Re: new DOS source
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jul 07, 2013
- 4170 views
The Pi requires a memory card,
Agreed. It requires an SD card. The Arduino does not. Don't change the topic.
and a dos pc can be booted from a pata ssd (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive).
Which brings along all the cruft involved in booting from and using random access hardware again (as that pata ssd emulates the interface to a standard hdd, even if it isn't random access itself).
Pata ssds are about the size of a standard hard disk. An SD card is a lot smaller. Both the Pi and the Arduino take up less room (in terms of physical space used) than a conventional DOS system.
After you put the minimum sized mobo ram you can buy today into the pc, the space taken up by a 1 Mbyte bios is trivial.
Agreed.
You are sweating a megabyte (vs an Arduino?), and i am talking of gigabytes on a pico/mini/microATX mobo.
Of which you can only use 4.
Anyways, the point is that as one of the Real Programmers(tm) who knows what they are doing, I should have the right and the option to get rid of that 1MB if I don't want or need it.
If someone were to ask me why I felt that I need to have this right, I'd counter with "Well, why should the programmer want direct access to the hardware when it can be emulated perfectly by a full fledged modern OS and dosbox?" It all boils down to the same thing.
Besides, the bios can be copied into ram and the prom on the mobo paged out, it's done, executing from the bios copy in ram is faster.
I was not aware that it was possible to page out or overwrite the BIOS in this manner. My research has consistently suggested the opposite is true.
Even if this is true for legacy BIOSes, would this still hold true for its successor, EFI? Perhaps this is a moot point, considering how difficult it is to get DOS to run on an EFI-only system...
