Hi, On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 10:52 PM <mich...@robinson-west.com> wrote: > > Just a thought, some of us have old computers that we want to run freedos on. > Running Linux on a Pentium 4 and trying to run Dosbox on top of that is going > to be pretty have for that machine.
Obviously, but my own Pentium 4 from 2002 (mostly) died many years ago. I was still minimally testing it via floppy and USB (via PLoP boot manager) with some simple networking (via packet driver) a few years ago. But, no offense, hardware is very cheap nowadays, and a P4 is very outdated. I'm totally sympathetic, but we've jumped the shark. No one cares about old machines like that anymore (except luddites like us). Modern computers are way different (ahem, AVX-512). > Some people aren't grabbing a multi core modern computer when they use > freedos. BIOS/CSM will die forever in 2020, allegedly, according to Intel. Luckily, most new machines all have hardware VT-X (EPT) extensions, so we can at least run FreeDOS speedily under VBox or KVM (QEMU) with their fake BIOSes. (I've not tested any CoreBoot / LibreBoot machines nor SeaBIOS payloads, but it presumably works for some limited hardware, according to what I've heard.) > Some of us want to use old computers, 386 anyone? You mean like this? (Don't get your hopes up.) * https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer > Linux won't run on a 286 or XT by the way. ELKS will (or even old Minix 2.0.2), but that's not quite the same. > Modern Linux distributions, don't expect them to work with less than a 1 Ghz > processor > with at least 1 gig of ram. Even worse, actually! Yeah, DOSBox itself needs 1 Ghz just to emulate a "fast" 486 DX2 with (max) 64 MB of RAM. It doesn't go higher than Pentium, which leaves out a lot of "newer" stuff. VirtualBox is better overall, but DOSBox is better for games (that's literally all it's meant for). N.B. I'm not too familiar with VDosPlus or various other forks, but they aim to focus away from gaming towards productivity. > Even the popular arm processors that run Linux, Raspberry Pi 3 and Pi 4, > run at over 1 ghz. Freedos is an OS that works on any ancient PC including > dinosaurs like the veritable 8086. Just saying ;-) Different niches, yes. Both are good in their own ways. Just some have an easier time attracting volunteers. "A poor carpenter blames his tools!" You know there are several Windows 10 laptops running natively atop ARM64 nowadays? And they emulate Win32 [sic] w/ SSE2 (aka, P4) userland software and DirectX (9-12). These are "always on" mobile laptops using phone/mobile data with extremely good battery life (20+ hours). They're using Qualcomm Snapdragon, IIRC. Highly intriguing (as even MSVC has native ARM target support nowadays). Granted, that probably?? doesn't include NTVDM, alas ...! _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
