> Well, I tend to disagree with this, but by a semantic question :) > In my opinion, VMM32 and all the VXDs are DOS, not Windows. They sound to > me like the natural evolution of EMM386.EXE. > For me, Windows starts with KRNL386.EXE, not before (or with WIN.COM).
I'm not familiar enough with VXDs but do they for example use the DOS interrupt 21 to open files, or do they call a Windows API? > > at least in the beginning, there existed SCSI drives without Win95 > > drivers where the DOS driver was loaded in CONFIG.SYS. Win95 tried to > > detect these disks by bouncing protected mode INT13 to real mode > > INT13. if this came back unchanged, the 32Bit code was used - as > > intended in the first place. But still 16 Bit drivers had a chance. > > > Interesting, I didn't know this. Any other 16bit stuff that Windows was > forced to use? I recall that you could load any DOS driver in CONFIG.SYS and it would be used by Windows, but Device Manager would report it running in a slow "compatibility mode" and would urge you to get native Windows drivers instead. I think any DOS drivers would do this - e.g. input drivers, but I only ever saw it myself with storage ones such as for ZIP drives. Usually you wouldn't install these as Windows came with native drivers for most hardware but if you used an old installer for Win3.1 it could mistakenly install them. I remember seeing it happen once when I installed a 3.2GB hard drive in a machine where the BIOS didn't support drives that large. The manufacturer's installer required me to put a drive overlay on it (installed in the boot sector) in order to access the disk's full capacity in DOS. Windows ran it in compatibility mode because of that overlay and it wasn't until later I realised that as long as I partitioned it the right way, I could boot off it without the overlay and Windows would access the full capacity with its native IDE drivers. Going back to the original point, I remember finding it interesting how if you booted Win9x natively it pretty much took over the environment and DOS all but disappeared, however if you booted into MS-DOS mode and then ran "win", DOS was still there in the background (just not being used if you had all native Windows drivers). In that case when you chose the option to shut down Windows, instead of getting the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen, it would return you back to the DOS prompt, just the way Win3.1 used to work. I suppose you could use that argument to say it was running on top of DOS, even if it wasn't using any DOS services. By comparison there were DOS programs that would load Linux from a file and boot it, and once you were in Linux it completely replaced DOS and you couldn't exit back to it. I would argue that Linux in that case was not running on top of DOS, even if it was launched from it. Cheers, Adam. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
