Hi, sorry for late reply, On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:46 PM, Charles Belhumeur <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks for the reply. Glad some of you see things in a way similar to I. > Remember the OS on the Amstrad Family Computer. I guess that's what I'd > like to see for a user interface for FreeDos. Perhaps a little more grown > up for modern Intel boxes. It was a small tidy GUI style OS.
Would GEM (aka, OpenGEM) suffice? That's a good as a GUI as we've presently got in FreeDOS. > Task > switching but not multi-tasking. Not a lot of code or effort to create that > OS by modern standards. Although I think some of the features were in the > firmware on that box. Brings back the remark one of you made about roll > your own BIOS. Not sure how easy task switching would be. (Usually such a thing is associated with 286s.) Sure, it can be done (a la MS' DOSSHELL), but I'm not sure how feasible it is in FreeDOS stuff without some fancy work. Probably easier to use coroutines (or similar) in specific apps to simulate the same thing. There apparently was a GEM/XM (buggy, unfinished) beta (eventually GPL'd) for DOS that did task switching, but it wasn't ever finalized. Honestly, I'm out of the loop, but I don't know of anyone maintaining (any parts of) GEM anymore. At least I can't seem to find Shane's homepage(s) online anymore. > Ah its all coming back to me now. The Adam Home Computer, the Commodore > 6060 (BASIC OS like the HP Workstations). Man I spent a lot of my life > wrestling with flaky boxes and compilers. Hard to believe I got any other > work done at the various jobs I've worked at. Don't have a lot of patience > left for flaky overcomplicated overreaching OSs and apps. I don't know. Most Linux developers seem to rely on X11. FreeBSD at least comes without X pre-installed. But I'm not sure how much graphical stuff you can do without X11, outside of DOS + VESA, naturally. (Svgalib isn't very popular these days, and Linux framebuffer ... I'm out of the loop, so no idea.) > Could the leftover RAM on a modern box be used for a disk cache or virtual > drive? FreeDos can do this right. I used to create a virtual drive and > then copy my menu app binaries and directory to it at boot. Significantly > improved performance with a disk cache as well on my old 12 MHz 286. I don't know of any decent 286 disk caches for FreeDOS, but yes, many of us use things like Jack's (386+) UIDE for UDMA and disk caching, as well as a RAM driver for (faster reading/writing of) temporary files. Yes, even on modern overpowered machines, it can speed things up a lot. > Just an example of how unused RAM can be used creatively to improve > performance. > There's likely more. Could you write a ghost BIOS, copy it to RAM and then > redirect BIOS calls to it? Maybe not all the BIOS calls, just the required > ones. Writing BIOSs used to a bit of voodoo and a black art dealing with > hardware timing and such. Not a lot of people want to write their own BIOSes. I don't (and couldn't if I tried). So I think that option is probably unlikely to be practical, though indeed a very few have tried and succeeded (in limited form) over the years, e.g. monahan dude, SeaBIOS, Coreboot, or whatever. > Oh wait before I go, there's good reasons you can't divy up gene sequence > files into smaller chunks. Each segment would need header with even more > info than the original header. Bioinformatics is kind of messed up now with > all the wankers focused on the IT and not the biology. All kinds of > needless screwing with file formats, file structures, compression and so on. > (Some wanker got into the game way way way back in the day and we've been > stuck with that Big Endian Small Endian crap ever since.) I refuse to believe you couldn't live with 2 GB files. :-) But what do I know. Just use whatever works, whatever's at hand. I don't expect FreeDOS to cover everyone's need, but it's quite good at what it does (and then some, thanks to some very cool developers and volunteers). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
