Hi Maarten, whether you want to make a GUI shell depends on how happy you are with the existing solutions. Also, it depends on whether you mainly want to make a file manager (various, at least free, sometimes open, solutions already exist) or something where you can run graphical apps. Louis and Jim already sent some pointers about the latter. If you would invent a new GUI for apps, almost no apps would be available for it, so it would not be very interesting...
The same holds for Jose's suggestion to make resident GUI toolkit driver: Most apps simply use existing libraries, so there is no need to invent something new. However, it could be interesting to port frameworks (as has been done for FLTK, maybe SDL) to DOS, making it easier to port apps. https://sourceforge.net/projects/fltk-dos/files/ The current way to run SDL apps in DOS is to use HX RT: SDL only uses a relatively small list of Win API calls. You could also work on supporting a complete existing OS with all apps - this is what HX DOS Extender (limited DOS support for Windows apps), ReactOS and Wine are doing and supporting some of the OS/2 API might give fun as well. Note that your GUI would have nothing to do with FreeDOS in particular. It would simply be an generic DOS app :-) Regards, Eric PS: Related news: www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=14646 On February 16, 2016, ReactOS 0.4.0 (alpha) was released. Changes: "A much requested feature for ReactOS was support for 16bit DOS applications. On Windows this support is provided by the NT Virtual DOS Machine (NTVDM) and the ReactOS implementation of it was first formally released in version 0.3.17. Needless to say since then the ReactOS NTVDM has seen considerable improvement to the point where many of the testers are sharing examples of old DOS games resurrected. And one of the biggest advantages to the way in which NTVDM is implemented in ReactOS is that support for it will continue on non IA-32 platforms, including AMD64 and even ARM." Website: https://www.reactos.org/ Downloads: https://www.reactos.org/download ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=272487151&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
