Hi Jim, Alessandro, Jeremy,
Is it possible to know if the next FreeDOS release will be compatible with Windows 3.1, please? I read an article a few months ago and if I am not wrong, I remember that it talked about this feature.
From the email that started this thread: no, this 1.4 release will not include the new kernel that provides Windows 3.11 support. The new kernel hasn't been made available for testing, so we cannot include it yet.
We basically do not include it because it has not been tested and since we do not include it, nobody tests it? That kernel has been, more or less, available for 3 years now: https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/07/27/freedos-running-windows-3-1/ The discussion somehow drifted off to boot loaders this year, to GPT partitions and to whether to use EDR-DOS instead of FreeDOS: https://github.com/FDOS/kernel/issues/50 Some people have created kernel binaries for testing: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27480/how-to-use-start-windows-3-11-with-freedos mentions ECM's build ==> https://pushbx.org/ecm/test/20230805.2/kwin31.zip <== made more than 1 year ago, which should be used with https://pushbx.org/ecm/download/fdshare.zip It would be nice to have newer builds, but that 2023-08-05 build at least is a better starting point than bare sources. Jeremy has included ECM's patch this February, so I assume automated CI builds could include Win31 support since then. However, this is not the default yet, because the Win31 compat needs testing. Which it does not get, because pre-compiled Win31 support FreeDOS kernels are so hard to find :-( See also, for more Win386 hints: https://danielectra.github.io/blog/windows-31-on-freedos Maybe this ticket could get updated again ;-) https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/issue-reporting/-/issues/58 Note that you should probably use HIMEM and optionally EMM386 bundled with Windows, as those have better Windows compatibility. However, they may have worse compatibility with modern hardware. Thanks for the support, ECM :-) Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
