Hi, On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 2:11 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > Hi Karen, > >> What discouraged me from using freedos was >> first the "for legacy games use only," suggestion on the site, > > That probably was a while ago: Now I would say this is more > the target audience of dosbox, in particular for Windows.
I think she's referring to the http://www.freedos.org front page, which says this: " What is FreeDOS? FreeDOS is a free DOS-compatible operating system that can be used to play games, run legacy software, or support embedded systems. FreeDOS is basically like the old MS-DOS, but better! " Clearly there were many of us who enjoyed a lot of DOS games back in the day (mostly '90s), e.g. Doom or Warcraft or King's Quest 6. (Windows-only software became more prominent later on, esp. with Win95. Hexen 2, for instance, which is Quake-based, had to be backported to DOS again.) Eric is right about "DOSBox" being "only for games", by design, but that actually doesn't use FreeDOS (or any real DOS) at all. It's strictly a 486 software-only emulator (GPL!) using SDL. It's even portable to non-x86 machines. And that is used by many companies (Gog.com, id Software, Sierra, and many more) to sell their "classic" game compilations for modern systems. http://www.dosbox.com/ FreeDOS is certainly not "only" for games, but it can still run most of them (albeit oftentimes without sound due to modern hardware SB16 incompatibility). >> and second, the lack of attention to native things like USB and >> networking. > > A classic for networking is the realtek rtl8139 chipset: > If you find no DOS driver for your new network chip, you > can always plug a PCI network card with that classic chip. > > When some modern (gigabit-) network chip is not supported > in DOS, all DOS versions are affected, not only FreeDOS. Blame the hardware engineers. Who else would even know how to write a packet driver?? Certainly not me. FreeDOS is stable, free with sources, and compatible, with many available tools and docs. It's not impossibly hard to find out how to program for it. But obviously some things are easier than others. >> Dos is stable, I have been running the package I referenced for many >> years, have found packages like ssh2dos for my networking, and now a fine >> dos usb browser that works. > > I have been wondering if ssh2dos still is useful - I guess > it only supports older protocols and algorithms. I remember > Jack complaining that even the browsers of older Windows (!) > versions do not support TLS: So as SSL 3 is being phased out > for being old and insecure, he can no longer use HTTPS web. No offense to Jack, but he wouldn't even update his web browser, even when several better options exist (for his ancient NT 4.0). I'm not totally sure if that would actually fix his problem, but he refused to even try (that or anything else). I think he really was naive enough to think that SourceForge would "fix their bug". Ugh. So that's the end of him. > I can imagine that ssh2dos and web browsers for DOS have the > problem in even more severe ways. Maybe. But we just don't have enough developers to do much of anything anymore. We're lucky anything still works. >> i use dos exclusively daily for all my computing. >> and still sometimes get the sense here that freedos does not take itself >> seriously enough for me to consider it for my professional needs. > > For you yes: The problem is that people often ask questions > like "why is there no LibreOffice and Firefox for DOS". You > know that there are none. Thanks to various geniuses (esp. Georg), we do have Flwriter and Dillo. Hey, it's far better than nothing, and I don't see anyone trying to do any better! https://code.google.com/p/nanox-microwindows-nxlib-fltk-for-dos/wiki/FlWriter (Eric, you are still a genius too, of course! Not that you need my faint praise.) > They do not, they think there can > be a professional DOS which basically is like Win or Linux, > just "better" in some unknown, magical DOS way. If you don't need compatibility (with DOS or anything else), you can do anything, but you'll have to do it all from scratch. Obviously part of the "problem" with DOS is also the "advantage": extreme compatibility and stable APIs. > For people who really need DOS, freedos is a very nice DOS. That's a huge understatement, but people don't even appreciate what's already here. They just have no imagination. I know I've harped on this saying a billion times, but it's true: "A poor carpenter blames his tools." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
