Thanks. I've been playing around with it a little (current version 0.74). It's an impressive technical achievement but has some limitations which make it unsuitable for my use.

In DOSBox you can mount a network mapped drive letter (or subfolder of that) as a DOSBox drive letter (for my testing, T: drive). I then fired up FPD2.5 which ran without complaint.

I also fired up VFP9 on two other sessions:

- One on the same workstation running DOSBox
- Another on the Windows server computer hosting some shareable tables

Within the DOSBox session you can open tables on the shared drive. However, whether you specify SHARED or EXCLUSIVE:

- DISPLAY STATUS always shows EXCLUSIVE use

- But that's a lie, because from other sessions you can open that same table SHARED (but not EXCLUSIVE, that gives the usual "Access denied" error). So, DOSBox/FPDOS are always actually getting SHARED use, despite always reporting EXCLUSIVE

Clearly, DOSBox is not properly handling NetBIOS locking mechanisms for shared files. There are various parameters available for the DOSBox MOUNT command but none appear relevant to this. There is, however, a RESCAN command:

"Make DOSBox reread the directory structure. Useful if you changed something on a mounted drive outside of DOSBox. (CTRL - F4 does this as well!)".

The fact this command exists says to me DOSBox "doesn't play well with others" (as it were).

DOSBox is aimed at running DOS games. If that's the goal it's reasonable to expect that you're going to be accessing local files, and not worrying about networking or shared access.

There are various posts about people having problems running FPDOS on DOSBox this way e.g. http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=26328 . The second message in that thread claims to be from "DOSBox Author" and says "This is not supposed to work".

So, running networked/multiuser FPDOS from within DOSBox looks like A Bad Idea.

Having said all that, there is one scenario where it might work well - if you are running a single-user application on a local hard drive.