MS DOS 6.x was not the end of MS-DOS. Windows 9x releases added a strange protected mode, but unlike NT, these versions of Windows still ran on top of MS-DOS.
There is no support for DOS based Windows any longer and the ReactOS project essentially abandoned it. However, there are embedded systems that depend on Windows 9x. It would be great if Windows 9x era software could be supported by something open and more stable. Why not replace the graphical system with FLTK and the WIN32API with a special library or something similar? Where Windows 9x comes to mind is on systems that use specialty ISA hardware which never got ported to NT. One system in particular used two servers, Windows 9x on one and MS DOS 6.22 on the other. Given time, I would love to substitute Freedos and see what happens. PPM bought out the Tyco system, but the new system is designed around different hardware with different problems and isn't necessarily better. I don't buy the notion that NT is better than DOS based Windows. A port of Q-Soft to a combination of FLTK and Freedos is very interesting to me. Theoretically, one can reverse engineer to drive the shared memory card in Freedos. Q-Soft is a Windows 32 program, but that could be abstracted out and a different system could be developed that runs in protected mode on top of Freedos. I think Q-Soft has a vxd internal to it, which is crazy IMHO. There should be a driver in device manager for the ISA shared memory card. The idea of a graphical hardware tree is something that would be nice to have in an open source gui that runs on top of Freedos. Even an unofficial service pack for 98se that lets you use more memory and modern hardware would be welcome. Just some thoughts is all. -- Michael C. Robinson
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