The Consortium for Upper-level Physics Software (an international team of 27 physicists, of course it has nothing to do with CUPS) has edited nine books dedicated to various domains in physics:

• Astrophysics Simulations
• Electricity and Magnetism Simulations
• Classical Mechanics Simulations
• Modern Physics Simulations
• Nuclear and Particle Physics Simulations
• Quantum Mechanics Simulations
• Solid State Physics Simulations
• Thermal and Statistical Physics Simulations
• Waves and Optics Simulations

All these books are on sell on the Internet (see for instance http://www.amazon.com). Each book comes with a floppy disk containing programs (binaries and source codes written in Pascal language). I stress that I never found any software equivalent to one of these CUPS item.

So, why do I want to run CUPS software under a Linux OS? This could appear as a challenging task as these old DOS program no longer run on recent Windows machines. In fact, I find these CUPS software extremely useful for my teaching (particularly for electromagnetism) and I definitively prefere Linux OS (like DEBIAN) than Microsoft OS. As we shall see this is not so difficult, we shall proceed in two steps: (1) installation of DOSEMU and FreeDOS, (2) patch of CUPS binaries.


The method used here should be Linux distribution independant, then it should work for Debian, Mandrake, etc. The steps to be followed are:

• DOSEMU installation If you don't have DOSEMU already installed on your machine, download an uptodate archive (named for instance dosemu-1.2.2-bin.tgz) of binaries here
and uncompress it in a given directory, for instance ~/work, with a command like this:

• FreeDOS installation on the same principle dowload the archive containing FreeDOS binaries and uncompress it:

You should now have a symbolic link:



Your "C:\" disk will be:



Just to check that all the things work properly, go to "~/work/dosemu/" and type:


you should get the following window poping up:

To obtain a fullscreen mode: Ctrl-Alt-F (see also the DOSEMU HOW TO). It is also possible to begin a DOSEMU session in fullscreen mode by setting (option "OFF" in the following example):

• # Start DOSEMU in fullscreen mode. Default = "off"
• # $_X_fullscreen = (off)

in the file "conf/dosemurc" (set it and copy in your home directory).
In order to specify (it is needed for some CUPS programs) our keyboard mapping, in "~/.dosemurc" uncomment the relevant line, e.g. for an french keyboard:

• $_layout = "fr"

To quit the "FreeDOS Box", type after DOS prompt:




See the page of Andy Dougherty from the Lafayette College Physics Department: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~doughera/cups, he gives 4 patches in the form of *.bat executable DOS files.

Copy the files from CUPS floppy disk in freedos directory, typing for instance in a Linux shell:



You should get tree files:

• em.exe (in the case of "Electricity and Magnetism Simulations" sofware)
• install.bat
• readme

Run the "install.bat" script (in the xdosemu window, i.e. after "C:\>" prompt) :



A directory "C:\CUPS\CUPSEM" is created by the program. Non-US users should notice that in xdosemu windows, the keyboard is supposed to be a QUERTY one (e.g. with an AZERTY keyboard type "," for "m", to get "." type ":", etc). Running the CUPS software "cupsem.exe" on an Intel 500MHz one gets:



This problem can be easily fixed thanks to Andy Dougherty's scripts and Klaus Hartnegg's program.

• first download the "tppatch.exe" from Andy Dougherty's web page or from the orginal Klaus Hartnegg's page, copy this program in ~/work/dosemu/freedos/cups directory (equivalent to C:\CUPS)
• download the appropriate Andy Dougherty's script (called "patchem.bat" in our example) his page and copy this files in ~/work/dosemu/freedos/cups directory; finally run the script.

Now, you are ready to run CUPSEM software on your Linux (faster than 200 MHz machines) system:




Here are some batch files I wrote and which are not available on the Andy Dougherty's page:

• patchtp.bat for CUPS Thermal and Statistical Physics programs
• patchas.bat for CUPS Astrophysics programs

Compile CUPS program sources with Free Pascal compiler.

			Daniel Cordier, Laboratoire GSMA - Université de Reims,