Question

Well, I suddenly missed GW-Basic very much, so I want to install one in my new Ubuntu box. I have a long time not programmed for GW-Basic, so I don’t know if there comes new releases. I copied GWBASIC.EXE from my old DOS 3.3 box, but it seems not start using Wine. I guess it’s 16-bit so Wine will not support it.

Is there something like 286 emulator? Or should I have to run some expensive VM like Vmware? Oh no.

Answer 1

DOSbox works for running gwbasic, and many old dos programs.

To install it: sudo apt-get install dosbox

To run it: dosbox gwbasic.exe

Caveats: DOSbox emulates the CPU, so it runs apps slower than on Wine or as a native app. However, anything that originally ran on a 486 should run fine with DOSbox.

Speaking of gwbasic, by default it saves the source in a binary format. You can save in a text format with the a (ascii) switch, like this:

save "filename",a

As far as a basic interpreter that runs gwbasic code on Ubuntu, I haven’t found one yet, but I am still looking.