Hi Thomas,
actually I was looking for a laptop with FreeDos using a photovoltaic system…
That should be relatively easy. Photovoltaics can output 12V DC, 230V AC with an inverter, or higher DV voltages directly via USB-C which some newer laptops use for charging. However, those will not usually have a BIOS, only EFI, so they cannot run DOS on hardware. Running DOS on a not too new laptop is generally easy, but you will almost never have WiFi / WLAN drivers for DOS and whether popular DOS text or graphics modes look okay on the laptop screen will vary depending on the model. Maybe a trial and error thing. Or maybe some people here can recommend some laptop models :-) I once tested DOS on an eeePC, which was okay, but as far as I remember, popular resolutions had to be displayed either with black bars or in a distorted and somewhat fuzzy zoom mode, so it would probably take some experimenting to find a smooth mode. Also, eeePC are too tiny for real work, I was just curious there.
(Is there DosBox for iPhones :?? )
There probably are some PC and/or DOS emulators for Android. Interesting that you already knew Velotype! Regarding mouse movement: In text mode, the mouse will jump one character at at time. Of course there are graphics mode based editors for DOS, too, like Blocek. Which may also have the advantage that you could pick a graphics mode with better match to your laptop screen size.
printers understanding plain text or PDF are easily available.
However, remember that text editors for DOS do not directly output PDF, so you will need additional tools and steps from text file to printout on paper. I agree that Centronics no longer is popular for printers, but if you want to run old printers on new PC, use an USB to LPT adapter cable. I would hope generic DOS drivers exist for that. Interestingly, with modern hardware, printing from DOS through wired LAN to a network printer with PDF and/or PS or plain text support might actually be less effort than using USB, but those printers are probably more bulky than certain USB printer types. Which brings in small external "print server" devices where you can plug USB printers and a network to make printers networked. Maybe some can also do the PDF rendering for "dumb" printers, but the whole idea is getting close to "just use Raspberry Pi or all that modern hardware and run a DOS window on that" ;-) Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
