On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 2:47 PM, <userbeit...@abwesend.de> wrote: > Original message from Eric Auer, 2016-06-18 19:14: >> Hi anonymous Abwesend forum member who is pessimistic about DOS ;-) >> >>> Running FreeDOS on real hardware can be challenging. >> FreeDOS no, old DOS games yes. > > No offence, FreeDOS is of course a modern project. But DOS is an old > conpect for an operating system. > >>> FreeDOS on the other hand is a very old operating system concept. >> Old concept yes, old operating system no. This means: DOS >> has no multi tasking and no 64 bit address space, so your >> modern computer will be bored: Only a single CPU core and >> at most 3 to 4 GB of RAM can be used inside DOS. Which is >> of course a lot more than old DOS games ever could imagine. > > DR DOS had a multitasker.
MSDOS could do a limited form of multi-tasking. The PRINT command installed a resident portion that did time-slicing, and could allocate clock ticks to spool print jobs in the background while the user continued to work in the foreground. This was a boon to early word processor users, who didn't have to twiddle their thumbs while the document they just sent to the printer finished printing before they went on to the next one. IIRC, analysis of what the PRINT command did spawned the whole notion of terminate and stay resident programs, that also installed themselves as resident extensions to DOS. Development of that approach resulted in Desqview, which was essentially a multi-tasking shell on top of DOS. So, for that matter, was Windows through 3.X, that was booted from DOS. I never ran DR-DOS, but I believe its multi-tasker used the same approach. Digital Research also had a variant called Concurrent DOS, originally based on their Concurrent CP/M-86 product. Wikipedia has a writeup on the various approaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS > 2. I don't know if there is one, but a CPU throttling driver would be a > good thing. One that supports Intel (Enhanced) SpeedStep and AMD > PowerNow!/Cool'n'Quiet. Reading the ACPI tables would be required. > Turning off the remaining (unused) CPU cores would reduce power > consumption and enhance the thermal situation. There is a long established application called TameDOS that does that, and is still sold and supported. The problem it addresses is that early DOS programs assumed they were the only thing running on the PC and had exclusive access to the hardware. They were not written to gracefully surrender unused time slices. One thing later DOS applications used to mention was being "DesqView aware", and able to cooperate with DV's time slicing, and this was the sort of issue TameDOS addressed. See http://www.tamedos.com/ There's a fork of DOSBox called vDOS, specifically intended for running old DOS character mode business applications under Windows. I have an assortment of old DOS apps up under vDOS on a 64 bit Win10 machine. TameDOS is useful for folks doing that so the DOS app they are running doesn't max the CPU core the DOS session is running in. ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What NetFlow Analyzer can do for you? Monitors network bandwidth and traffic patterns at an interface-level. Reveals which users, apps, and protocols are consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity planning reports. http://sdm.link/zohomanageengine _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
