The easiest way to support Windows 9x software would involve evolving FreeDOS
into the 32-bit era, most likely via a kernel upgrade.
Hmm, I seem to remember there being some little project aiming to do that... lol
But yes, I agree it would be nice to have the option to run some older GUI
programs under our favorite OS.
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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, January 5, 2020 8:27 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.
>
> 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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