Hi Adam,
while the ability to provide ISA-like DMA for PCI (e.g. sound cards) or PCIe basically vanished at least 10 years ago, I am less pessimistic about BIOS services. Can you give specific examples of too stripped down BIOSes in recent mainboards? Wikipedia sounds more as if it took until 2019 before a significant number of vendors stopped including a CSM to provide BIOS-like services on their UEFI firmware? I have also heard about VGA, VESA or VBE getting worse, for example no 8x14 font or only powers-of-two bytes per line in VBE framebuffer RAM etc. Those do not sound as if they would seriously impact classic DOS apps apart from the DOS game sound problem of having no Sound Blaster 16? > If it doesn't matter "at all" then where can I get a modern CPU with > working support for ISA DMA? It was removed back in one of the Pentium > 4 chipsets so the CPU model/generation is definitely important. > > That's no guarantee though. Some modern machines only provide partial > BIOS services - only enough to get common operating system installers > to run and no more. I have had machines that booted to DOS and I could > install an operating system on and it ran fine, but they would lock up > when I tried to run most DOS programs because they were missing a > bunch of ROM BIOS services. > One of these was a small form factor Intel NUC I bought a few years > ago with the intention of installing Windows 98... Thanks for the NUC warning, but Win98 actually will switch from BIOS to built-in drivers which are likely not able to cope with new chips. How about classic DOS on the NUC? Which DOS apps locked up on which other PC as you have mentioned above, trying to use which features? Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
