Hi, On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 3:24 AM Paul Edwards via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > > However, most people don't care about standards, and even the ones who > > do don't really think anything "useful" can be written in them. Which > > is untrue and a shame. > > It is only recently - perhaps only a few hours ago - that I started > to have confidence that it was untrue. > > Ok, so an entire toolchain plus OS plus fullscreen editor can be > written - what definition of "useful" is being used? That's enough > to quite literally rebuild the world.
I don't know, some people are never satisfied. I'm happy with Space Invaders or Tetris or Doom. Others prefer Minecraft or Fortnight or whatever modern Unreal or Unity game. I'm also happy with a simple 386 assembler, but others demand x64 with AVX-512, a full preprocessor, structs, unions, macros, HLL-compatible calling conventions, etc. My favorite utility is probably *nix Sed (which is related to Ed and Grep). So those are super useful to me. Others prefer a full HTML5 web browser with Javascript v5 (or whatever). I used to chide my brother with his quote "but it doesn't burn DVDs", so I think that's an unreasonable expectation for computers. But I'm not huge on multimedia (although I enjoy YouTube and Twitch). I like "simple" compilers. I like text editors. I like text manipulation tools. > > There are way too many competing languages, > > too. Something else is always "newer", shinier, more practical, more > > elegant, more popular, etc. > > Yeah, I'm not really trying to compete in that field either. You know what I mean. Pascal vs. Modula-2 vs. Oberon vs. Ada vs. Delphi C vs. C++ vs. ObjC vs. C# vs. D vs. Go AWK vs. Perl vs. Ruby vs. Python Or even C++11 vs. C++20 vs. whatever. It never ends. > Once I have the entire toolchain (just the C compiler is sort of missing - > SubC is only a subset of C90), then I am happy, in principle, to > start again from scratch in Pascal or Rust or whatever. But so > far I haven't even completed the "C venture" - even to the point > of answering the above question about migrating from one bitness > to another. C is a bit of a red herring. (Isn't everything?) ISO C alone isn't enough for POSIX 2008 (requires mmap). A lot of code depends on deleting open files (POSIX file system), for instance. And there's no (inherent) subdir support. I'm not complaining. Just saying, others' expectations and demands are much heavier than yours (and ours). > > It takes two to tango. Most people don't care about ultimate or > > theoretical portability. While I 100% agree with and sympathize with > > you, it's not interesting to them. > > Sure. I'm not really attempting to corner the mass market. Maybe > that will happen later, but it isn't priority at the moment. I'm more > interested in an 8080 (8-bit) OS, now that I have a NEC V20. Check out David Given's attempt at CPMish on Github: * https://github.com/davidgiven/cpmish > >> But I'm expecting to burn the latest UC8086 onto a CF > >> and boot it on my Book 8088 later today. > > It does work, but there was an anomaly. Clearing the > screen doesn't work. I took a look at how that is done, > and it is done by doing a scroll up. I suspect the bios > in the Book 8088 doesn't support that. I haven't yet > confirmed it. Isn't there an ANSI escape for that? Or does that not work either? "[2J" or something? (I think DR-DOS' shell did that for CLS.) > >> I don't think I can > >> even do that with the Freedos distribution I use as I think it > >> has a dependence on an 80386 processor. So for an > >> alternative to UC8086 I will be using MSDOS 6.22 and > >> ANSIPLUS. > > > The kernel should have an 8086-friendly build. The latest shell might > > be 8086-friendly too (although the old 2006 stable one was 186). > > I didn't really understand this comment, FreeDOS should run on 8086, both kernel and shell. If it doesn't, that's a bug or omission. I know I have some old floppy images that I ran under 8086tiny (and derivatives) and Joris' Retro. I never preferred a "386" kernel for FreeDOS because it was very minimal improvements and not worth it. We're talking a few minimal cycles shaved due to better instruction use (in real mode), that's all, no added features. Same with 186, usually not worth it. (Doesn't mean there isn't still room for improvement.) > so I simply burnt my > Freedos 1.3 onto a CF. It said "Loading FreeDOS" and then it > beeped continuously for 1-2 minutes, then it started making a > clicking noise, which I let run for 15 minutes or something > before switching off the computer. * http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/kernel/2043/ Contents of release zip files: ke20xx_16.zip : binaries for 8086, FAT16 ke20xx_32.zip : binaries for 8086, FAT16, FAT32 ke20xxsrc.zip : sources for the kernel * http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/command/0.85a/ANNOUNCE (I assume these are the latest versions. Someone please correct me if not.) > > What else did you rely upon? > > I don't understand this question. The very bare minimum (besides boot sector) is kernel and shell. What other pieces of DOS software did you need or want? > > I would definitely not bother with old MS-DOS. > > I don't understand what you are proposing as an alternative. > ie how do I make Freedos a viable alternative? I assumed that > I needed to rebuild everything myself, which is not something > I really wanted to get involved in. No, you shouldn't have to rebuild anything. > MSDOS 6.22 is sitting there ready to go. For testing, okay, but you can't redistribute it. I see no reason not to use FreeDOS. If something doesn't work, keep bugging us here. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
