> The 32-bit WinNT one can't: it's a sort of VM, containing a DOS emulator.
> The reason the NT one isn't very good is the reason that NT was a successful
> product: because it isolates apps from the hardware, making it more reliable
> and allowing SMP and things.
The root reason is that WinNT is not DOS based, so it tried to emulate DOS in
some way. However, as you also agree that the NTVDM has apparent compatibility
problems, so many people sought for better solutions and DOSBox(-X) emerged at
the time which worked better for their purposes. I really wonder why you were
"puzzled" about such solutions. Many people simply needed a better DOS emulator
rather than the emulation that NTVDM provided.
> That is nothing to do with the VDM.
There was definitely something to do with the VDM, that Microsoft was never
interested in seriously working on NTVDM in the (32-bit) XP+ era. For example,
XP's NTVDM only provided Sound Blaster 2.0 emulation for sound support. We know
how terrible the sound was in SB 2.0 (compared with later sound cards), but
Microsoft never provided better sound card emulation in their NTVDM, say SB Pro
or SB 16 emulation. People who wanted better emulations had to use 3rd-party
products anyway. If Microsoft was more serious in supporting NTVDM, they would
certainly provide a better quality solution for NTVDM, such as adapting SB
Pro/16 emulation and/or trying to fix the full-screen mode issue in Vista+.
However, it was clear that no new functionalities were added to NTVDM by
Microsoft since XP, but only reduced functionalities, even if it was well-known
that NTVDM had many problems.
> It's part of the hardware design and MS has little influence over that.
The apparent thing is that Microsoft had no interest in keeping DOS/Windows 3.x
support at all in their new products. If they were interested, they could
definitely try to develop 64-bit NTVDM for 64-bit Windows releases (similar to
NTVDMx64). But as mentioned above, Microsoft had no desire to improve NTVDM
even in their 32-bit Windows releases, so it is understandable that they would
not have desire to ever work on 64-bit NTVDM for their 64-bit Windows releases.
MS had full control over this.
Wengier
On Wednesday, August 17, 2022 at 06:00:16 a.m. EDT, Liam Proven
<lpro...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 01:34, Wengier W via Freedos-user
<freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>
> The apparent problems are the compatibility and quality. There are huge
> differences between Windows 9x's MS-DOS prompt and (32-bit) Windows XP's
> NTVDM.
Well, yes. The Win9x DOS prompt is real DOS running on a real DOS
kernel which can access hardware.
The 32-bit WinNT one can't: it's a sort of VM, containing a DOS emulator.
The reason the NT one isn't very good is the reason that NT was a
successful product: because it isolates apps from the hardware, making
it more reliable and allowing SMP and things.
This is akin to complaining that a motorcycle is a bad bicycle because
this big heavy engine slows you down. The engine is the point of the
exercise. If you don't use the engine then yes it gets in the way.
> Even OS/2's MVDM did a much better job than XP's NTVDM in emulating DOS.
Yes, it did. But I bought and ran OS/2. Running Fractint for DOS in an
OS/2 DOS box, and then picking one of Fractint's extended screen
modes, reliable crashed OS/2.
It let apps hit the hardware. More compatible, but less stable.
You can have one thing or the other. Not both, unless you time-travel
20Y forwards and emulate the entire computer in software. That's very
inefficient and that itself offends my sense of elegance. :-)
> The NTVDM only got worse with (32-bit) Windows Vista or 7 -- things such as
>the full-screen mode were removed from its NTVDM as well.
That is nothing to do with the VDM. That is because PCs were all
getting 3D cards. Microsoft's devs (and Linux's devs) had no idea what
to do with them. Apple's devs were smarter and worked out how to use a
3D accelerator to speed up a windowing desktop: what you do is, you
render all the window contents as textures, and then you hand those
textures to the 3D accelerator and ask it to render those textures
onto flat rectangles on the screen.
It's called display compositing, and Apple's implementation is called
Quartz Extreme.
Microsoft copied it in Vista. The display is a composited 3D scene
rendered by the GPU. No frame buffer any more, and no way to switch
between full-screen and window any more.
Linux did the same, first with Compiz (AFAICR). But in Linux, the GUI
is in a separate process from the kernel, so you can still switch back
to text mode. Windows can't, because in NT4, Microsoft foolishly moved
the GDI, the Graphics Device Interface, into the kernel. After NT4 the
kernel is running in graphics mode all the time, and it was only about
a decade later that MS realised this was a bad idea and started trying
to disentangle them again.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-confirms-minwin-is-in-windows-7-after-all/
It only applies to server versions and it's only partial.
> Meanwhile, 64-bit Windows XP (or higher) never had NTVDM in the first place.
On x86, 64-bit Windows runs in x86-64 mode. x86-64 does not have VM86
any more. It has been removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_8086_mode#64-bit_and_VMX_support
Basically you have to run a full VM, or emulate it.
> Clearly, Microsoft was trying to gradually eliminate the existence of DOS
> from its Windows releases.
It is not "clear" at all. It's part of the hardware design and MS has
little influence over that. Remember, x86-64 is not even an Intel
design: it is from AMD.
Win64 drops 16-bit support. DOS is a 16-bit OS. It went along with
16-bit Windows support, no more and no less.
--
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
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