Re: new DOS source
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jul 07, 2013
- 4178 views
Derek, are you willing to run a poll - or gather the data using other methods - to actually and accurately gauge the interest level in a DOS edition? If you aren't, then perhaps you would be unwise to simply assume that there is "next to zero interest" without any evidence to back it up.
You need to figure that a poll here is measuring only those who are active here and who have predetermined to use Eu on dos.
Well, I didn't necessarily mean a poll here. Though it would be a logical place to start, there are probably other places that should be polled as well (e.g. simtel forums, freedos mailing lists, etc).
A poll here won't measure those who use dos and have not yet used Eu, or those here who use Eu and have never seen a dos computer.
Agreed.
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.
I am not interested in "retrocomputing" as much as a computer giving me unfettered hardware access with a reasonable OS and LBA harddrive access.
Sadly, with things like TPM and VT, that "unfettered" hardware access is growing more and more distant at the hardware level itself.
In a way, i don't see much distinction between a 80486 running msdos5 and a modern micro or picoatx mobo, except for the quantification of the peripherals (hdd size, main memory size, filesystem type, ethernet speed, etc).
I see some differences that may make a huge difference to some. E.g. USB legacy support causes a timer to run that can not be masked out (not even with STI/CLI) that takes up to 400-500us. Older systems that don't support USB at all don't have this problem and can run code that must be run at 25-30 us resolution.
This sort of thing may not be a problem for you personally, but it's probably a problem for someone out there.
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.
To me, make it run 32bit flat memory dos instead of linux and i'd be pleased to run Eu on it. Maybe that's your "out" to easy dos support: find a way to make it look exactly like the dos i described, but in a shell on box that boots nix.
DOSEmu - which runs in a shell (e.g. bash) on a box that boots nix, has had support for direct hardware access for over a decade. http://www.dosemu.org/docs/README/1.2/config.html
Edit: And you can run eui (or other nix commands) from inside a DOSEmu session via DOSEmu's unix.com utility. http://www.dosemu.org/stable/announce
