There has been quite a bit of talk about AST hardware needing special drivers even under DOS. Well, if the company won't put the drivers in the public domain and there aren't very many AST computers in the world, the logical thing to do is recycle the ones that are left and replace them. Am I missing something? Are AST computers superior to normal PC compatibles?
In general, can free dos drivers be developed for hardware that is otherwise unusable? For example, the sound blaster 16 pci card doesn't work apparently without expanded memory in dos and the driver has to be in a Windows 98 tree. Rather weird if you ask me. More to the point, you can't play Ultima 7 even under MS-DOS 6.20 because the game is not compatible with protected mode environments. Oops! There is Exult, but I find that it is somewhat unstable on top of 98SE. I haven't used it in a current Fedora system. Free operating systems whether we are discussing Freedos, Minix, or Linux have problems with certain hardware. In the Linux world unfortunately, drivers for modern graphics cards that work are hard to come by. In a Freedos environment, modern graphics card came after DOS lost most of it's popularity. On modern systems, one can use an emulated dos environment to create the appearance of a legacy PC, but what if you don't want to emulate? What if you are after real time computing and need to use the full capability of a modern graphics card? I can't think of a good example, but I'm sure one exists. Maybe Freedos isn't the best get the maximum out of a modern computer in real time OS. Dos was originally developed before the modern computers of today existed. Minix may be a better choice. I'm sure there are other real time OS'es available beyond Minix and Freedos. A few questions and points to take away: 1) Why should the open source community support rare hardware? 2) Can the open source community support rare or even cutting edge hardware? 3) What is it about DOS environments that draws people to them instead of Linux, Minix, etcetera environments? There is talk of not letting copyrighted software that the producers don't care about get lost. I think supporting software that is unpopular or not well documented inside and out in the public domain is a mistake. Freedos exists because DOS is well defined in the public domain and there are talented people who took that information implementing what we have today. Think about where the open source community focuses resources and why. One of the weaknesses of a real time OS is that it probably won't protect against bad programming in the interest of speed. Another issue, spaghetti code is more likely which is harder to maintain than object oriented code. Whether a true real time environment is necessary for a particular task has to be weighed against the disadvantages. Computers are so fast now that an OS which allows one to write maintainable code at the expense of some speed loss probably makes more sense than an OS which will run a program as fast as possible at the expense of the code being harder to maintain. Harder to maintain code is more likely to have serious bugs which is counterproductive when time performance is critical. There is probably a sweet spot between real time and general purpose that is appropriate for most applications. As a thought experiment, how do you design a real time kernel so that you can say this operation has to complete in x time and it will? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
