM for maintenance. It runs, it runs and it runs. What more can you ask for?

People here were talking more about the attempt to add modern desktop applications on it. Running some legacy stuff isn't the point here.