> while the ability to provide ISA-like DMA for PCI (e.g. sound cards) > or PCIe basically vanished at least 10 years ago, I am less pessimistic > about BIOS services. Can you give specific examples of too stripped > down BIOSes in recent mainboards?
Recent is probably relative here - it has been a good few years since I have tried this - I think around 2016 or so. > Thanks for the NUC warning, but Win98 actually will switch from BIOS > to built-in drivers which are likely not able to cope with new chips. That's what I thought too, but I figured it would at least run in compatibility mode and IIRC the BIOS had options to run the SATA interface in IDE-compatibility mode so I figured my chances were good but alas no. > How about classic DOS on the NUC? Which DOS apps locked up on which > other PC as you have mentioned above, trying to use which features? It has been quite a few years so my memory is hazy but I've only bought Intel boards for quite a few years now so it would've been their UEFI implementation. I definitely remember the NUC - when I ran the Windows 98 installer it said "Detecting hardware" just after the DOS prompt and then froze. I played around with it quite a bit but was unable to get it to progress beyond that point. I guess I could've tried installing it on another PC then transferring it to the NUC and updating drivers but I imagine that would've raised a whole bunch of other issues. I'm really struggling to remember the other issues I had. I seem to remember getting disk corruption when I was playing around with it. I think I had booted off USB and was trying to run the installer off that, so I tried making a small ~1GB partition on the internal disk and copying the installer across but the files didn't copy properly or something because I seem to remember the installer coming up with error messages about corrupted files. I might be misremembering the details, but I just recall thinking that after everything I tried, I was surprised I could get a test Windows 7 installer to run properly on it as I thought the unit was faulty and I'd have to return it. Linux also installed on it just fine which is what I ended up running on it. It's made me wary of using DOS on modern machines so it was quite enlightening joining this group and finding out that there are still modern machines that will run DOS properly, and my experience was apparently an uncommon one. I do like the NUC though and I found that some of their older models list Win98 as supported so I am on the lookout for those models, but even second-hand ones go for surprisingly high prices where I am, and people seem happy with them as they don't come up for sale very often. Cheers, Adam. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
