February 26, 2013 at 12:06

To the Internet from under DosBox. Text and graphical browsers for Dos

Want to see how the modern Internet looks from under the black DOS windows? Do you want to assemble an old iron machine for this? DosBox will help you plunge into the abyss of classics.

Under the cat, instructions for setting up DosBox to access the clean Internet, examples of launching 3 different dos-browsers (including graphical ones!), Really LOTS of screenshots, as well as for impatient ones - an archive with DosBox already configured (windows- version) and older browsers.

What do we need


  1. A computer that accesses the Internet via cable , for example, through a router. I’m having problems setting up for Wi-Fi, although maybe it’s all my hands and you’re more lucky.
  2. A special street version of DosBox . On the official website, the version was last updated in mid-2010, so we download some kind of assembly, for example this home.arcor.de/hal-9000 - in it, in fact, only a network patch is included, but the version taken from 2009 year. Or this one - there are much more extensions, for example, there is Glide support (yeah, Voodoo 1-2 emulation - but that's another story).
  3. Library Pcap Library then - DosBox'om used to access the real Internet.
  4. Packet driver - dosovsky network card driver for TCP / IP support. DosBox emulates a ne2000 card. I don’t remember where the driver was downloaded, you will immediately find it in the archive.
  5. Browser under Dos . I suggest to try (and it will be considered in the article) right away 3 - Lynx, Arachne and DilloDOS - few people remember the last one in RuNet, but in the meantime ... Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
  6. File manager - it’s more convenient with it. The command line is good, but I'm used to moving around directories visually. I took Volkov Commander because of the size, but if you want to take, for example, Norton - you are welcome

Installation


  1. Unpack DosBox into any directory. Inside, we make the “disk_c” folder - it will be the root of our virtual system for it, the virtual drive C. Again, you can place it in any other place, but do not forget about editing the paths to your own.
  2. We unpack drivers, browsers, a file manager, toys into it ... Everything that is useful to us under the dos.
  3. Install Pcap
  4. We make some adjustments to the dosbox.conf configuration file, in particular, we turn on the Russian language support. We


    slightly increase the available video and regular memory,


    switch the network card to the “show the list of available adapters” mode,


    mount a virtual hard disk, launch the network driver and file manager.


  5. First start. In the debug console window, we see a list of network cards. Now we return to the configuration file and change “list” to something more - to the network card number from the list OR part of the name.



    In addition, you can now disable this debugging console altogether - for this, use the program launch with the “-noconsole” key. If you downloaded the full archive - there is already prepared for you. batch file “run without console.cmd”.
  6. All is ready. Now you can start setting up browsers, they will be described personally.


Lynx


Cross-platform browser, came to us from Linux, ported to many OSs. Under Dos, there are several ports created by various people. It uses text mode, so it will start and will work quickly even on a 386 or even a 286 processor, which is very beneficial for us!

Before starting, you need to edit the WATTCP.CFG file - register the ip of your computer (preferably not matching the physical machine), DNS server address, gateway.


We start the lynx.bat file, correcting inside the path. This is important because it defines several browser-specific environment variables.
To go to the url, you need to press the g key (because Go ) and enter the address. We open, say, a habr.





However translit! Long time no see, my friend, but I would not give up the normal Russian language. Press the O key ( options , as Cap prompts) - we find ourselves in the browser settings menu, where we reconfigure the encoding:


... disable questions about cookies,


in the end - do not forget to check and save! True, some of the options (marked with an exclamation mark (!) Still will not be saved - maybe they can still be written in the configuration file?).



Look, now it’s a completely different matter:





Logging in, however, didn’t work out - the captcha is very graphic. Habr’s authors do not care about DOS users (and by the way, who cares?). And through the social. Do not enter the network - the feature also works through pictures and JS. Well then, we can read.

Google is also quite usable for itself:





Google could not be defeated - at the last stage, an incorrect looped redirect begins. But github and mail.ru have earned quite a profit:









In general, lynx is quite suitable for use, it also knows how to download files, although it looks like our native Internet is, to say the least, unusual.

Arachne


This browser is mentioned in RuNet very often, as the only graphical under DOS. Well, let's try.
Download, run - installation and configuration went. You don’t need to dig into the config files - everything is visual.

A bunch of installation screenshots





















Installed. Excellent. Now we install the plug-in for support of cp1251 (downloaded separately).

The second bunch of screenshots - now but setting the encoding












We open a habr - and we understand that all runet quite a while ago switched to UTF-8.





There is no plugin to support utf-8. It's a shame. Annoyingly. But some sites still work with win-1251 (and that is not always and not always):















Cool, of course, but alas, alas, with this browser a considerable part of the runet will remain inaccessible to us. It's a pity. However, the English-language part of the Internet is quite accessible. But in terms of versatility, this browser is inferior to lynx .

Dillodos


Further searches led me to this browser, and they paid off in full.
First, we traditionally configure IPshniki in the etc / wattcp.cfg file (like with lynx). Well, now we’ll open something interesting, for example - Habr ...









Urrra! It worked! Yes, the layout breaks, PNG is not displayed, the title bar is in the wrong encoding, but it works! Dear utf8, how I missed you ...

True, authorization will still fail. Pancake. Well, for complete happiness, https is also not supported (or something I didn’t understand), so, strangely enough, by some parameters this browser loses to lynx . Nevertheless, the benefits are still more than arachne .









These are the good old DOS browsers. Of course, you don’t even have to stutter about the support of JS, CSS3 and HTML5 novelties, besides, PNG is also not shown, but you can still use the network minimally - and this, of course, is a victory.

Do you know other DOS browsers? Found bugs? Waiting for your comments!

Further, as promised - a link to download the already configured DosBox with all the specified browsers (only the IP and the name of the network card will have to be corrected). Weight - 15.2 mb.

List of references


Tags:

Also popular now: