> On Aug 3, 2023, at 12:37 PM, Bret Johnson via Freedos-devel > <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > >> >> Yeah, USB and CD/DVD makes only sense for a 386+ ... > > USB, yes. CD/DVD, no. USB requires PCI which in turn requires 386+. > Actually, there were supposedly USB host controllers manufactured for the ISA > bus instead of PCI, but I've never actually seen one. But USB protocols > assume you're using a 32-bit (and in some cases 64-bit) CPU so USB really > only makes sense on 386+, though you could probably make things work on a > lesser CPU if you absolutely had to. > > But CD drivers existed back in the early days and they never required > anything special of the CPU. They would sometimes take advantage of special > features if they were available, but it wasn't required. AFAIK, there are no > DOS DVD drivers anyway since I don't think anything has ever supported UDF.
I don’t recall any sub-386 ever shipping with a CD-ROM drive. But, there may have been a couple very high end machines. I do recall waiting a while for the prices to drop to something semi-affordable. Which I added to my 486DX2/66 notebooks VLB docking station. So, there were definitely a bunch of 286/386 still in general use at the time. But they were still very expensive and not very popular. If I recall correctly, it was a Creative Labs drive that came with a controller card and cost about $700 USD. I don’t recall if it was a writer or not. (Circa 93/94). I may have held off waiting on a writer. Don’t recall. After all, we are talking about ancient history from back in the days when a CD had a much larger storage capacity than a typical PCs total hard drive storage. It wasn’t long after that CD drive prices dropped dramatically and most computers started including disc drives. Which of course made the Windows 95 CD media practical. As for DVD support, on of the primary drivers we include is UDVD2. Which will probably work fine with with DVDs using iso-9660. As for Rockridge or UDF, IDK never tried. I burn very few discs nowadays. Mostly use USB HDDs and Flash. Probably only about 1/3 the way through a stack of blank DVD-Rs I bought a decade ago. None of this really matters. We do not have open source drivers available to FreeDOS that we will provide CD support on sub-386 machines. :-) Jerome > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
