Re: new DOS source
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jul 07, 2013
- 4144 views
Or those who use smaller computers like Arduino, who might consider a dos machine as a step up.
Might being the opperative word here. I suspect that it'd not be the case for most users, who would use the Arduino for very low level operations (like emulating an SID chip or acting as a microcontroller) that a full fledged DOS computer, with its clunky BIOS requirement and need to have some kind of random access hardware (flopy or hard disk) would be ill-suited for. Again, though, there's no accounting for individual taste.
What do you mean by "clunky"? The arduino has a bootloader in it's avr,
The BIOS is required to boot DOS. For the Arduino, a bootloader is optional and it can be removed in its entirety.
Also, the Arduino bootloader is only 2K (and can be shrunk to 0.5K http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,38002.0.html ) while a typical modern BIOS can be as big as 1024K (e.g. http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/check-bios-version-linux/ )
and both dos and Eu insulates the programmer from the bios unless the programmer wants at it.
Agreed. But you can't get rid of it completely if you don't want it/need it - at best you can just bypass it after DOS has finished booting. That level of total control is denied.
For functionality, i don't see dos as full fledged anything, it's simply not running a full fledged gui-type modern OS,
Agreed.
there's FAT12 and FAT16 (and maybe FAT32) for the Arduino, color dotmatrix led display shields, and usb and lan (wired and wireless) ports. What you call "full fledged dos computer" is only adding bigger monitor support, more ram, faster cpu, and more disk storage.
I know that there are actually attempts to do build full fledged computer systems out of the Arduino (e.g. http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/19793/making-a-functional-computer-out-of-an-arduino-uno ). It's not so much about the "full fledged" bit, but rather the historical cruft that a computer capable of running DOS on it would bring with it that makes it unsuitable as a replacement for an arduino.
Of course, you could take the requirement for that stuff out of DOS (e.g. using the FreeDOS or DR-DOS/OpenDOS code as a base, remove the need to boot from a BIOS), but anyone with the skills to do that could probably get DOS running on the Arduino itself. I take that to mean that virtually all the niches that a computer running DOS could fulfill, could also be done by either a modern server system running Linux/GNU or an Ardiuno.
Even if i read it and got competent with dosemu, there's not a Eu version to run on dos, other than 3.11, right?
Ignoring alphas and prealphas, and assuming one means a native DOS edition port, then yes. However, the idea here was to "cheat" by running the Linux/GNU edition of Euphoria on DOS through this DOSEmu setup.
and seemingly forever ongoing compiling sessions i hear about
You should be able to get DOSEmu installed from a binary distribution (no compiling!). In general though this can be true (I once spent three days trying to get wxUniversal to compile on a Linux/GNU system, though this was over a decade ago).
Frankly, the complicated linux setup put me off linux.
Agreed - there is a lot of complicated setup involved in getting DOSEmu to be able to grant direct access to the hardware. You'd probably be on your own if you wanted to give that a try.
But it would be a way to instantly get modern hardware for dos to run on, and maybe in a way that's easier to port Eu to?
Yes, precisely.
Also, there is no 64bit version of DOS, so it's still not possible to use more than 4GB of ram in a single DOS application.
Neither does Euphoria on winxp.
I haven't personally tested this, but you should be able to use more than 4GB of ram in a single Euphoria application that runs on 64bit XP using the 64bit version of Euphoria.
And "modern" is also an operative word, meaning a small ramdrive of some flavor as C:\.
How is this modern? Ramdisks have been around since the time of CP/M. Linux/GNU has had support for using ramdisks as the root since virtually the beginning.
Edit: My mistake. Booting DOS from C: as a ramdisk does seem to be relatively modern: http://www.styma.org/bootcdrom/bootcdrom.shtml
I assumed that, since Linux/GNU has had support for using ramdisks a root for several decades now, that something as flexible and extendable as DOS should have had it for just as long as well. My mistake.
