I would like to see programs written to work with GEM directly. Updating FDPKG to work through GEM would be really neat. GEM is beautifully simple. I don't know about turbovision etcetera, but how hard would it be to build the installer on top of opengem? Talk of needing a dos extender gui to play Windows 9x games is not where the focus needs to be right now IMHO.
I think the focus for Freedos 1.1 should be: improve compatability, fix bugs, and strengthen the documentation. Add on software should be saved for say Freedos 2.0 with a notable exception of scandisk. Getting free defrag working on FAT32 would be a welcome improvement. There needs to be a scandisk replacement. The ReactOS project needs these as well btw. Is part of the compatability mess a matter of not wanting to code around the bugs in various popular programs? Apparently, this happened in Windows 9x for games like simcity. IMO, coding around bugs is not a good idea. Better to replace those programs or pressure the producers of them to fix the bugs. The result of not programming around bugs will be a better freedos overall. A major point of freedos is being able to use older computers that nothing else will work on. Dos died before Pentium 4's and modern multi core behemoths came into existence. There are many integrated sound and video cards that there are no optimized dos drivers for. The integrated nic on my Intel D845PEBT2 is not supported by Crynwr. Freedos is supposed to work on everything from an 8086 on up. Packages that need a 386+ to operate should be labelled at the installation step as such. At one point, to bring dos back to life, you probably have to write optimized drivers for complex modern hardware. This is likely to be difficult. How many companies know how to write drivers for dos these days? USBGEAR burned me recently with a USB sound card claiming that it would work in 98se when in fact there are no drivers for it and Microsoft isn't going to provide one. Instead of writing a driver, the company got defensive and said I should complain to Microsoft. It's a USB 1.1 sound card with speaker and mic plug ins. here is a link: http://www.usbgear.com/computer_cable_details.cfm?sku=USBG-X3S&cats=121&catid=121 I don't want to see anyone else get burned. So is freedos 1.1 still stalled? I want to see freedos get a bit farther. Disk checking is needed along with other fat32 compatible tools. I want to see the improved installer Jim envisions and an improved package management capability that lets you select from a menu at any time. Integration of FDPKG with opengem would be really nice. ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
