Re: [Freedos-user] DOSshell replacement
Hi Eric, True! I forgot of Triple-DOS. (Although I have not tried it myself). Aitor On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 21:42, Eric Auer wrote: > > Hi Aitor, > > the topic reminds me that we have > > > https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/triple-dos/ > > in our archives - it is 20 years old and rather limited, > but it might still provide some inspiration somehow :-) > > Regards, Eric > > > > > Under DOS-Shell, there was the DOSSWAP to do the task switching. But > quite > > a different approach from multitasking, specially the preemptive way > that > > appeared with Win386 (the VMM). > > Unfortunately, for the simplest (and useful) easier uses, I do not know > of > > a free DOSSWAP replacement. I assume that such software would make copies > > of DOS and BIOS global variables (such as the list of lists) and swap > them > > upon a task switch. > > > > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSshell replacement
Hi Aitor, the topic reminds me that we have https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/triple-dos/ in our archives - it is 20 years old and rather limited, but it might still provide some inspiration somehow :-) Regards, Eric Under DOS-Shell, there was the DOSSWAP to do the task switching. But quite a different approach from multitasking, specially the preemptive way that appeared with Win386 (the VMM). Unfortunately, for the simplest (and useful) easier uses, I do not know of a free DOSSWAP replacement. I assume that such software would make copies of DOS and BIOS global variables (such as the list of lists) and swap them upon a task switch. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSshell replacement
Hi, On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 18:21, Bret Johnson wrote: > The first thing I think to note is that DOSShell was MUCH more than just a > program launcher. It include the same basic implementation and > functionality that were in early versions of Windows (3.x) to perform > task-switching. With DOSShell, you could literally have several DOS > applications running at the same time and switch between them with a few > keystrokes. This was similar to other task-switching programs from the > same era, like DesqView and Software Carousel. It sounds like that level > of functionality is not required here. I always found DOSShell to be > "clunky" and even though I experimented with it a little I never really > liked it for what I was trying to do. I personally never tried any of the > other task-switching programs besides DOSShell (and, of course, Windows). > Under DOS-Shell, there was the DOSSWAP to do the task switching. But quite a different approach from multitasking, specially the preemptive way that appeared with Win386 (the VMM). Unfortunately, for the simplest (and useful) easier uses, I do not know of a free DOSSWAP replacement. I assume that such software would make copies of DOS and BIOS global variables (such as the list of lists) and swap them upon a task switch. Aitor ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] dosbox-x update available
> NTVDM Compatibility and quality problems aside, WinNT+'s NTVDM only supports (subset of) DOS programs designed for the standard IBM PC with limited hardware configurations. On the other hand, DOSBox(-X) goes way beyond this, for example, allowing to emulate another full DOS-based PC, running different types of DOS programs and DOS-based Windows. You can for example emulate a PCjr, Amstrad, or NEC PC-98 system, and run programs designed for them, which are simply not possible with NTVDM. This is similar to that running DOSBox-X in DOS itself - you can emulate a DOS system very different from the host DOS and run programs designed for that DOS system. NTVDM is rather basic in such functionalities when compared with dedicated DOS emulators like DOSBox(-X). Wengier On Wednesday, August 17, 2022 at 12:26:51 p.m. EDT, Wengier W via Freedos-user wrote: > The 32-bit WinNT one can't: it's a sort of VM, containing a DOS emulator. > The reason the NT one isn't very good is the reason that NT was a successful > product: because it isolates apps from the hardware, making it more reliable > and allowing SMP and things. The root reason is that WinNT is not DOS based, so it tried to emulate DOS in some way. However, as you also agree that the NTVDM has apparent compatibility problems, so many people sought for better solutions and DOSBox(-X) emerged at the time which worked better for their purposes. I really wonder why you were "puzzled" about such solutions. Many people simply needed a better DOS emulator rather than the emulation that NTVDM provided. > That is nothing to do with the VDM. There was definitely something to do with the VDM, that Microsoft was never interested in seriously working on NTVDM in the (32-bit) XP+ era. For example, XP's NTVDM only provided Sound Blaster 2.0 emulation for sound support. We know how terrible the sound was in SB 2.0 (compared with later sound cards), but Microsoft never provided better sound card emulation in their NTVDM, say SB Pro or SB 16 emulation. People who wanted better emulations had to use 3rd-party products anyway. If Microsoft was more serious in supporting NTVDM, they would certainly provide a better quality solution for NTVDM, such as adapting SB Pro/16 emulation and/or trying to fix the full-screen mode issue in Vista+. However, it was clear that no new functionalities were added to NTVDM by Microsoft since XP, but only reduced functionalities, even if it was well-known that NTVDM had many problems. > It's part of the hardware design and MS has little influence over that. The apparent thing is that Microsoft had no interest in keeping DOS/Windows 3.x support at all in their new products. If they were interested, they could definitely try to develop 64-bit NTVDM for 64-bit Windows releases (similar to NTVDMx64). But as mentioned above, Microsoft had no desire to improve NTVDM even in their 32-bit Windows releases, so it is understandable that they would not have desire to ever work on 64-bit NTVDM for their 64-bit Windows releases. MS had full control over this. Wengier On Wednesday, August 17, 2022 at 06:00:16 a.m. EDT, Liam Proven wrote: On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 01:34, Wengier W via Freedos-user wrote: > > The apparent problems are the compatibility and quality. There are huge > differences between Windows 9x's MS-DOS prompt and (32-bit) Windows XP's > NTVDM. Well, yes. The Win9x DOS prompt is real DOS running on a real DOS kernel which can access hardware. The 32-bit WinNT one can't: it's a sort of VM, containing a DOS emulator. The reason the NT one isn't very good is the reason that NT was a successful product: because it isolates apps from the hardware, making it more reliable and allowing SMP and things. This is akin to complaining that a motorcycle is a bad bicycle because this big heavy engine slows you down. The engine is the point of the exercise. If you don't use the engine then yes it gets in the way. > Even OS/2's MVDM did a much better job than XP's NTVDM in emulating DOS. Yes, it did. But I bought and ran OS/2. Running Fractint for DOS in an OS/2 DOS box, and then picking one of Fractint's extended screen modes, reliable crashed OS/2. It let apps hit the hardware. More compatible, but less stable. You can have one thing or the other. Not both, unless you time-travel 20Y forwards and emulate the entire computer in software. That's very inefficient and that itself offends my sense of elegance. :-) > The NTVDM only got worse with (32-bit) Windows Vista or 7 -- things such as > the full-screen mode were removed from its NTVDM as well. That is nothing to do with the VDM. That is because PCs were all getting 3D cards. Microsoft's devs (and Linux's devs) had no idea what to do with them. Apple's devs were smarter and worked out how to use a 3D accelerator to speed up a windowing desktop: what you do is, you render all the window contents as textures, and then you hand those textures to
Re: [Freedos-user] dosbox-x update available
> The 32-bit WinNT one can't: it's a sort of VM, containing a DOS emulator. > The reason the NT one isn't very good is the reason that NT was a successful > product: because it isolates apps from the hardware, making it more reliable > and allowing SMP and things. The root reason is that WinNT is not DOS based, so it tried to emulate DOS in some way. However, as you also agree that the NTVDM has apparent compatibility problems, so many people sought for better solutions and DOSBox(-X) emerged at the time which worked better for their purposes. I really wonder why you were "puzzled" about such solutions. Many people simply needed a better DOS emulator rather than the emulation that NTVDM provided. > That is nothing to do with the VDM. There was definitely something to do with the VDM, that Microsoft was never interested in seriously working on NTVDM in the (32-bit) XP+ era. For example, XP's NTVDM only provided Sound Blaster 2.0 emulation for sound support. We know how terrible the sound was in SB 2.0 (compared with later sound cards), but Microsoft never provided better sound card emulation in their NTVDM, say SB Pro or SB 16 emulation. People who wanted better emulations had to use 3rd-party products anyway. If Microsoft was more serious in supporting NTVDM, they would certainly provide a better quality solution for NTVDM, such as adapting SB Pro/16 emulation and/or trying to fix the full-screen mode issue in Vista+. However, it was clear that no new functionalities were added to NTVDM by Microsoft since XP, but only reduced functionalities, even if it was well-known that NTVDM had many problems. > It's part of the hardware design and MS has little influence over that. The apparent thing is that Microsoft had no interest in keeping DOS/Windows 3.x support at all in their new products. If they were interested, they could definitely try to develop 64-bit NTVDM for 64-bit Windows releases (similar to NTVDMx64). But as mentioned above, Microsoft had no desire to improve NTVDM even in their 32-bit Windows releases, so it is understandable that they would not have desire to ever work on 64-bit NTVDM for their 64-bit Windows releases. MS had full control over this. Wengier On Wednesday, August 17, 2022 at 06:00:16 a.m. EDT, Liam Proven wrote: On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 01:34, Wengier W via Freedos-user wrote: > > The apparent problems are the compatibility and quality. There are huge > differences between Windows 9x's MS-DOS prompt and (32-bit) Windows XP's > NTVDM. Well, yes. The Win9x DOS prompt is real DOS running on a real DOS kernel which can access hardware. The 32-bit WinNT one can't: it's a sort of VM, containing a DOS emulator. The reason the NT one isn't very good is the reason that NT was a successful product: because it isolates apps from the hardware, making it more reliable and allowing SMP and things. This is akin to complaining that a motorcycle is a bad bicycle because this big heavy engine slows you down. The engine is the point of the exercise. If you don't use the engine then yes it gets in the way. > Even OS/2's MVDM did a much better job than XP's NTVDM in emulating DOS. Yes, it did. But I bought and ran OS/2. Running Fractint for DOS in an OS/2 DOS box, and then picking one of Fractint's extended screen modes, reliable crashed OS/2. It let apps hit the hardware. More compatible, but less stable. You can have one thing or the other. Not both, unless you time-travel 20Y forwards and emulate the entire computer in software. That's very inefficient and that itself offends my sense of elegance. :-) > The NTVDM only got worse with (32-bit) Windows Vista or 7 -- things such as >the full-screen mode were removed from its NTVDM as well. That is nothing to do with the VDM. That is because PCs were all getting 3D cards. Microsoft's devs (and Linux's devs) had no idea what to do with them. Apple's devs were smarter and worked out how to use a 3D accelerator to speed up a windowing desktop: what you do is, you render all the window contents as textures, and then you hand those textures to the 3D accelerator and ask it to render those textures onto flat rectangles on the screen. It's called display compositing, and Apple's implementation is called Quartz Extreme. Microsoft copied it in Vista. The display is a composited 3D scene rendered by the GPU. No frame buffer any more, and no way to switch between full-screen and window any more. Linux did the same, first with Compiz (AFAICR). But in Linux, the GUI is in a separate process from the kernel, so you can still switch back to text mode. Windows can't, because in NT4, Microsoft foolishly moved the GDI, the Graphics Device Interface, into the kernel. After NT4 the kernel is running in graphics mode all the time, and it was only about a decade later that MS realised this was a bad idea and started trying to disentangle them again.
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSshell replacement
I realize I'm a little late to this party, but I've got a couple of comments. The first thing I think to note is that DOSShell was MUCH more than just a program launcher. It include the same basic implementation and functionality that were in early versions of Windows (3.x) to perform task-switching. With DOSShell, you could literally have several DOS applications running at the same time and switch between them with a few keystrokes. This was similar to other task-switching programs from the same era, like DesqView and Software Carousel. It sounds like that level of functionality is not required here. I always found DOSShell to be "clunky" and even though I experimented with it a little I never really liked it for what I was trying to do. I personally never tried any of the other task-switching programs besides DOSShell (and, of course, Windows). Many of the suggested alternatives are really designed as file managers, which you can also be used to start programs by "selecting" an appropriate executable file and having the file manager "shell out" and start running the executable. Some of them have a more "advanced" menu system where you have a special list of programs where the file manager knows where the appropriate executable file is so you don't need to "look for" the executable file yourself (DOSShell had this also). I remember using an old program called Pop-Up DOS which was basically a simpler version of the more advanced modern file manager programs. Pop-Up DOS came bundled with some versions of the Logitech mouse drivers (if you bought a Logitech mouse Pop-Up DOS came included on the disk with the mouse drivers). Even though I don't use it myself (I prefer the command-line), I developed a menu system that simply uses a batch file and some DOS utilities (like ANSI and CHOICE). I also use a couple of my utility programs, SCANCODE to automatically select the "Screen Saver" from the menu if nothing is selected for a long time and MOUSKEYS to enable use of the mouse to select things instead of just the keyboard. I can create a ZIP file with the main MENU.BAT file and some of the utilities if anybody is interested. You configure/customize the Menu by editing the batch file so it's less "automated" than some of the other options (though you could have one of the menu options set up to edit the MENU.BAT file with your favorite text editor). One advantage to using a batch file is that it provides more free memory than a regular executable since it doesn't need to "shell out" to execute another program. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] dosbox-x update available
Hello, On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 12:00, Liam Proven wrote: > On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 01:34, Wengier W via Freedos-user > wrote: > > > > The apparent problems are the compatibility and quality. There are huge > differences between Windows 9x's MS-DOS prompt and (32-bit) Windows XP's > NTVDM. > > Well, yes. The Win9x DOS prompt is real DOS running on a real DOS > kernel which can access hardware. > Not actually. It may access the VxD virtual devices that do the real hardware access in 32-bit, and are able to coordinate "multiple DOSes" acceeding the same hardware (including "Windows", that is running in DOS VM0). > The 32-bit WinNT one can't: it's a sort of VM, containing a DOS emulator. > > The reason the NT one isn't very good is the reason that NT was a > successful product: because it isolates apps from the hardware, making > it more reliable and allowing SMP and things. > Actually translating BIOS and DOS calls to an OS that is not on the DOS line, therefore doing not as good as VMM32.VXD (aka DOS386.EXE in previous versions) and all its VxDs did in Windows 9X. > Win64 drops 16-bit support. DOS is a 16-bit OS. It went along with > 16-bit Windows support, no more and no less. > I think this is more realistically the real problem (not the graphics). After all, we could still manage with DOS in a box, even if you can't switch to full screen. Aitor ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] dosbox-x update available
>> The apparent problems are the compatibility and quality. There are huge >> differences between Windows 9x's MS-DOS prompt and (32-bit) Windows XP's >> NTVDM. > Well, yes. The Win9x DOS prompt is real DOS running on a real DOS > kernel which can access hardware. Well, no. The Win9x DOS prompt is protected mode DOS running on a protected mode DOS kernel that allows your program to access hardware as if it were in real mode. thats no the same. Tom ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] dosbox-x update available
On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 01:34, Wengier W via Freedos-user wrote: > > The apparent problems are the compatibility and quality. There are huge > differences between Windows 9x's MS-DOS prompt and (32-bit) Windows XP's > NTVDM. Well, yes. The Win9x DOS prompt is real DOS running on a real DOS kernel which can access hardware. The 32-bit WinNT one can't: it's a sort of VM, containing a DOS emulator. The reason the NT one isn't very good is the reason that NT was a successful product: because it isolates apps from the hardware, making it more reliable and allowing SMP and things. This is akin to complaining that a motorcycle is a bad bicycle because this big heavy engine slows you down. The engine is the point of the exercise. If you don't use the engine then yes it gets in the way. > Even OS/2's MVDM did a much better job than XP's NTVDM in emulating DOS. Yes, it did. But I bought and ran OS/2. Running Fractint for DOS in an OS/2 DOS box, and then picking one of Fractint's extended screen modes, reliable crashed OS/2. It let apps hit the hardware. More compatible, but less stable. You can have one thing or the other. Not both, unless you time-travel 20Y forwards and emulate the entire computer in software. That's very inefficient and that itself offends my sense of elegance. :-) > The NTVDM only got worse with (32-bit) Windows Vista or 7 -- things such as > the full-screen mode were removed from its NTVDM as well. That is nothing to do with the VDM. That is because PCs were all getting 3D cards. Microsoft's devs (and Linux's devs) had no idea what to do with them. Apple's devs were smarter and worked out how to use a 3D accelerator to speed up a windowing desktop: what you do is, you render all the window contents as textures, and then you hand those textures to the 3D accelerator and ask it to render those textures onto flat rectangles on the screen. It's called display compositing, and Apple's implementation is called Quartz Extreme. Microsoft copied it in Vista. The display is a composited 3D scene rendered by the GPU. No frame buffer any more, and no way to switch between full-screen and window any more. Linux did the same, first with Compiz (AFAICR). But in Linux, the GUI is in a separate process from the kernel, so you can still switch back to text mode. Windows can't, because in NT4, Microsoft foolishly moved the GDI, the Graphics Device Interface, into the kernel. After NT4 the kernel is running in graphics mode all the time, and it was only about a decade later that MS realised this was a bad idea and started trying to disentangle them again. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-confirms-minwin-is-in-windows-7-after-all/ It only applies to server versions and it's only partial. > Meanwhile, 64-bit Windows XP (or higher) never had NTVDM in the first place. On x86, 64-bit Windows runs in x86-64 mode. x86-64 does not have VM86 any more. It has been removed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_8086_mode#64-bit_and_VMX_support Basically you have to run a full VM, or emulate it. > Clearly, Microsoft was trying to gradually eliminate the existence of DOS > from its Windows releases. It is not "clear" at all. It's part of the hardware design and MS has little influence over that. Remember, x86-64 is not even an Intel design: it is from AMD. Win64 drops 16-bit support. DOS is a 16-bit OS. It went along with 16-bit Windows support, no more and no less. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
