Hi!
On Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 2:51 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If you love QPro, fine. If you can still use a DOS system and DOS
> applications to do what you need to do, more power to you. But if you
> can, you are one of a *very* small number of people. The rest of us
> cannot. And if you think there are a whole lot of people Just Like
> You who can (or *want* to) do everything in DOS - enough to make it
> worth while to maintain and sell DOS programs - I fear you are living
> in a dream world. The rest of the world has moved on.
Dennis, remember that we're currently on a DOS mailing list! More
specifically, one about a Free software clone (hi, Oracle!) of
(unsupported) MS-DOS.
You had a very minor point the first thousand times you told us how
obsolete DOS is, but at this point you're just a broken record.
Should we have false hope? No. Is DOS commercially dead? More or less.
At least, MS-DOS is no longer developed, nor is DR-DOS, nor is ROM DOS
(AFAIK). But all of them are still sold online (again, AFAIK).
DOSEMU2 (Linux-hosted) is still being worked upon, and there have been
efforts to port the current FreeDOS kernel to GCC (with 16-bit support
patches). Since that (also) works on x64, the latest efforts should
again continue to prolong the lifetime of DOS programs, which is good
since even traditional BIOS/CSM will "probably" disappear by 2020.
You act like we're trying to bring back Egyptian hieroglyphics! No,
this is functional software (often commercial) that we all used/bought
within our lifetimes. Yes, there are more popular systems (Windows,
Linux, Mac, et al). We already know this. It's like constantly
barraging C developers with "Java Java Java" or "C++ C++ C++". They
don't care, it still works. Maybe a bad analogy since C is still
actively developed (even Fortran and Ada, which are not as popular).
Moreso since FD tries to be binary compatible for old software rather
than source compatible (which itself is not necessarily easy or even
possible in most cases).
"Moved on" ... yes and no. There are still people using ancient
software. One person recently posted a bug report to VirtualBox about
Turbo Pascal 7 (DOS), which got fixed in ultra-latest release.
(Something to do with keyboard, probably not Finnish layout specific.
Silly Finns, what were they ever good for? [sarcasm] Oh yeah, Linux.
[Another brilliant Finn is nicknamed Bisqwit, but he seems totally
disinterested in Pascal these days in lieu of C++11.])
Sure, we all know that such a person should be using Free Pascal
instead, but they aren't! ;-) At least FPC is still source
compatible to {$mode tp}, so it's not an impossible transition, if
ever needed.
You know the original XBox (2001) is also "dead", right? And yet even
MS is porting a few select games from it to its latest XBox One. I've
seen videos on YouTube (John Hancock) of at least two titles: Crimson
Skies, Panzer Dragoon Orta. (IIRC, someone said Sega lost sources to
the Saturn versions, so that rules out easy porting.) In video games,
that was two generations ago, and the current gen is already long in
the tooth. It was always sad how backwards compatibility is thrown
away, moreso in video games. Even the Nintendo Switch doesn't support
anything else directly, but they are porting some games to it (e.g.
Wii U's DKC: Tropical Freeze comes out [again] in May.)
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