How to run GW-Basic under Ubuntu?

Question

Well, I missed GW-Basic very much, so I want to install it in a new Ubuntu window. I have not been programmed for GW-Basic for a long time, so I do not know if there will be new releases. I copied GWBASIC.EXE from my old DOS 3.3 box, but didn't seem to start using Wine. I assume this is 16-bit, so Wine will not support it.

Is there something like a 286 emulator? Or do I need to run several expensive virtual machines such as Vmware? Oh no.

Answer 1

DOSbox works to run gwbasic and many older dos programs.

To install it: sudo apt-get install dosbox

To run it: dosbox gwbasic.exe

Caveats: DOSbox emulates a processor, so it runs applications slower than on Wine or as a native application. However, everything that originally ran on 486 should work fine with DOSbox.

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

 save "filename",a 

As for the base interpreter that runs gwbasic code on Ubuntu, I haven't found it yet, but I'm still looking.

Answer 2

PC-BASIC runs your GW-BASIC programs unchanged and runs initially on Ubuntu (based on Python). Just unzip the archive and run

 pcbasic filename 

Answer 3

GWBASIC.EXE will only work on Windows. You can configure the Windows virtual machine on Ubuntu, as indicated here: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/02/10/run-windows-in-a-virtual-machine-using-ubuntu-and-virtualbox/

Answer 4

I installed dosbox from synaptic. and GW basic works great. I actually tried many dos-based programs in my collection, most of them worked. Dos box perfectly shows the feeling of an old dos machine

Answer 5

QB64 runs on Linux.

REMLINE.BAS is a program for removing line numbers from major Microsoft programs. It only deletes line numbers that are not the subject of one of the following statements: GOSUB, RETURN, GOTO, THEN, ELSE, RESUME, RESTORE or RUN.