On Fri, 27 Jan 2023, tom ehlert wrote:
this argument is nonsense. many/most people don't care about the 'open source' part as long as it's free.
This.
most care more if this OS supports big disks or much memory. after all, an OS is not an end target: people need the OS to run their applications like 1. Play classic DOS games. 2. Run legacy software. 3. Develop embedded systems. none of this is open source.
Often, "Windows 3.1x" is the #2.
I can't see many users to reprogram their motherboard (even if it would be supported) just to play a casual round of Doom or Wolfenstein.
Also this. (Though those, at least, can be rolled and run on modern systems.)
no network card. no mouse. no USB devices. (no memory at b8000 or a0000)? no sound. nothing with interrupts. congratulations.
The way I suggested to do things - a bare-metal emulator/virtualizer, upon which the FreeDOS kernel is run - is heavier than SeaBIOS, but would be a better fit for all of this.
Emulate a generic NIC, mouse, SVGA, SB16...run 16-bit code in emulation if you have to...and virtualize 32-bit stuff.
If the system's 32-bit, you can run DOS natively. If the system's 64-bit, this would be for if you can't...if you can, just do.
(Hopefully that doesn't sound too confused.) -uso. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
