Hi Ed,
Is there any major differences between FreeDOS and MSDOS under the hood?
FreeDOS aims to be highly compatible with MS DOS, so even if you rely on some "reasonably inner workings" of DOS beyond the normal int 21 interface etc. everything should still work very much the same with FreeDOS. A well-known exception is Windows: If you use 386 enhanced mode or Windows for Workgroups and open multiple DOS windows in parallel, Windows will rely VERY much on deeper inner workings to be exactly as in MS DOS to make this work with DOS, which normally does not run several times in parallel. This only has rather experimental support in newer FreeDOS kernels. Probably no issue for you, though.
I did notice differences in DosBOX as this has the SVGA drivers built in so you can use high definition modes up to 1024x768 in 256 colours iirc.
That is not actually a property of DOS: It is a property of your DOS applications and whether your hardware (or simulation of it, if you run DOS in a DOSBOX window) is compatible with what your applications expect. It also depends on whether your VGA BIOS is compatible with what your application expects. That said, SVGA will work equally well with MS DOS and FreeDOS, because DOS itself does not participate in SVGA infrastructure. SVGA just is something used by your apps, provided by your hardware and BIOS. In exciting related news: There is a new project to create a simulation of a classic Sound Blaster soundcard, figure out what sound it would produce, and then send that sound data to a modern standard HDA or AC97 sound chip which is more likely to exist in your modern real hardware PC than an old ISA slot with an old soundcard. This can be very useful because your old games are likely to hardcode expectations about sound hardware which simply are not met by modern sound chips. So there are no easily swappable drivers and the simulation is a good workaround. Yet again, your old games communicate directly with the real or simulated sound hardware. There are no interfaces for this provided by DOS, so it makes no difference whether you use MS DOS or FreeDOS when it comes to sound in apps. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
