Hey I was wondering if it would make sense to step up FreeDOS to
actually you know, be bootable under UEFI ;) The CPUs still got support
for real mode so we should be fine.
W dniu 27.04.2021 o 16:41, Frantisek Rysanek pisze:
On 27 Apr 2021 at 16:01, Eric Auer wrote:
I agree that it will be tricky to ask vendors which styles
their machine supports, but actually my impression is that
support for booting DOS is not that exotic yet.
In my recent experience, and I don't sell office-grade PC hardware so
that experience is limited:
ITX motherboards by Gigabyte, with BayTrail and Apollo Lake ATOM, do
have the "legacy BIOS boot" (and CSM support) available in the BIOS.
You can select whether to have it or not, there are several items in
the BIOS Setup related to that.
ITX motherboards by AsRock, with Gemini Lake ATOM: UEFI only.
Not in the least apologetic about it :-)
The motherboard user's guide, typically available in PDF for download
off the vendor's website, typically has a couple screenshots of the
BIOS SETUP. If there's not a word about a CSM or legacy boot, beware.
There were some earlier examples of motherboards where the CSM
initially wasn't available, and got added in a later version of the
BIOS. But, I wouldn't rely on this anymore - for many vendors it's
UEFI-only from now on.
Where I work, our key supplier is Advantech = industrial-grade PC
hardware. The legacy boot method is typically still supported in
their hardware, ispecially in their "inhouse products", e.g. ATX /
microATX / mini-ITX motherboards. But, this isn't something you'd
want buy for a home PC, at the price. Otherwise it's rock solid PC
hardware, and the BIOS feels very conservative / vanilla.
To be honest, if I wanted to get a modern PC toy box with
SoundBlaster compatibility, I'd probably use some recent ATOM, even
if UEFI-only, install an appropriate version of Linux and run DOS
under QEMU on top of that. And I'd be free to choose the emulated
SoundBlaster if I wanted to.
As for what Linux: whatever you are familiar with. And, QEMU seems to
get better with every version. In the recent years, I'm with Debian,
so I'd probably choose some recent fast-paced Ubuntu, to get a fresh
QEMU out of the box, with frequent updates if desired.
Whenever I deal with something in DOS, the native DOS-based editors
and IDE's nowadays feel so tiny, in the 80x25 terminal (even 80x43).
I prefer to edit text files "out of band" in some Windows or Linux
environment and maybe just run the compiler for that in DOS, if
cross-development on the modern machine is not practical for some
reason.
Frank
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