On Sat, Nov 20, 2021 at 4:52 PM ZB <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Nov 20, 2021 at 10:54:50AM -0600, Jim Hall wrote: > > > I think that's a very narrow view. The reality is that a lot of the > > "classic" (say, '486 or earlier) hardware is hard to find - at least in > > working condition. > > The site: ebay.com > The search phrase: motherboard 486 > The result: more than 10 pages 50 positions each page > > I didn't try "386", "286", "Pentium"... what for? Of course it's NOT that > difficult to find working 486. No problem to get graphics card, sound card > etc. >
And lots of people like to build their own keyboards, yet the vast majority of keyboards in use today are keyboards that someone took out of a box and plugged in. I agree that running on real hardware is great. And if you can do it, you should do it. I have an old Thinkpad laptop that I keep meaning to reinstall with FreeDOS, just to run it on hardware. But I haven't because it's much easier to run FreeDOS in a virtual machine. (It's also much easier for me to record YouTube videos that way.) And clearly, for almost-but-not-quite-100% of use cases (exceptions include Wolfenstein 3D) a virtual machine does the job the same as real hardware. In the survey results of "how do you use FreeDOS" (see email to freedos-devle on July 13 for the results) I shared these survey results: Virtual: ######################################################## [222] Classic: ############################ [112] Recent: ################################################ [190] Modern: ############# [49] But in the follow-up discussion, I suggested the actual number of virtual machines was much higher, and that respondents appeared to misinterpret the question (poor wording in the question?) Even if the results are completely representative, it still suggests a lot of people using a virtual machine to run FreeDOS. Jim
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