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And then there’s another OS: UEFI. Something I recently joked about doing was porting SDL to the UEFI environment and then building DOSBOX for it. I’m sure someone has already done this in some fashion, but the idea was amusing enough for me to genuinely consider it one of these weekends. I guess in that case, though, you can’t really run FreeDOS.
So yeah, I'm thinking horribly broken company process and/or outsourcing without actually making sure the requirements make sense.
What gets me is... what's the point ? If you don't want to fight MS about selling PCs with no OS, ship some Linux distro. DOS was a nice option when you needed to support bare-metal stuff like flashing the BIOS without a modern OS getting in the way, but I would be shocked if that worked here - basically, I can see reasons to ship DOS, but they're all mutually incompatible with a virtual machine. And if you're going…
And that's exactly what they're doing. They just did the bare minimum work to be able to fit that Linux setup under their pre-existing "FreeDOS" SKU. And the real point of that SKU is for sophisticated users to wipe the whole thing clean and set up their own OS install. It still works perfectly for that.
Ghastly.
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Would those apps work inside QEMU though? Is it configured to properly pass through the parallel port?
Maybe, but wouldn’t the customer have to know how to run QEMU? I am imagining a customer who wants to just replace an old machine while changing as little as possible.
And then there’s another OS: UEFI. Something I recently joked about doing was porting SDL to the UEFI environment and then building DOSBOX for it. I’m sure someone has already done this in some fashion, but the idea was amusing enough for me to genuinely consider it one of these weekends. I guess in that case, though, you can’t really run FreeDOS.
Also, don't forget the Minix running inside a small embedded processor inside your processor or platform controller.
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Also, don't forget the Minix running inside a small embedded processor inside your processor or platform controller.
I am sure they will soon find a way to add a hypervisor to Minix so they can add yet another layer to the mix.
Not unlike "Other OS" on PS3. Same theory, different application.
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> modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore This is false. They still can and happily will. Issue is more about vendor not shipping a CSM image. A modern x86 processor will happily run real DOS just fine.
Intel's been threatening to cut off everything non UEFI for a while... I think I read the iGPU in Alder Lake doesn't work unless you're running UEFI? It might not have happened yet, but it seems inevitable.
...which makes me wonder whether it's possible for the community to write one, given how much docs and source code Intel have released for their GPUs. Of course, how VGA-compatible it is is another thing to consider.
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Maybe it is for customers running weird old legacy hardware (e.g., lab devices, manufacturing, that only runs on DOS).
Weird old legacy hardware that only runs on DOS generally requires real-time access to stuff like ISA cards or parallel/serial ports, so this wouldn't work for that use case since the computer doesn't have any of those.