Hi, On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 6:26 AM Jerome Shidel <jer...@shidel.net> wrote: > > > On May 24, 2020, at 1:39 AM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > > The extremely limited number of > machines out there that can run FreeDOS and don’t have EGA or > better graphics makes this a very low priority.
Didn't Mateusz lightly patch and rebuild FreeCOM for his CGA machine? I think he made a floppy image, too. Wasn't that Svarog86? * http://svarog86.sourceforge.net/ But let's not wear ourselves out too badly on theoretical compatibility. Jerome, you're already doing more than good enough. > Why does Zip support 286, but Unzip needs a 386? The 16-bit Unzip runs out of memory faster and doesn't support LFNs. (DJGPP, FTW!) Other than that, I dunno. > Why keyb need a 286, it’s a keyboard mapper? AT BIOS compatibility needed? > Why does ctmouse need a 286? 286 or 186? Dunno, presumably 186, not pmode stuff. Probably not direly needed. > It was required for most CGA and up games on our old 8086 clone. > It really is a critical driver. I wouldn't call games critical, but I see your point. > Why does FDAPM have no support at all for < 286. Are there any APM BIOSes on older machines? I was surprised that my 2011 Lenovo desktop machine supported it! (RIP CSM.) > Why does dosfsck need a 386? Couldn’t 8088,8086,80186 and 80286 disk have > issues as well? Large FAT32 drives would take a lot of memory. IIRC, it was compiled by DJGPP (386+) and tweaked quite a bit by Eric to be memory efficient. CHKDSK is the older 16-bit tool. (Also, older cpus probably had smaller drives, so less difficult to manually repair or copy, presumably.) > You can’t tell me it needs 32-bit code. I just spent half a day writing > 16-bit 8086 assembler code > to do some manipulation, math and display 64-bit integers. Doing 32-bit arithmetic in 16-bit is easy enough, but doing 64-bit is much harder. There is "some" partial support in some HLL compilers, but overall most people don't even bother. (Obviously ADD/ADC and SUB/SBB are easy.) There's also other outstanding problems, usually, so people often give up. (OpenWatcom has some support, but it also doesn't fully support C99. FreePascal has some int64 support, but few FreeDOS programs use that.) BCD and FPU are yet another ball of wax, ugh. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
