Hi Paolo, (sorry everybody about the long answer... The short answer is "would be nice to have a Wiki page about situations where WfW 3.11 can be made to run, but I still think that this has mostly novelty value only)
> I guess people who commonly use Windows, > and don't feel comfortable with Unix/Gnu-Linux, > and people who used to work with MS-DOS, would benefit You cannot surf the modern web or use modern Office in any version of DOS and you do not have to type any command to do that in any version of Linux either... You can install Win95 style Look and Feel in Linux, as well as tiled GUI and nice retro file managers. GUI is not a feature of DOS at all, so you cannot re- implement that. You can only make DOS compatible to run ancient GUI for DOS and run ancient GUI apps ;-) This would not hurt DOS app compatibility but it will not bring new DOS GUI apps into existence. Plenty of good free GUI apps exist for Linux and for Windows. Interesting that you mention Calmira (Win95 looks for Win3?) while preferring Win3 looks with app icons and without start menu tree anyway? Windows 3.1 and WfW 3.11 have a hard time to run on a modern system even with MS DOS (no LBA, crashes above 256 MB by default and above 1 GB RAM even tweaked...). Very few EMM386 provide GEMMIS, as only Windows needs that, but Windows afaik also ships with MS EMM386 ;-) Or use HIMEM-only configurations and avoid EMM386. Or try whether DPMIONE, 386SWAT and others can help you. The easiest way to run Win3 games today is to tell Wine in Linux to simulate Win3 instead of newer Win. A fun but exotic way would be to install HX RT in DOS and run a few Win3 GUI apps directly in DOS without having Win3 itself. DOSEMU2 on GITHUB has a discussion whether they should bundle HX by default, which is a powerful DOS extender which even implements Win3 API. It would of course be nice to have an up to date Wiki page about how to get Windows to work in 32-bit modes. Our kernel AARD compatibility should be default now. It surprises me that new hardware still ships with NDIS drivers. When in doubt, NDIS and package drivers can be wrapped into each other for use in plain DOS. Having XGA 8-bit graphics is not exactly a feature even if Win9x safe mode is even worse (VGA 4-bit). I basically never see Linux fail to use VESA as fallback, at most I had to tell it not to use experimental 3d drivers if it would otherwise crash those :-p VESA today is true color. Nice that Office 97 Win3 viewers exist or ancient Adobe viewers or MSIE. Yet Office 97 format is rarely used, a plain TXT file in arbitrary encoding can be handled by FoxType and similar with some effort and a GhostScript based PS / PDF viewer today is probably better than old Adobe tools. Pity that you prefer MSIE 5 over Dillo ;-) There are also nicer DOS media players than Win3 ones, same for image viewers. Dunno for catfish & VisualBasic. A GUI ZIP or Totalcommander might be nice, but DOS file managers with GUI and ZIP also exist in many versions. > - There are many nice games designed for windows 3 Some may work in HX ;-) Cheers, Eric PS: There is a Blinky FreeDOS thing for Super Tux Cart? For Linux? Sounds interesting! Where did it come from? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
