On Sat, 14 Dec 2024, Ben Collver via Freedos-devel wrote:
Thanks for the explanation. Reminds me of folks who made grand plans
for programming projects and perhaps wrote some scaffolding code, but
never finished anything. A whole new GUI or multitasking system built
on top of DOS would be grandiose indeed.
It's exactly that, really.
I mean, something like a free Windows 3.0 or a free Desqview/X would be
nice, but eh. I know my limitations - my favorite saying is "The more I
know the more I know I don't know" ;)
(I specifically said 3.0 because there's a lot of added stuff in 3.1 that
would make cloning it an order of magnitude more difficult in theory than
3.0.)
My general attitude has been that I wanted to create a lightweight version
of DOS - this is nothing new, I've been trying to do this since the early
aughts, but having the MS-DOS 4.01 code made that a lot closer to reality,
and if I legitimately had 5 or 6 (or better, 6.21), then that would be no
big deal. Not that I haven't tried writing my own stuff - I'm just not
very good at it. My code is certainly a lot better than it was in the
late 1990s - I mean, I was an ignorant teenage fool in the '90s - but it's
still about terrible.
I hope starfrost is successful in getting 3.3 and 5.0 from Microsoft.
Maybe like buying a luxury sportscar and parking it on a remote dirt
road in the country. Those roads weren't designed for that kind of car.
Man, that old dirt road near where I grew up musta done a number on the
suspensions of the school buses...
(It's no longer a dirt road. Sometime between when I moved away in 1992,
and the time I visited the area in 2016, they paved it.)
I think HP's method of "booting" FreeDOS on amd64 hardware is
interesting. I would like to see a tightly integrated, special purpose
Linux distro for this; the minimum required to present a guest BIOS plus
features to enable removable media, networking, etc. Only if someone
else makes it happen.
On one hand I kinda feel like Linux would be overkill.
A few years ago I tried to write an Apple //e emulator that ran directly
from UEFI - wasn't able to finish because I couldn't figure out how to do
certain things with the C runtimes I had. I had been thinking of doing
something similar in spirit to "DOSBOX" as an operating system unto
itself.
Then again, doing things the "proper" way is hard, and "slap a Linux on
it" is easy. (This is why my most recent project hasn't been going
anywhere; building Linux/glibc/gcc is relatively easy, building
kNetBSD/NetBSD libc/clang without building the whole damn system is quite
a bit harder and when you try to get tips you just get a "you shouldn't
want to do that".)
-uso.
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