DOS Compatibility and Emulators
As one of the oldest and, for a long time, most popular OSs on PCs, DOS has been the target of a great deal in the way of emulation efforts. OS/2, originally intended as a replacement for DOS, included a DOS emulator even in its first version, although OS/2's DOS emulation improved substantially with OS/2 2.0. Microsoft's Windows products support DOS emulation—in fact, Windows 9x is built atop a 32-bit version of DOS, so calling Windows 9x 's DOS support emulation might be a bit of an exaggeration. Even Linux includes DOS emulation.
Most of these DOS emulators use a special operating mode of the x86 CPU. In this mode, the CPU sets up a special environment in which DOS software can execute a subset of the available ...
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