Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS as a everyday/common-use system; Pros of making FreeDOS and Windows3 more compatible

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 7:02 PM, Paolo Vincenzo Olivo  wrote:
> Thank you for your answer Ruxgulo but I think I've been misunderstood in some
> parts, where I admit I may not have made myself clear
>
>> Just get a cheap Chromebook, if you need all these modern niceties.
>
> As I mentioned, I personally do not "need" all those niceties, but I was
> stating that it would have been better if they were available; I know what
> Windows and Linux are capable of, and I've already seen what a Chromebook
> can do.  I'm not demanding from FreeDOS to be Windows or Linux, but I just
> wanted to share my experience with FreeDOS (as I have some more spare time
> in those summer days), and possibly give some good hints and feedback :).

I just meant that "modern" software (Windows or POSIX [Linux or OS X])
isn't minimal in its dependencies, and it doesn't try to support niche
or "legacy" OSes anymore. Heck, a P4 is considered bare minimum these
days, and many people want to drop IA-32 kernels entirely.

So you're expected to buy a "cheap" Chromebook and exclusively use
only "modern" software, if at all possible. So, if anything, the
hardware lives shorter than the software these days, but at least it's
cheaper to buy than ever. (But talk is cheap, and forcing someone to
upgrade perfectly-working hardware just for software reasons is
considered insincere and annoying.)

I'm just saying, in this spoiled world, you'll get no sympathy for
running DOS and only barely any sympathy for running virtualized under
a "modern" OS. (Developers / geeks are just not sympathetic to old
tech.)

It doesn't mean we few here can't try to improve things, even with a
thousand little paper cuts, but it's tough to survive when nobody
sympathizes or tests or writes patches.

"Just use Linux!!!1" (whether you like it or not, resistance is futile!!)

> The day I would be able to open youtube or see a movie with mplayer from a 
> zsh shell,
> I believe I'll never install a desktop environment again.

I believe some already do this, even in DOS!

>> If you use VBox or QEMU (atop Linux), you don't have to look far to
>> find a working packet driver.
>
> I don't doubt it, but I don't see the point of using internet in QEMU, atop
> Linux. If you booted linux, then you just need to open links, epiphany, or
> firefox.

The point is that you *must* use emulation to support a packet driver
if modern hardware (overwhelmingly) isn't supported. There are some
drivers that work natively, but overall DOS is abandoned and
unsupported.

Sure, Linux has lots of ports, but that doesn't mean you can use (or
write) DOS versions instead. It's a starting point, an unavoidable
obstacle, not necessarily an end goal.

>> I doubt it's there already. He probably wants us to add it.
>
> As I said, Blinky is available among supertuxkart among characters.

Cool, that's good to know.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS as a everyday/common-use system; Pros of making FreeDOS and Windows3 more compatible

[Louis Santillan]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 2:53 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
[SNIP]
> On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 9:20 AM, Paolo Vincenzo Olivo  
> wrote:
[SNIP]
>> Anyway, as clearly stated on FreeDOS home page, the purposes for ever 
>> installing it are in fact
>> legacy softwares, dos-games, and embedded systems. I'm sure this comes from 
>> some sort of
>> survey carried out among FreeDOS users. In light of that, I bet as well that 
>> the idea of making
>> a "modern version" of a MS-DOS\Dr-DOS\CP/M-86 like system (maybe 32 bit, 
>> multitasking,
>> real-mode, with modern software compatibility), was dropped after having 
>> seen what people
>> really needed, which was a true old-school dos, running on newer hardware, 
>> being able to be
>> burnt on a USB flash-drive and to be installed even without a floppy disk.
>
> There are not enough active developers to make such big changes.
> Multitasking might be nice, but in light of things like DOSEMU, it's
> unnecessary. Also, 32-bit isn't necessary in light of things like
> (CWS)DPMI. Now, that doesn't mean the kernel couldn't (somehow) be
> massaged to build with GCC (as 386+ real-mode), but it "probably"
> wouldn't gain much in speed. The only reason to do that would be to
> remove the dependency on OpenWatcom (which is disliked in the Linux
> and GNU communities).
[SNIP]

It's more possible than ever [0] to compile the kernel with GCC.
Skeeto/Chris Wells posted [1][2] an example of compiling 16-bit code
with djgpp/GCC, including a linker script for linking 386+ real mode
code into a 64KB COM.  Chris may have used a pre-4.9.x gcc [3] and/or
pre-binutils-2.18 [4].  It now appears gas is also able to speak
i8086, i186, i286 and can even generate correct, pure 16-bit mode
instructions (no i386 opcode prefixes) [5] if given the correct
directives (which appears to be `.code16gcc` in gas and the argument
`-m16` to gcc).

Yes, it would be a large under taking but maybe a long term worthwhile
goal as OW has seem to lost a bit of steam.


[0] http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/16bit/
[1] http://nullprogram.com/blog/2014/12/09/
[2] https://github.com/skeeto/dosdefender-ld31
[3] 
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.9.4/gcc/i386-and-x86-64-Options.html#i386-and-x86-64-Options
[4] 
https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.18/as/i386_002dOptions.html#i386_002dOptions
[5] https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.18/as/i386_002d16bit.html

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS as a everyday/common-use system; Pros of making FreeDOS and Windows3 more compatible

[Paolo Vincenzo Olivo]

> We can't rest on our laurels. We need to be open to obvious 
> improvements. 

This is a high-minded, wise way of talking I hadn't heard in a while. One
point to you, deserved

(But I'm not talking about stupid multimedia stuff or 
> anything overkill like that. I'm thinking much more reasonable goals.) 

I know that there many more important things to care about, and that there
aren't neither many developers, nor much free time to develop anything for
anyone. I suspected it to be a bit childish or, at least secondary to any
project regarding any way to improve FreeDOS in what it currently does and
does not, so I was prepared to receive such an answer. 
Anyway It was just an idea I wanted to share about what I thought FreeDOS to
be missing. There are indeed many other ideas and projects to carry out, but
I saw that those things were somehow a work in progress, while I felt dthose
aspect were being left behind..now I know why, thank you for this

>> Multitasking might be nice disliked in the Linux 
and GNU communities)>>. 

As I said, I agree that these are not viable options

 
> Win95 (aka, MS-DOS 7.1) had FAT32 support.
I know, but its really easier to find a working copy of FreeDOS than one of
Win95 or  simple MS-DOS 7.1.  I do not own any of these and albeit being
likely available on some legacy software site, like winworld pc, they would
be, for experience, only for  50% of likelihood working.

> Do you mean licensing or just simplicity? For the latter, the easiest 
> way is virtual machines / images. 

I was talking of both indeed :). However I was speaking of installing a
pocket system on a USB drive (not burning the installer, but installing the
system itself and make it bootable) and boot it on every machine you use and
you actually do not own. Or even boot it using your own computer if you do
not want to have a dedicated partition for that OS. 
Using Virtual Machines would require the host computer to have a virtual
Machine installed (and there aren't many), and, in addition you'de be forced
to use a reduced resolution if guest additions were not available for that
OS, and to bring all the iso you need to mount (with all files and programs)
with you.

> Small size is good, but better is compatibility, which Kolibri 
> somewhat lacks. Better are systems 
> that allow you to download / install (or better still, rebuild) 
> various third-party apps. 

Agreed, at the end, a good OS, is most of times an OS with the least
compatibility issues.

> GUI is irrelevant. It may be somewhat more convenient, but it improves 
> almost nothing else (e.g. raw functionality). 

Speaking of DOS, I agree with you. The fact I was talking about a GUI in
DOS, was due to the possibility of adding the softwares I mentioned (after
having read  and understood those replies, I admit they're not worth the
struggle), as well as the important advantage of making it more
user-friendly



> I disagree. Honestly, much could be done to improve it. Heck, it's got 
> free sources! But most people aren't developers, and most developers 
> are too busy with other priorities (or just too lazy) to care about 
>"old" DOS. 

Glad to hear that XD


>MS Word has a billion different formats, so it's a crapshoot on what 
> format you'll need to support. I haven't tried all the various DOS 
> converters, but surely some can handle some things appropriately. I 
> don't think relying on old, proprietary Win16 is the answer here. 
> Surely it depends on the situation, but there's many workarounds 

> Presumably you want Blocek (editor) if you want to edit Unicode in >
> DOS. (Or maybe Mined or GNU Emacs.) 


> XPDF will convert to text. And there are some GUI viewers that will 
> jump to page. I don't know if any is truly perfect, but at least we 
> (barely) have "some" support. 

Thanks for those tips


> I know it's cheap to keep saying, but hardware is so cheap these days 
> (and Linux so mature) that you will get derisive looks if you attempt 
> to use DOS with (bloated, incompatible, overkill) PDFs. "Just get a 
> Chromebook!" is probably the simplest solution. 

> Unless you're running an old 486, then you "probably" can handle Linux 
> (although I'll admit that anything other than Firefox or Chrome is far 
> from perfect, and those two can eat lots of RAM if you're not 
> careful). 

I've been a Linux user for a very long time, and I'm very satisfied of it.
Here i was posting some others Ideas I had gathered with the passing of
time, since apart from music and sports my next favorite hobby is to have
fun and mess with my computer during spare time (and sometimes beat about
the bush on forums like I'm doing now). I didn't want to steal any precious
time on that mailing list and I apologize for that. I know there's better
software out there, but it was just a matter of fancying out workarounds for
people who are really determined to run DOS for those purpose in 2017,
instead of waiting for free software that is never going to be  

Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS as a everyday/common-use system; Pros of making FreeDOS and Windows3 more compatible

[Paolo Vincenzo Olivo]

Thank you for your answer Ruxgulo but I think I've been misunderstood in some
parts, where I admit I may not have made myself clear 

> No Javascript support is one obvious omission. But "modern" web (HTML 
> 5, etc) practically demands Firefox or Chrome anyways. Just get a 
> cheap Chromebook, that's probably your simplest answer, if you need 
> all these modern niceties. 

As I mentioned, I personally do not "need" all those niceties, but I was
stating that it would have been better if they were available; I know what
Windows and Linux are capable of, and I've already seen what a Chromebook
can do.  I'm not demanding from FreeDOS to be Windows or Linux, but I just
wanted to share my experience with FreeDOS (as I have some more spare time
in those summer days), and possibly give some good hints and feedback :). 

> If anything, I'd say GUI is worthless, it doesn't (usually) add any 
> power or any extra features at all. So you don't really "need" it. But 
>I  guess it looks nice and is simpler to use

I prefer command line, and use it every time I can. On FreeDOS I mostly do
not launch a GUI. If I do it is windows, and it is to launch windows' exes.
Someimes I set OpenGEM in autoexec.bat, because I want to save a little time
with by pointing and clicking. 
I use FreeBSD on my desktop and on a old laptop, alongside FreeDOS,
Archlinux on another laptop, and installed Slackware on my father's one. In
none of those cases GUI is enabled by default and I prefer to run Xorg or
Wayland at need. However there are obvious things a command Line will never
replace a GUI for and there's nothing to argue about that. The day I would
be able to open youtube or see a movie with mplayer from a zsh shell, I
believe I'll never install a desktop environment again.

One reason for which I spoke about windows3 is that its not just a GUI for
DOS. 
The other is that I feel that many people are not eager to try FreeDOS
because they're have never seen a CLI and are somehow scared of it. I
believe that one of the main goal of a free software is to reach the largest
community possible, obviously trying to avoid to distance itself too much
from its native structure, targets and guidelines. Provided I were to write
a free software, I would be proud if more people had installed it, or if
anyone would have made a new, different use of it, without altering my own
work. Keeping my target in mind, i would have written it in a way it would
affect the largest audience possible.
In that way, It's a pity that some people buy a pc with FreeDOS installed
and prefer to delete that 1 Gb partition, because they do not know what they
could do with it, they do not know how to set a dual-boot, and, what's more,
they have to look on youtube to be told how to select a boot device on their
UEFI because "FreeDOS has ruined their optical drive and now their pc is
unable to read window's installation disk".
Currently all free OSes and software that are worth an hardware installation
(thus excluding for me Haiku, ReactOS, Darwin, Syllable, FreeOS etc..) are
Unix-like systems and most of them is whether Linux or Android. This means
If I want something free it is Unix or nothing. Do not take me wrong, I love
Unix and Linux, and I would go with it forever. But I imagine that someone
might not like it as I do, and that's when  other things like FreeDOS come
in handy.  
So my post was mainly focused on possible solutions for other people who are
willing to try a freesystem and want to break out of the Linux environment.
My goal was to argue whether FreeDOS would fare well or not as a portable
desktop, everyday-use, system, without the need of moving it away from its
roots. I'm not here to say if Linux can replace every single thing it does,
and if can do it better.
So many people just ask GUI and some basical applications to do their work. 

>* http://www.mevis-research.de/~ritter/awakeideas/desktop.html
>* https://sourceforge.net/projects/fltk-dos/?source=navbar

Thanks very much for the two links provided. I knew Desktop2 but thought it
to be not available in English. I think I've both of them a try ;)


> If you use VBox or QEMU (atop Linux), you don't have to look far to 
> find a working packet driver. 

I don't doubt it, but I don't see the point of using internet in QEMU, atop
Linux. If you booted linux, then you just need to open links, epiphany, or
firefox. 

> I doubt it's there already. He probably wants us to add it. 

As I said, Blinky is available among supertuxkart among characters.  All
characters (and subsequently karts) in the games are inspired to a free/open
source project's mascotte. You can find Blinky among the addons (simply
clicking on the addons panel to download it, or you can download it from
official web site, and put it in a folder in the game addons subdirectory,
under the name 'Blinky').the destination folder is for me (on FreeBSD):
~/.local/share/supertuxkart/addons/karts 
I usually invite two friends to come to my place, and play 

Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS as a everyday/common-use system; Pros of making FreeDOS and Windows3 more compatible

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

Just to add (more) $0.02 

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 9:20 AM, Paolo Vincenzo Olivo  wrote:
> Hello there FreeDOS community,
> I've been a FreeDOS user for 3 years so far, and I'd like to thank the 
> developers
> for their effort and their amazing job.

They've accomplished very very much, and it works very very well.
Indeed I'm grateful, but there's still tons more to do.

We can't rest on our laurels. We need to be open to obvious
improvements. (But I'm not talking about stupid multimedia stuff or
anything overkill like that. I'm thinking much more reasonable goals.)

> Anyway, as clearly stated on FreeDOS home page, the purposes for ever 
> installing it are in fact
> legacy softwares, dos-games, and embedded systems. I'm sure this comes from 
> some sort of
> survey carried out among FreeDOS users. In light of that, I bet as well that 
> the idea of making
> a "modern version" of a MS-DOS\Dr-DOS\CP/M-86 like system (maybe 32 bit, 
> multitasking,
> real-mode, with modern software compatibility), was dropped after having seen 
> what people
> really needed, which was a true old-school dos, running on newer hardware, 
> being able to be
> burnt on a USB flash-drive and to be installed even without a floppy disk.

There are not enough active developers to make such big changes.
Multitasking might be nice, but in light of things like DOSEMU, it's
unnecessary. Also, 32-bit isn't necessary in light of things like
(CWS)DPMI. Now, that doesn't mean the kernel couldn't (somehow) be
massaged to build with GCC (as 386+ real-mode), but it "probably"
wouldn't gain much in speed. The only reason to do that would be to
remove the dependency on OpenWatcom (which is disliked in the Linux
and GNU communities).

> So, since there's plenty of good modern and even free OSes out there, the 
> only reason for
> FreeDOS to be still developed is to one thing and do it well: to be a 
> powerful DOS with many
> enhancements, an active community and a good support.

It can overlap, it doesn't have to be unique. Rust, Haskell, C++, Java
aren't all needed by every single developer, but people still use
them.

Obviously the two big advantages to FreeDOS are freedom and compatibility.

> I can confirm that, I would never exchange FreeDOS with MS-DOS, whereas there 
> would be too
> many things I'd miss: starting from FAT32 support,

Win95 (aka, MS-DOS 7.1) had FAT32 support.

> passing through the FreedDOS additions (the drivers, jemm, wcd, 
> shsucd*,xfdisk, ntfs, fdapm,
> nnansi, unzip, foxtype, devload, dos /32a, swsubst, and many others)to all 
> the UNIX-like utilities
> (dosfsck, touch, tar, sleep, wget, du, lynx, the ports/repository system, 
> clamav, the syslinux
> bootloader, freemacs, alpine, grep,etc).

Most (or all) of these are not FreeDOS specific. AFAIK, they will also
run on any compatible DOS. But yes, many of them came from (erstwhile)
FreeDOS developers. But I don't think many of them are actively
maintained either.

> The reason that brought me about to start that thread is to discuss about 
> another possible
> employment of FreeDOS: a pocket, portable system for everyday use; and that's 
> mostly what
> I've been using it for in the latter year. I'm a Medicine student, and 
> personally I like carrying
> my own system with me wherever I go, especially in case I decided not to brig 
> my laptop with
> me. It's good to have all of your files on a USB bootable drive, so that you 
> can boot in your
> operating system, with all the programs you feel comfortable with, a system 
> you can feel free
> to mess with, without (mostly) worrying about the machine you're currently 
> running it on (and
> that's all the more true with University's computers, libraries' and internet 
> points' ones,
> computers of relatives and friends that contain important work and files).

Do you mean licensing or just simplicity? For the latter, the easiest
way is virtual machines / images.

> There are many other portable OSes available for that purpose on the Web, 
> many of which I tried
> out throughout years: TinyCoreLinux, PicoBSD, DamnSmallLinux, PuppyLinux, 
> KolibriOS, Minix
> and others. KolibriOS is in the best in terms of stability, system 
> requirements, speed, boot time,
> space occupied (insanely small); however, it's a lone standing system, which 
> means you have to
> accept it the way it is, with anything aside from the few softwares provided. 
> Hence I'd say Tiny
> Core Linux is best, and it's the one I used almost always, if not for PicoBSD 
> before it died out.

Small size is good, but better is compatibility, which Kolibri
somewhat lacks. Better are systems
that allow you to download / install (or better still, rebuild)
various third-party apps.

> As I mentioned I recently started adopting FreeDOS as my portable OS. The 
> reasons why I
> ended up choosing it include the possibility to bring my dos-games with me, 
> the fact I'm really
> fond of FreeDOS, its reliability and speedy boot. 

Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS as a everyday/common-use system; Pros of making FreeDOS and Windows3 more compatible

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 10:30 AM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> (sorry everybody about the long answer... The short
> answer is "would be nice to have a Wiki page about
> situations where WfW 3.11 can be made to run, but I
> still think that this has mostly novelty value only)

There's nothing stopping someone from fixing any remaining
compatibility issues with FreeDOS, but overall it's not been a
priority for most developers. It's just too old (and non-free,
proprietary, buggy, wimpy, etc).

You can probably only find it on MSDN (Subscriber Downloads or
whatever) or eBay. But it's very niche, very obscure these days. I
wouldn't bother (without a very good reason, too much other stuff to
do!).

I'm told that DOSBox can run Win 3.x, but I never tried.

>> I guess people who commonly use Windows,
>> and don't feel comfortable with Unix/Gnu-Linux,
>> and people who used to work with MS-DOS, would benefit
>
> You cannot surf the modern web or use modern Office
> in any version of DOS and you do not have to type any
> command to do that in any version of Linux either...

No Javascript support is one obvious omission. But "modern" web (HTML
5, etc) practically demands Firefox or Chrome anyways. Just get a
cheap Chromebook, that's probably your simplest answer, if you need
all these modern niceties.

> You can install Win95 style Look and Feel in Linux,
> as well as tiled GUI and nice retro file managers.
>
> GUI is not a feature of DOS at all, so you cannot re-
> implement that. You can only make DOS compatible to
> run ancient GUI for DOS and run ancient GUI apps ;-)

If anything, I'd say GUI is worthless, it doesn't (usually) add any
power or any extra features at all. So you don't really "need" it. But
I guess it looks nice and is simpler to use:

* http://www.mevis-research.de/~ritter/awakeideas/desktop.html
* https://sourceforge.net/projects/fltk-dos/?source=navbar

> This would not hurt DOS app compatibility but it will
> not bring new DOS GUI apps into existence. Plenty of
> good free GUI apps exist for Linux and for Windows.

There's nothing wrong with good ol' "cmdline" apps (if you can find
them). As long as they do the job, who cares about a flashy interface?

> The easiest way to run Win3 games today is to tell
> Wine in Linux to simulate Win3 instead of newer Win.

I honestly don't know if Chromebooks intend to support such emulation.
There are kludges (chroot?), but I'm not sure of the details. Though
that would help tremendously if you could easily install such things
(and QEMU, etc).

> A fun but exotic way would be to install HX RT in DOS
> and run a few Win3 GUI apps directly in DOS without
> having Win3 itself. DOSEMU2 on GITHUB has a discussion
> whether they should bundle HX by default, which is a
> powerful DOS extender which even implements Win3 API.

I seriously hope they don't include it. It's not "free/libre", and I
thought they were intending to "fix" the "old" DOSEMU issue of things
like that. But maybe it's too much work to fix.   :-(Good luck
getting any Linux distros on board, they are extremely picky.
(Honestly, we need to do a better job of using "Free" tools overall.)

> It surprises me that new hardware still ships with NDIS
> drivers. When in doubt, NDIS and package drivers can be
> wrapped into each other for use in plain DOS.

If you use VBox or QEMU (atop Linux), you don't have to look far to
find a working packet driver.

> Nice that Office 97 Win3 viewers exist or ancient Adobe
> viewers or MSIE. Yet Office 97 format is rarely used, a
> plain TXT file in arbitrary encoding can be handled by
> FoxType and similar with some effort and a GhostScript
> based PS / PDF viewer today is probably better than old
> Adobe tools. Pity that you prefer MSIE 5 over Dillo ;-)

There are several ways to view PDFs in DOS, but none is perfect.

Not to take the cheap way out, but honestly I think PDF is
overengineered and uselessly complex. Honestly, people shouldn't rely
so heavily on it and should focus on simpler formats.

> There are also nicer DOS media players than Win3 ones,
> same for image viewers. Dunno for catfish & VisualBasic.

Yes, various tools exist (Dugl Viewer, SEE, DISP, QuickView, Mpxplay),
but again nothing is perfect.

> A GUI ZIP or Totalcommander might be nice, but DOS file
> managers with GUI and ZIP also exist in many versions.

DOS Navigator? Doszip?

> PS: There is a Blinky FreeDOS thing for Super Tux Cart?
> For Linux? Sounds interesting! Where did it come from?

I doubt it's there already. He probably wants us to add it.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS as a everyday/common-use system; Pros of making FreeDOS and Windows3 more compatible

[Eric Auer]

Hi Paolo,

(sorry everybody about the long answer... The short
answer is "would be nice to have a Wiki page about
situations where WfW 3.11 can be made to run, but I
still think that this has mostly novelty value only)

> I guess people who commonly use Windows,
> and don't feel comfortable with Unix/Gnu-Linux,
> and people who used to work with MS-DOS, would benefit

You cannot surf the modern web or use modern Office
in any version of DOS and you do not have to type any
command to do that in any version of Linux either...

You can install Win95 style Look and Feel in Linux,
as well as tiled GUI and nice retro file managers.

GUI is not a feature of DOS at all, so you cannot re-
implement that. You can only make DOS compatible to
run ancient GUI for DOS and run ancient GUI apps ;-)

This would not hurt DOS app compatibility but it will
not bring new DOS GUI apps into existence. Plenty of
good free GUI apps exist for Linux and for Windows.

Interesting that you mention Calmira (Win95 looks for
Win3?) while preferring Win3 looks with app icons and
without start menu tree anyway?

Windows 3.1 and WfW 3.11 have a hard time to run on a
modern system even with MS DOS (no LBA, crashes above
256 MB by default and above 1 GB RAM even tweaked...).
Very few EMM386 provide GEMMIS, as only Windows needs
that, but Windows afaik also ships with MS EMM386 ;-)
Or use HIMEM-only configurations and avoid EMM386. Or
try whether DPMIONE, 386SWAT and others can help you.

The easiest way to run Win3 games today is to tell
Wine in Linux to simulate Win3 instead of newer Win.

A fun but exotic way would be to install HX RT in DOS
and run a few Win3 GUI apps directly in DOS without
having Win3 itself. DOSEMU2 on GITHUB has a discussion
whether they should bundle HX by default, which is a
powerful DOS extender which even implements Win3 API.

It would of course be nice to have an up to date Wiki
page about how to get Windows to work in 32-bit modes.
Our kernel AARD compatibility should be default now.

It surprises me that new hardware still ships with NDIS
drivers. When in doubt, NDIS and package drivers can be
wrapped into each other for use in plain DOS.

Having XGA 8-bit graphics is not exactly a feature even
if Win9x safe mode is even worse (VGA 4-bit). I basically
never see Linux fail to use VESA as fallback, at most I
had to tell it not to use experimental 3d drivers if it
would otherwise crash those :-p VESA today is true color.

Nice that Office 97 Win3 viewers exist or ancient Adobe
viewers or MSIE. Yet Office 97 format is rarely used, a
plain TXT file in arbitrary encoding can be handled by
FoxType and similar with some effort and a GhostScript
based PS / PDF viewer today is probably better than old
Adobe tools. Pity that you prefer MSIE 5 over Dillo ;-)

There are also nicer DOS media players than Win3 ones,
same for image viewers. Dunno for catfish & VisualBasic.

A GUI ZIP or Totalcommander might be nice, but DOS file
managers with GUI and ZIP also exist in many versions.

> - There are many nice games designed for windows 3

Some may work in HX ;-)

Cheers, Eric

PS: There is a Blinky FreeDOS thing for Super Tux Cart?
For Linux? Sounds interesting! Where did it come from?


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[Freedos-user] FreeDOS as a everyday/common-use system; Pros of making FreeDOS and Windows3 more compatible

[Paolo Vincenzo Olivo]

Hello there FreeDOS community,
I've been a FreeDOS user for 3 years so far, and I'd like to thank the 
developers for their effort and their amazing job.
The reason I first looked out for a free/open source version of DOS, was that, 
being a retrogamer, I had grown up tired of dosbox and wanted to have a real 
DOS system to run all my games and possibly, the old programs I owned back in 
the 90s when I was a child and had a pc with MS-DOS 5.0 atop of it (as well as, 
later on, another pc with Windows ME).  

Anyway, as clearly stated on FreeDOS home page, the purposes for ever 
installing it are in fact legacy softwares, dos-games, and embedded systems. 
I'm sure this comes from some sort of survey carried out among FreeDOS users. 
In light of that, I bet as well that the idea of making a "modern version" of a 
MS-DOS\Dr-DOS\CP/M-86 like system (maybe 32 bit, multitasking, real-mode, with 
modern software compatibility), was dropped after having seen what people 
really needed, which was a true old-school dos, running on newer hardware, 
being able to be burnt on a USB flash-drive and to be installed even without a 
floppy disk.
So, since there's plenty of good modern and even free OSes out there, the only 
reason for FreeDOS to be still developed is to one thing and do it well: to be 
a powerful DOS with many enhancements, an active community and a good support.  

I can confirm that, I would never exchange FreeDOS with MS-DOS, whereas there 
would be too many things I'd miss: starting from FAT32 support, passing through 
the FreedDOS additions (the drivers, jemm, wcd, shsucd*,xfdisk, ntfs, fdapm, 
nnansi, unzip, foxtype, devload, dos /32a, swsubst, and many others)to all the 
UNIX-like utilities (dosfsck, touch, tar, sleep, wget, du, lynx, the 
ports/repository system, clamav, the syslinux bootloader, freemacs, alpine, 
grep,etc).

The reason that brought me about to start that thread is to discuss about 
another possible employment of FreeDOS: a pocket, portable system for everyday 
use; and that's mostly what I've been using it for in the latter year. I'm a 
Medicine student, and personally I like carrying my own system with me wherever 
I go, especially in case I decided not to brig my laptop with me. It's good to 
have all of your files on a USB bootable drive, so that you can boot in your 
operating system, with all the programs you feel comfortable with, a system you 
can feel free to mess with, without (mostly) worrying about the machine you're 
currently running it on (and that's all the more true with University's 
computers, libraries' and internet points' ones, computers of relatives and 
friends that contain important work and files). 
There are many other portable OSes available for that purpose on the Web, many 
of which I tried out throughout years: TinyCoreLinux, PicoBSD, DamnSmallLinux, 
PuppyLinux, KolibriOS, Minix and others. KolibriOS is in the best in terms of 
stability, system requirements, speed, boot time, space occupied (insanely 
small); however, it's a lone standing system, which means you have to accept it 
the way it is, with anything aside from the few softwares provided. Hence I'd 
say Tiny Core Linux is best, and it's the one I used almost always, if not for 
PicoBSD before it died out.

As I mentioned I recently started adopting FreeDOS as my portable OS. The 
reasons why I ended up choosing it include the possibility to bring my 
dos-games with me, the fact I'm really fond of FreeDOS, its reliability and 
speedy boot. I guess people who commonly use Windows, and don't feel 
comfortable with Unix/Gnu-Linux, and people who used to work with MS-DOS, would 
benefit from trying FreeDOS as a pocket system. On youtube videos talking about 
FreeDOS, FreeDOS reviews online, I saw many comments of people trying to use it 
as everyday OS. Many argued about the lack of good GUI and criticized the fact 
OpenGem was no more installed by default (it's a one minute work though). 
Others looked disappointed after failing at making their optical drive 
available (I had a similar problem with a sata drive,though I worked it out 
loading gcdrom.sys and setting Native IDE mode on bios; I guess for most of 
those people it is just a matter of switching between AHCI and IDE mode, and 
letting UDVD2 d
 o the rest of the job).  
Undoubtedly it would have been great if FreeDOS were a more modern, up to date, 
2017 reimplementation of DOS; however as we discussed above, this unlikely ever 
to happen, as if that's was the case, FreeDOS would lose  its very reason of 
development, and, nonetheless, as Eric Auer told me, its simplicity and 
retro-compatibility would be gone, alongside its speed. 

I think that using windows 3.1 or 3.11 in enhanced mode would be enough to make 
FreeDOS more user-friendly and more likely to be a very good choice when 
dealing with everyday task involving a computer (see below why). It's true that 
windows 3 is not freeware nor shareware, but it's arguably the most