DOSbox and viruses \ VOGONS

DOSbox and viruses

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First post, by DarthJDG

Posted on 2004-03-04, 18:24

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First of all DOSbox is great, many thanks to everyone who had ever worked on it!

Now, I know it's a stupid question, since DOSbox is a purely simulated environment, but I was wondering if there's any way for a program, more precisely a virus for example, to access anything outside the mounted drives? By outside I mean real boot sector of the mounted drive, master boot record and such.

So is it safe to run a game in DOSbox with any type of destructive, undisinfectable virus in its code if I mount only its own directory?

Reply 1 of 6, by Qbix

Posted on 2004-03-04, 18:29

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in principle yes. only the files in your mounted directories can be affected.

But who knows what bugs dosbox has. So if a virus manages to infect a file outside the mounted the directory don't go complaining here.

Use at your own risk.

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 2 of 6, by eL_PuSHeR

Posted on 2004-03-04, 19:56

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Interesting question but you better keep away from viruses. 😎

Reply 3 of 6, by canadacow

Posted on 2004-03-05, 11:25

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From my knowledge of DOS based viruses, most were based on loading from the boot sector. Since such an area doesn't technically exist within the DosBox world, I would expect most viruses would run during the session and then fail to make themselves permanent.

Last edited by canadacow on 2004-03-05, 17:52. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 4 of 6, by Guest

Posted on 2004-03-05, 15:11

Guest Offline

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Now I'm curious how does DOSBox behave when a program tries to reach the boot sector / master boot record / FAT table and such directly.

I would stay away from viruses, believe me, but I have only an infected version of a game of mine and lost the source long ago.

I think I try to rebuild a machine of mine from my pile of old hardwares and play it on that, then repartition the hard drive.

Reply 5 of 6, by DarthJDG

Posted on 2004-03-05, 15:12

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Sorry, I forgot to log on, the previous post is mine.

Reply 6 of 6, by mirekluza

Posted on 2004-03-05, 18:22

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Anonymous wrote:

Now I'm curious how does DOSBox behave when a program tries to reach the boot sector / master boot record / FAT table and such directly.

Not possible. DOSBOX does not support direct low level access to harddisk. These functions are not implemented.

Mirek

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