David Elliott,
>
> Actually, no. I figured it would be an added bonus assuming there weren't any other
> major obstacles. The main reason is that it would appear to be the right thing to
> do. There is no reason to continue to use an interface that is almost identical
> when there is a perfectly good interface already defined. I am looking to allow
> interrupts to be implemented as a VDD (.DLL basically) so we can seperate out the
> DOS stuff properly. Also, it would have added benefits like allowing you to right
> an ANSI.VDD (or something like that) much like OS/2 did. That might be another good
> place to check for documentation. I did grab the OS/2 VDD kit as well for some more
> background info, it's a tougher read though because IBM tried to do everything
> object oriented (sort of) and even though I like OO programming, I sometimes get
> caught up trying to read descriptions that would just be a lot simpler if they'd go
> out and say it a normal way!
>
Does this change the way that I'll have to write the code for the interrupts
I'm working on? Somebody wanted INT 0x13 and I'm going to do some of 0x10 as
soon as I figure out 8-bit directx. It's meaningless until somebody who knows
how reenables the DOS loader, but I wouldn't like to have people with less free
time than I do wasting effort in this area if we have changes to make.
> Anyway, about implementing this. It would seem that the correct way to do it would
> be to have a program (a modified version of dosmod would probably be the way to
> go) that is a Win32 app that starts a DOS session. We could do away with having to
> pass a CONTEXT86 around everywhere, and instead use a global context. That makes
> implementing all of the get and set register functions pretty trivial. And since
> DOS isn't multithreaded, I don't see any reason for not using a global CONTEXT86
> structure, I mean, it's kind of global on the processor anyway.
>
This seems to be what we're working towards, anyway. Modularity may allow us
to write plug-in modules for single user OS other than DOS.
> I am not planning on all of a sudden writing this whole thing in a day and releasing
> it. The plan is to gradually move to this interface. Any functions that we don't
> need to implement won't be implemented until someone needs the functionality either
> to write a VDD module specifically for Wine, or to use a native one.
>
I'm only getting involved in this discussion to make sure that the new code I,
and others, write will not need rewrites once DOS support is restored.
-Robert 'Admiral' Coeyman
--
http://www.corner.net/admiral/
May you live as long as you wish and age but a single day.
[Telnet to telnet.corner.net]
