I may add a few commentes: Video allways work with vesa, never had a problem
Network qorks 90% of the time. There is a disk NETBOOTDISK that installs a PacketDriver that works on most machines (using NDIS2). I just had to write a small batch file to copy the configured files do C: so that they can called later. SATA are fine allways, only a bit slow because we don't have a DMA driver. SATA usialy are 5MB/s, IDE are 6MB/s and IDE+UDMA are 36MB/s I don't use sound... Alain Eric Auer escreveu: > 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
