Hi Antony, if the goal is only to use Windows driver, then writing a clone of Windows is a high price. Plus it already has been paid, by the ReactOS project. Note that DOS windows in Windows often do not gain from Windows drivers: For example if your soundcard comes with a Windows driver, your DOS games still can not use that, even in Windows.
The exception would be dosemu and dosbox in Linux and, only the latter, in Windows: Those simulate a PC with DOS compatible hardware. They are not just DOS windows. So regarding the balance between gain and effort, the big question is: For WHICH (categories of) pieces of Windows hardware do you want better DOS support? You already say that mouse, keyboard and storage are not enough, so what else? You mention VMware, Parallels and VirtualBox: Those all simulate complete PC hardware, VM aware client drivers there are just to add features, such as the host / client drive sharing for which at least some VMware DOS driver already has been written afaik :-) I remember that the "joystick" category already is known to DOS USB drivers: The problem probably is that many games do NOT use the BIOS calls to query joystick status. Instead, they directly access the joystick port hardware, but that expects non-USB. Again, full hardware simulations can give your DOS game access to non-DOS sound and joystick, but DOS windows in Windows are not enough for that... And a full hardware simulation is not what you are looking for, apparently: You "only want DOS which somehow at the same time is almost Windows, so it can use Windows drivers". To make that really work, you would end up having a lot of Windows plus some PC hardware simulator, which is much more than DOS. For thinking about how small a system could be to combine DOS and sufficient magic to support those pieces of "Windows" hardware you are intersted in, the main question is: WHICH Windows hardware driver categories are you interested in? Regards, Eric PS: Your intuition that using Windows drivers and not Linux drivers for DOS probably comes from DOS and Windows being from the same company. Yet BOTH modern driver ecosystems are totally DOS unrelated. There IS some DOS software with Linux sound drivers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
