> A Virtual Machine for the rest of us is something like VMWare, Qemu, > VirtualBox, etc. - something that simulates a real machine. You > load a real operating system in it and the operating system > generally doesn't know or care that it's actually in a simulation.
So "the rest of us" is _everybody_ but me? And you consider BIOS software that never existed in a real machine to be part of a "simulated real machine" but DOS software that never existed in a real machine to be something different? Would you consider something like PTS-DOS (which in some ways is less compatible with MS-DOS than is DOSBox) a real DOS? There is definitely a terminology problem, but it seems to me that the problem is inconsistency even within the same person. > Those other environments are not virtual machines. They are DOS > emulators or different versions of DOS. They are not any form of a > virtual machine. Then what do you call the overall category of "virtual environments that let you run DOS applications?" That's what users are concerned about -- how the implementation works behind the scenes is irrelevant. Do you really believe a _user_ would call DOSBox something other than a Virtual Machine (or Virtual DOS Machine), or would perceive that DOSBox and QEMU are not the same "kind" of thing (or at least that they are not trying to accomplish the same goal)? I know developers need to distinguish between the different kinds of environments, but users don't. > ... > I wouldn't even think to try to look for the InDOS flag on something > like DOSBox. Why would you _expect_ it to not be there? I must admit that I'm not completely surprised it doesn't exist in DOSBox, but it is something very fundamental to how DOS works (and related to the fact that DOS is neither multitasking nor re-entrant). It _should_ be there in anything that even pretends to be compatible with DOS. What I'm probably going to end up doing is trying to detect whether the InDOS flag is there or not (which may not be very straightforward) and just tell the user they're screwed. I could also offer the user the option to install anyway, but that's probably a bad idea. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
