Hi Michael, > It`s quite problematic to run FreeDOS on modern hardware. > (lack hardware and driver support)
I disagree... For example somebody recently asked me how he could remove a preinstalled FreeDOS from his PC, as he wanted to install Windows. It turned out that his SATA harddisk was supported by BIOS (and DOS) but not by the default install of Windows, so he had to use some driver disk to be able to install Windows on that computer. Keyboard, mouse and harddisk are almost always DOS compatible. If you can boot from it, it is DOS compatible. And USB mouse and keyboard are often supported via some "legacy" BIOS option which makes them look like PS2 mouse and keyboard for DOS. Next aspects are graphics and network: Graphics almost always supports VGA or even VESA VBE BIOS functions, and often has hardware VGA compatibility, so DOS text mode and DOS games should work just fine. Sometimes new functions take too much space and old functions are dropped: A typical aspect is the 8x14 EGA font. Luckily you can load a TSR which contains such a font, so EGA games will work even if your BIOS has no 8x14. Network can be more tricky. Either you get a network card with a classic chip, like Realtek rtl8139, and use a DOS packet driver from crynwr or similar sources for that. Or you check if there is an ODI or NDIS driver for your network card and then you use a wrapper from ODI/NDIS to packet. You should find HOWTOs about this online. Even my current nForce board uses a GBit LAN chip for which official nVidia ODI/NDIS DOS drivers exist. I believe this is because GHOST with network drives is still a popular DOS app and this somehow likes the "network drive" related ODI/NDIS drivers? The CPU and RAM of a modern PC are still trivially supported by DOS. Of course my dual core AMD Athlon64EE (energy efficient, now also available as BE which uses even less energy) is quite under-used in DOS: there are no 64bit calculations in DOS, you cannot use more than 4 GB RAM in DOS, and you can only use one of the cores. But still DOS is happy to run on this hardware. > In the long run emulation will be the way to keep DOS alive. I only agree for one aspect: an emulated soundblaster so old DOS games can play sound while you really have AC97 or HDA :-). There were some discussions about this on the BTTR forum recently: you could use AC97 drivers from MPXPLAY (a DOS media player) or from Linux Alsa-Project and the emulated soundblaster of DOSEMU (or Bochs, Qemu, similar...) to create a DOS "driver" which uses virtualization functions from, for example JEMM386 to trap all access from games to soundblaster, simulate a soundblaster, get all the audio data, and play it using the real AC97 hardware. A similar project already exists from somebody in Russia: > Virtual Sound Blaster is here: >> zap.eltrast.ru/en/dldos.html > VSB sources are here, Assembly: >> cs.ozerki.net/zap/pub/vsb/ (found by Spiro, thanks :-)) www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=3174&page=0&order=time&category=all (this also discusses whether there can be a bounty - we can collect some funds to motivate volunteers to write a JLM sound driver module) Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
