Latest news
5 March 2008
Dioscuri will be present at the biggest IT exhibition of Europe: CeBIT. As digital preservation is a matter of the future, Dioscuri is situated in the future hall at the joint stand of Planets, Digital Preservation Europe (DPE), NESTOR and CASPER. From 4 - 9 March several demos will be given of Dioscuri, including its recently released 32-bit capabilities! Furthermore, two presentations on Friday, March 7th, will tell the story behind Dioscuri and overall Planets-activities.You can find us at stand B14, Hall 9. See you at CeBIT!
14 February 2008
Dioscuri version 0.3.0 has been released! This version supports 16-bit and 32-bit processing and is capable of running MS Windows 3.0 and other 32-bit applications. The emulated 32-bit CPU is taken from the JPC project with whom the Dioscuri project team has been cooperating. The new features of this release are:- 16-bit and 32-bit X86-based CPU (real-address and protected mode)
- Added serial mouse support (experimental)
- Added serial port (UART 16550A with COM-ports 1 to 4)
- Fixed minor bugs in modules CPU, DMA, PIC
- Updated GUI
6 November 2007
During the Conference Tools and Trends on digital preservation, organised on 1 and 2 November 2007 by the National Library of the Netherlands, Dioscuri has been successfully demonstrated.
The Dioscuri project team was present with a special demostand. Attendees of the conference could experience the old DOS-era offered by three computers running Dioscuri and MS-DOS. It was possible to open and edit WP5.1 documents, browse webpages with DOS-browser Arachne and play multiple computer games which showed the versatility of Dioscuri.Furthermore, Dioscuri was officially presented to the audience by a presentation of Remco Verdegem, project leader of Dioscuri. Remco described the development process and emphasised that emulation is a viable and feasible preservation strategy for digital preservation.
The highlight of the conference for Dioscuri was the speech of emulation guru Jeff Rothenberg who gave a live demonstration of Dioscuri. He convinced the audience that even homemade applications that were assumed to be lost can be retained with Dioscuri. As an example, Jeff used a self-created digital agenda from 1983, called Calendar/1. Attempts to run this application on current computers fails and the calendar program seemed doomed to never run again. However, Dioscuri was able to run Calendar/1 again successfully.
3 September 2007
Dioscuri version 0.2.0 is out now! This release is capable of running various versions of MS-DOS, FreeDOS 0.9 Beta (included in package) and ELKS (Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset). The following improvements have been made:
- Fixed minor bugs in CPU instructions and added some new instructions
- Fixed keyboard status LEDs on GUI
- Improved system timer and PIT
- Improved GUI for image file selection
- Improved keyboard controller for mouse/keyboard control
- Added functionality to copy text to clipboard (text mode only)
See the disk images download section for various new disk image downloads.
13 August 2007
Dioscuri version 0.1.0 is out for download. Last month many improvements have been made:
- Fixed CPU/PIC problem (context switch interrupting repeat prefix handling)
- Fixed cursor problem
- Fixed minor bugs in CPU instructions
- Fixed VGA screen update (sometimes buffer got scrambled)
- Improved PIT timer functionality
- Improved keyboard support for extra characters
- Improved GUI with crossplatform Java Swing interface
- Added support for system clock based on PIT interrupts
2 July 2007
Dioscuri version 0.0.9 has been released! This is the first public release of Dioscuri and it has the following features:
- 16-bit Intel 8086-based CPU, DMA-support, IRQ-handling
- 1 MB RAM
- Storage devices: floppy, HDD
- Input devices: keyboard
- Output devices: VGA, screen
- System BIOS using Plex86/Bochs BIOS
- VGA BIOS using VGA LGPl’ed BIOS
