Hi anonymous Abwesend forum member who is pessimistic about DOS ;-) > Running FreeDOS on real hardware can be challenging.
FreeDOS no, old DOS games yes. > FreeDOS on the other hand is a very old operating system concept. Old concept yes, old operating system no. This means: DOS has no multi tasking and no 64 bit address space, so your modern computer will be bored: Only a single CPU core and at most 3 to 4 GB of RAM can be used inside DOS. Which is of course a lot more than old DOS games ever could imagine. This leads to the next problem: > Running it on modern hardware will very often result in some features > not working correctly. DOS games often required an AdLib or SoundBlaster > audio card. For AC'97 and Intel HD-Audio sound, there are no DOS drivers Old DOS games do not use "DOS drivers" for sound. They could not imagine that games would have any more fancy sound card available than a stereo SoundBlaster. So the games THEMSELVES contain drivers for SoundBlaster. DOS kernel is unable to tell a game that it must use your computer has 7.1 channel surround. This is where DOSBOX and similar special tools comes into play: DOSBOX can show your game a SIMULATION of a SoundBlaster card and capture all sound from that simulation. It can then send the sound to your REAL sound card so you can hear the sound from the front speakers of your surround system :-) Note that you CAN run a modern media player for DOS, which is aware of surround sound cards, to enjoy MP3 & OGG on modern PC. Is there anything else than sound which has problems in DOS on modern hardware, when playing old games written in the 1990s? Note that DOS also does not involve networking in the operating system itself: You may have a DOS web browser which supports a common packet driver interface. The DOS kernel does not care if you have packet drivers or web browsers. So because you will not find a packet driver for your wireless network, the DOS kernel can not help your DOS web browser to use a wireless network. Which other "dozens" of drivers do you miss? Interesting topic! Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What NetFlow Analyzer can do for you? Monitors network bandwidth and traffic patterns at an interface-level. Reveals which users, apps, and protocols are consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity planning reports. http://sdm.link/zohomanageengine _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
