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Running old viruses in DOSBOX [not recommended, dangerous]

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First post, by Riyune

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Before I try this myself, wondering if anyone has dug up some old viruses from the mid 1990's to see what they do in DOSBOX. I suppose the system's AV protection would have to be adjusted in settings to avoid deleting them. This might be a way to study old viruses without messing up one's system. Most of the old viruses shouldn't be too dangerous to an XP/Vista system ??

Jesus loves you, unless you have tatoos. Then you are going to hell.

Reply 1 of 2, by wd

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AV apps won't capture the viral code because it is not directly run.

Virus code that does something as simple as del c:\*.* recursively works
plain fine in dosbox meaning you'll screw up some files of your mounted drive
in the worst case (same for recursive infectors).

So it's up to you whether you know what you're doing, from my point you and
anybody else is strongly advised to not run potentially harmful software inside
dosbox be it virus code or other applications.

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Reply 2 of 2, by ripsaw8080

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If you really want to experiment with this kind of thing using DOSBox, I would recommend using a debug build and booting MS-DOS from a HD image. The debugger in DOSBox is mostly invisible to programs running inside DOSBox, and won't interfere with them like some debuggers running within the emulation can. Booting a real DOS with an image will not only be more compatible with all the strange stuff virii do, it will isolate them from your host OS file system as well.

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