Hi, On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 1:47 PM, <userbeit...@abwesend.de> wrote: >> >>> Running FreeDOS on real hardware can be challenging. >> FreeDOS no, old DOS games yes. > > No offence, FreeDOS is of course a modern project. But DOS is an old > conpect for an operating system.
But you have to be "old" to run on old cpus (e.g. 8086, 286). Sure, in theory you could have a binary OS release that runs on multiple cpu families (dispatching via CPUID), but that's a lot more testing and work. DOS already offloads almost everything outside of the kernel, which is probably a bit too minimal. There's just not a lot of sympathy for old hardware anymore. Forced obsoletion is more fierce than ever, so people are routinely asked to upgrade (or even re-buy) everything on a fairly constant basis. They don't want stability, legacy, compatibility, they want "shiny! new!" features. >>> FreeDOS on the other hand is a very old operating system concept. >> Old concept yes, old operating system no. This means: DOS >> has no multi tasking and no 64 bit address space, so your >> modern computer will be bored: Only a single CPU core and >> at most 3 to 4 GB of RAM can be used inside DOS. Which is >> of course a lot more than old DOS games ever could imagine. > > DR DOS had a multitasker. So did OS/2. Also Win16 and Win9x. Not to mention Desqview. And even DOSEMU. And WinXP's NTVDM. And nobody cares anymore. :-( Well, maybe ReactOS, but even their NTVDM still needs lots of work. >> This leads to the next problem: >>> Running it on modern hardware will very often result in some features >>> not working correctly. DOS games often required an AdLib or SoundBlaster >>> audio card. For AC'97 and Intel HD-Audio sound, there are no DOS drivers >> Old DOS games do not use "DOS drivers" for sound. They could >> not imagine that games would have any more fancy sound card >> available than a stereo SoundBlaster. So the games THEMSELVES >> contain drivers for SoundBlaster. More or less true (but not absolutely). Blame the tooling, but even then there has been "some" support for dynamic loading of libs, etc. It's just not popular (or bug-free or easy enough, I suppose). E.g. (DJGPP-built) "h2dos -sndpci" (as .dxe). (Bad example, that's a fairly recent backport. But I know many DOS games had separate drivers for various hardware.) There were other games that used similar methods for drivers, but those never caught on as much (and weren't well-supported). So it's not that nobody did it, they just didn't keep it up, it didn't widely catch on, it wasn't obvious enough, etc. > Yes, but bit number of original DOS programs cannot use modern sound > hardware. >> Is there anything else than sound which has problems in DOS on >> modern hardware, when playing old games written in the 1990s? Cpu timing? >> Which other "dozens" of drivers do you miss? Interesting topic! > > 2. I don't know if there is one, but a CPU throttling driver would be a > good thing. One that supports Intel (Enhanced) SpeedStep and AMD > PowerNow!/Cool'n'Quiet. Reading the ACPI tables would be required. > Turning off the remaining (unused) CPU cores would reduce power > consumption and enhance the thermal situation. There are at least two simple prototypes for that for DOS in recent years, but they weren't widely tested and thus don't work on all models. Power management, as designed by hardware manufacturers, doesn't concern itself very much with DOS. By far, most people only use Windows or (less common) Linux. > 3. USB devices like USB sound cards, USB video cards (enabling you to > use a second/third/... montior) will not work. USB video capturing > devices (WebCams, analog TV, DVB, ...) will also lack drivers and a > usable protocol. Already lamented as "too complicated" by local experts. > 6. How is the support for graphics cards? Are there tools to add > additional VESA modes if they happen to be missing in the BIOS? VESA is way too simplistic for modern users anyways. And one hobbyist told me that his professor said hardware acceleration was basically impossible for DOS anyways. So DOS is stuck in minimal support, at best, and it's not going to get better. You're going to have to do without, dual boot, and/or use DOSEMU. > 8. But the worst incompatibility of them all is the lack of CSM > (Compatiblity Support Module) on modern UEFI machines. Or does FreeDOS > run on EFI/UEFI? Lacking CSM is because they aren't intended to be used for legacy OSes. That's their prerogative. How can you convince them that DOS is still important in 2016? AFAIK, you can't. > I know, this may not be a dozen, but a lot. Depending on the actual > hardware and on the requirement of the to-be-used (legacy) software. > > IMHO, for games lack of sound and mouse/joystick support really is the > fun-killer. Unavoidable, esp. sound. Maybe I could have minimal hope for the others (doubt it!), but overall nobody is writing drivers for DOS anymore. I hate to be pessimistic, but I think we're out of luck. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What NetFlow Analyzer can do for you? Monitors network bandwidth and traffic patterns at an interface-level. Reveals which users, apps, and protocols are consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity planning reports. http://sdm.link/zohomanageengine _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
