On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Joey Puopolo <jwy...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi everybody! > i just joined the mailing list and I tried out FreeDOS. Im totally impressed > that this exists hah!
DOS isn't (quite) dead. > Im not sure if any of these things can even be done without the kernel being > natively loaded into protected mode? Maybe some of these, at least, can be > emulated for fun to show potential developers some esthetic potential. Don't expect the latter. FreeDOS is a 16 bit application, intended to be compatible with MS-DOS. I don't expect it to ever become a 32 bit application. The OS is single-user and single tasking, Early DOS applications like WordStar and Lotus 1,2,3 were character mode, running in a console. Things like GUIs run as applications on top of DOS, and mouse support is implemented by a loadable driver installed in CONFIG.SYS. (Windows 1.X - 3.X and Win95 were multitasking shells running on top of DOS, and protected mode and multitaking support were implemented by the application. Win98 used DOS as a real mode loader for Windows as the OS, and once Windows was loaded, DOS was out of the loop.) MS-DOS originated on X86 CPUs that had a 1MB address space, of which 640KB was available to user programs. Memory above 1MB was made available by as XMS by HIMEM.SYS and EMS by EMM386.SYS, but not all applications could use it. Protected mode was not implemented by MS-DOS, (I use XMS in FreeDOS, and have drivers that make is available as a RAMdisk and disk cache.) FreeDOS can't even be run in a current system without jumping through hoops. Under 32 bit Windows (2K/XP/32 bit Win7) you can run 16 bit DOS applications (but not the FreeDOS kernel) in a console window. To run DOS itself you must boot into it using something like Grub. 64 bit Windows removed support for 16 bit applications, and you must either boot into FreeDOS directly, or run it or other 16 bit applications in a virtual machine like MS's, VMWare, or Virtual Box. It's a decent embedded system for low resource X86 based devices, as long as multitasking is not a requirement. Aside from Gem as base for a GUI you might also look at FLTK, which has a port that works under FreeDOS. Good luck on touch support: that's another thing that would require a driver to support it, and none exist. Know any hardware hackers that like to code in assembler? :-) ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135991&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
