Aeon is an x86 with DOS emulator written in 100% C#. It was originally started in 2008 as an experiment in developing a high performance emulator fully in C#/.NET. So basically, it's like DOSBox but with worse compatibility and only for Windows.

C# developers might be interested in this, or fans of retro gaming that want to experiment with a different emulator. If you're just looking to get an old game running, just use DOSBox :)

See the Releases page for the latest builds, or get the source and build it yourself (see building instructions below).

Aeon doesn't haven an installer, but does require that the .NET Core 3.1 runtime is installed. You can download it from Microsoft at https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core/3.1.

The easiest way to get started is just to use the "quick launch program" button in the toolbar, and browse to a DOS .exe or .com file. Launching a program this way will create a virtual environment with the program's directory mounted as the C: drive in the emulated system.

It's also possible to quick launch a command prompt in a directory if you'd like to pass in arguments before launching the program. Aeon's DOS command interpreter is very limited, but can perform basic tasks. Batch files are not currently supported.

You can set up the emulated environment with more detail by creating a yaml configuration file with a .AeonConfig extension and launching it with the quick launch program button. This format isn't documented yet; samples are forthcoming if anyone is interested.

You can build Aeon using Visual Studio 2019. It has a couple NuGet dependencies that should be fetched automatically on build.

Important: Aeon will be extremely slow if you build in Debug configuration, and even in a Release configuration if you have a debugger attached, as it relies heavily on inlining, intrinsics, and other JIT compiler optimizations that get suppressed in Debug mode or with a debugger attached.