Pippi wrote:
>I wuz talking to a college kid the other day, mentioned I knew folks who
>ran DOS on their pIIIs
>He said "run an 8bit system on a 64bit machine? Why? That's nuts!"
The kernel is 16-bit. Many programs (espacially games) are 32-bits.
I think only some versions of UNIX are able to use a 64-bit to it's fullest.
But who cares that the kernel is 16-bit instead of 32-bit anyway? Since
it's not sitting there doing useless things it's still faster (if we only
want to run one program at a time).
I think there are versions that claim to be 100% (MS-)DOS compatible and
are 32-bit, I haven't tried any of them.
If you have the source then you can change whatever you want so it's of
course possible to make a 64-bit DOS. But I have no idea if this would
actually increase speed by any ammount anyway since most of the things in a
computer still is 8 or 16 bit.
DOS does use 8-bit in a way since the registers in the CPU have a length of
16 (and some 32 on 386+) and these 16-bit registers can be seen as two
8-bit registers if we want (high and low byte).
>I thought about it, couldn't explain it.
>Is dos still only 8bit, or can you get versions/software that increases
>it? Would you want to? Can it therefor take advantage of a 64 bit
>machine, or is that machine not being used to it's full potential?
In a sense we aren't using the CPU as good as we could, but if you compare
a DOS program and a Windows (or Linux for that matter) the DOS program is
often smaller and faster.
>Am I completely off track here?
Anyway, the only 8-bit I have is my NES emulator - and with that I'm off to
try a new version of ZSNES (which is 100% made in ASM) ;-)
//Bernie
http://hem1.passagen.se/bernie/index.htm DOS programs, Star Wars ...
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