I realize that VMs are all the rage these days for DOS, but I would also like to see how things work on real hardware. I rarely play games myself any more, but games are usually a pretty good test of compatibility.
The problem is that with real hardware there is WAY more variation than there is with VMs. E.g., the QEMU environment should be pretty much the same no matter what real hardware (or even what real OS) is used. There are less than a dozen VMs (depending on exactly how you classify and differentiate them), but thousands of real hardware variations. Compatibility issues tend to be more on the "background software" side (like EMM386 vs. JEMM, or different types of BIOSes, e.g.) and it can take a lot of experimentation to figure out what issues are related to hardware (or hardware emulation in a VM) vs. software. There's also DOSBox (and DOSBox-X) where both the hardware and the OS (DOS) are virtualized, which is yet another "version" of DOS. I will just say such a compatibility record is certainly a valiant goal, but if it were up to me I'm not exactly sure what the best approach would be -- there are lots of variables to take into account. And for certain issues, there will be "known workarounds" or "known fixes" that will probably need to be kept track of as well. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
