[ros-dev] (Free)DOS subsystem

[ShadowFlare]

On 8/29/06, fd0man™—The Magical Floppy Man <fd0man at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 19:34 -0600, ShadowFlare wrote:
>
> Hmm, I'm not sure if it is really even necessary to directly support DOS
> programs.  One thing I thought of that I should mention here is that
> Microsoft doesn't even support DOS programs at all with their latest Windows
> versions (Windows XP and Server 2003 x64 Editions).  However, that isn't
> really a problem since there are alternatives to Windows' DOS support (which
> wasn't really even that great in some ways in Windows 2000 or XP to begin
> with anyway).
>
> I don't know why, but for some reason I'm thinking it would just kind of
> be a waste of time to implement NTVDM for ReactOS if the developers working
> on it would be able to work on other parts of ReactOS.  Hmm, it might be at
> least somewhat worthwhile to work on a NTVDM alternate that could run on
> both ReactOS and Windows (possibly even x64 editions), though.
>
> Well, just my opinions on the matter.
>
> -ShadowFlare
>
>
> Doesn't NTVDM also handle WOW (Windows on Windows) sessions with 16-bit
> Windows applications?  I seem to recall when I worked at AT&T having (quite
> a few) applications that the only way they could be killed was to kill NTVDM
> and another process (old[something]app or something?) and then restart the
> application.  In any case, there are still quite a bit of software
> applications that are available online that would make use of these types of
> subsystems—and it would be nice, I think, to continue supporting something
> that Microsoft does not, and improve upon it, because that would just be
> another point in favor of getting people to use free software.  Right?  :-)
>
>     — Mike
>

Heh, I still think that an actual NTVDM implementation might not necessarily
be the best solution, though.  Well, if it could run on x64 editions of
Windows then it would be fine, but if it couldn't, then that's why I was
suggesting an alternative.  Of course, the alternative still wouldn't have
to be just for DOS programs either, it could also be for 16-bit Windows
applications as well.

Hmm, if there could be an implementation with no kernel-mode code or at
least something that could somehow work when running AMD64 CPUs in a 64-bit
OS, then that would be a good thing to work toward.  Then if ReactOS was
later made to support the API for Windows x64, then it could have 16-bit app
support, while Microsoft's 64-bit OS doesn't. :)

-ShadowFlare
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