Eric, It’s simple. Every piece of computer hardware comes with a Windows driver. Depending on the age of the device, you may have the older Windows drivers, or the newer Windows Driver Model driver. The reality is that to the major manufacturers of hardware, DOS is dead. No one is using a 16-bit OS, especially DOS, excluding our demographic, or as an “emergency boot disk". The bare minimum is 32-bit and now the transition is to 64-bit operating systems. DOS is so “dead” that VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox (even though the latter is aware of FreeDOS/MS-DOS usage) do not provide integration services or support for DOS and Windows 3.x
USB support in DOS is limited to hard drives only, perhaps USB keyboards and mice as they can emulate their PS/2 counterparts. What about USB game controllers, if you weren’t fortunate enough to buy a game controller that runs off the game port of your sound card, you’re definitely not getting it to run on FreeDOS. Which means you have to play your favorite video games using the keyboard. It’s true, you can install Linux or another OS, install the emulator of your choice, connect your game controller and have it emulate as a game port controller in FreeDOS, but what if you only want FreeDOS on your machine? If we are able to graft the Windows API into FreeDOS (as FreeDOS 32) then we have access to thousands of drivers. If Windows is just so bad, then I guess we’re left to contemplate a way to graft the Linux driver model onto FreeDOS. Somehow, I think it would be much easier to do Windows. Hope this helps, > On May 29, 2015, at 11:31 AM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > > Hi Anthony, > > please explain in which way Windows WITHOUT a GUI would be > something that we want to add to FreeDOS: There already are > really good, free and open DPMI based DOS extenders for DOS. > > FreeDOS itself is not running in protected mode, but every > EMM386 style software must use protected mode (not to be > confused with EMS hardware solutions for old computers) and > Windows in 386 enhanced mode is not compatible with normal > EMM386. Instead, it uses an exotic interface called GEMMIS > to REPLACE EMM386 on the fly. This only works with non-free > versions, for example Microsoft EMM386. The solution is to > use either the Microsoft version or simply not use EMM386. > In some cases, HIMEM and similar drivers can cause similar > problems, but again, you can use the Microsoft drivers :-) > > Microsoft mainly patches DOS when it tries to put it into > a protected mode bubble to be able to run DOS windows in > a Windows session. In standard mode, Windows is more like > a normal program for DOS, which makes things easier :-) > > As described earlier in this thread, you do have to edit > your Windows config AND you have to use special versions > of the FreeDOS kernel to support that bubble wrapping or > patching of FreeDOS for 386enh Windows compatibility. If > Windows can not figure out how to patch DOS, it will give > a similar error message to the already protected mode one. > >> Microsoft demonstrated a means of providing multitasking and 32-bit >> functionality on top of a 16-bit OS through the development of Windows 3.x >> and Windows 9x. If we are able to build a 32-bit subsystem that can utilize >> the device drivers and other existing components of the 32-bit Microsoft >> subsystem (Win32s or Windows 9x) then FreeDOS gains a 32-bit option that >> provides the backwards compatibility that is needed to meet spec. > > Everything that you mention in the previous paragraph is > useful only for graphical Windows software: To summarize, > you really should try Linux with Wine, or ReactOS for it. > > Regards, Eric > > PS: Even running only multiple DOS Windows in Windows is > already something that does need the GUI of Windows, too. > But you can work with DOS "task swappers", as TriDOS :-) > They swap between different (full screen) DOS sessions. > This is not related to how many bits your Windows has. > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
