61–70 of 136 posts
All that's left now is SDL for UEFI, and then all our games can run in a pre-OS environment.
What's the latest with Intel's Management Engine / Minix that runs on every Intel chipset? Is that still a thing? Did they harden it? Or can you still get access? https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...
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Well… UEFI is kind of modern DOS.
It certainly is not.
Uhm... excuse me? Why? Is there anyone even using DOS for anything serious these days?
Most computers in Turkey come with FreeDOS preinstalled because there's a law that states all computers must be sold with an operating system. FreeDOS turns out to be the cheapest and easiest. That's why you don't let people who have never touched a computer write tech laws. You get results like this.
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Welcome to Amiga games, in many cases the floppy would contain the boot loader that would directly jump into the game. At least on the Amiga 500 you would not go through the trouble to start Workbench, only to load the game, unless you were a lucky owner of an external hard drive.
I recall many IBM-PC games are bootable games. I inserted a floppy , resets the computer, and then it directly boots into the game. The disk must contain a boot sector and drivers and such.
At least on my circle for doing the same with PC games, we built the floppies ourselves, then again, it could be a side effect that you could hardly buy any legal games in Portugal during those days, even regular shops would sell pirated games as originals.
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I basically had this setup back in the day. I don't really know how I ended up with it, I was 7 at the time and none of it was intentional - but my bootloader had two entries: I could boot into Windows 98, or I could boot into Worms.
It's a similar idea, but that's a DOS menu. At the point when the menu appears, MS-DOS 7.1 has already been loaded.
I realize this is basically doing docker for DOS games and incredibly stupid, I'm just curious about the thought experiment
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What do you mean by "BIOS chip"? Like, the flash memory that stores the motherboard's firmware? I don't think that contains any processing elements.
BIOS can only manage VESA which is much much slower than the capabilities of a modern GPU, so they might have meant graphical performance in regards to that.
UEFI GOP additionally supports accelerated bitblt, but again YAGNI for 2D game performance at reasonable framerates on a modern PC.
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Who said anything about "serious"? (FWIW: I suspect there are more than a few old industrial control systems and such out there that are still running DOS, just because of an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude)
My brother is in manufacturing. DOS is everywhere . Older things too (PDP-11? DG Nova? Seen both, semi-recently). Not just because "ain't broke, don't fix", but because when you have a cloth dying machine or brick forming machine you spent >US$5M for, that is often a bespoke install for your plant, you don't replace it because some guy who prolly slings Javascript all day sez "DOS is oooold, boomer".
This is an especially funny screenshot as DosBOX itself is built on SDL.
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It's a similar idea, but that's a DOS menu. At the point when the menu appears, MS-DOS 7.1 has already been loaded.
Stupid question but... would bundling the binary with an ASM port of something that could run this technically make it possible to run without the OS? I realize this is basically doing docker for DOS games and incredibly stupid, I'm just curious about the thought experiment