Op 26-12-2012 11:58, Michael Robinson schreef: > I've been studying Windows 7 verses Windows XP and honestly, it's a toss > up. Both systems are bloated and complex. A ROM based dos system is > more secure than even the typical Linux system and it's going to be > light weight. That's not saying much though, I can't compare Apples to > Oranges and be fair about it.
(cc'ing Kevin in case he's interested, but might be wisest to leave him out of further discussion if replying) I remember Kevin O'Connor demonstrating Coreboot + SeaBIOS + embedded FreeDOS floppy image a couple years ago. This was for some old version of the QEMU emulator program. As coreboot als works on some real hardware (for example http://www.coreboot.org/ASRock_E350M1 ) you can actually build an embedded DOS. Too bad you first have to install a multiple-Gigabytes Linux distro to start compiling this. It can go even further: use the Cache-As-RAM trick and in theory you wouldn't need any memory installed. Assign outermost cache (L2 or L3) as memory and split it between working memory (640K? 2MB?) and video memory (yay AMD APUs!). It would make a nice tech demo. Then again, programmer's time is expensive, RAM isn't. In above experiment, coreboot would then need to decide: * memory installed: do regular thing * no memory present: load FreeDOS floppy img, @ECHO PLEASE INSTALL DIMMS Alternatives were 1 or 2 flavors of storing FreeDOS in a small ROM and have that loaded by your motherboard. Usually requires modifying the system BIOS or flashing the ROM into a network card or storage controller. ( [ http://rayer.g6.cz/romos/romose.htm ] works with Bochs I think) ( never tried http://www.datalight.com/products/rom-dos ) To be fair, Linux likely could also be stored in ROM/flash/eeprom especially with today's large sizes necessary for UEFI. > currently not supported in DOS and one has to take care of that somehow. > I think that running Warcraft II Battle.Net edition on a freedos system > is possible, but there are a lot of pieces to pull together and Blizzard > probably won't offer to help. I'll try to get some PCIe network cards and see if they work with iPXE (network bootloader software) as well as packet drivers. Might start with some Intel card. My preference is to run DOS from a ramdisk, then obtain further software through whatever networked program in DOS. > can't. Even if they make their fundraising goals and can hire > competent programmers to help move the project along faster, > there is no telling when stability will be achieved. Consider it a legally free to redistribute flavor of Windows, instead of an operating system suitable for gaming. The only way I get ReactOS working is by removing all USB devices and booting from ATAPI CD. I don't know how old your systems all are, but old Windows versions should boot fine in Bochs as it's a rather complete system emulator. So: host OS (windows/Linux/OSX) + Bochs + Win9x + game. Bernd ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122712 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
