On Sun, Jan 5, 2020 at 8:28 PM <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
Well, kinda. Win3.X ran on top of DOS, and was essentially a multi-tasking shell with protected memory access on top of a DOS FAT filesystem. Win95 still used DOS but added the beginnings of 32bit support through the win32s subsystem. Win98 used DOS as a real mode loader. Once Win98 was loaded and running, it took over all OS functions and DOS was out of the loop for Windows itself, though you could still run DOS applications using it.. WinNT was the first fully 32bit Windows system that did not have DOS under the hood and booted directly to Windows. It *did* support a DOS VM in the form of NTVDM.EXE, and you could run DOS applications in a window under NT. That was preserved through Win2k and WinXP. I believe it still existed under Win7 and later, *if* you were running a 32bit build of Windows. 64bit Windows removed support for 16 bit applications, so you had to run a VM of some sort to use them. > 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? Which embedded systems are you thinking of? <...> > Even an unofficial service pack for 98se that lets you use more memory and > modern hardware would be welcome. I agree wholeheartedly, but who, exactly, will *do* this? The people who *can* do it make their *living* developing software, and the effort involved in doing what you want is significant. I do not see anyone putting in the time and effort on a volunteer hobbyist basis. Want it done? Find a way to pay people to do it, but it won't be cheap. > Just some thoughts is all. > > -- Michael C. Robinson ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
