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ReactOS 0.3.17 alpha (Emulation)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 23.11.2014, 21:48

> > > Changes: "A major new feature for this release is the inclusion of
> > > NTVDM,
>
> Not yet much usable. Well, it's a start. :-)
Indeed, I think we all got our hopes up for 99% compatibility when clearly they were just proud to have anything! Hey, "something" is always better than nothing.

If I had to guess, their priorities are probably more focused on overall stability (which isn't even quite 80% yet), then Win32 fixes (for popular programs like modern web browsers), then secondary stuff like NTVDM.

Wengier:
"The primary reason I am interested in ReactOS's NTVDM is that there
is no NTVDM in 64-bit versions of Windows any more so that I need a
replacement to run under Windows x64 (which is the main system I am
using)."

It's almost a lost cause. MS has better things to do. The closest you get from them is Hyper-V (Win8 Pro x64 with advanced VT-X [nested page tables / POPCNT] only), but that clearly is focused 99% on modern Windows and (barely) some enterprise-y Linux (and their website doesn't seem to mention older partial support for FreeBSD at all). Hyper-V (since 2008) seems to be moreso a competitor to cloud companies and VMware than anything else. Even VirtualPC seems to be abandoned since 2011. In fairness, MS probably thinks home users will just use third-party tools (VirtualBox, DOSBox) anyways.

No, I don't think ReactOS NTVDM will ever be well-supported on Win64, but who knows? I think you're expecting too much from them. I think VirtualBox (with Intel Nehalem 2010 VT-X) is as close as you're going to get, for now. (Or just dual boot, but that has its own problems.)

RayeR:
"I think that for old 16b apps is dosbox good enough but for some
latest 32b PM games and demos it's still slow. Did something changed
on dosbox to better utilize multiple cores? or some new vtxx
instructions? that could help boost performance."

DOSBox is very slow, yes. It needs 1+ Ghz just to reach "fast 486" speeds. It's only for old games, not everything else. If you want more, you may do better to use DOSEMU under Linux (although even that, AFAIK, doesn't use VT-X). The goal of DOSBox was to be portable, so it doesn't have much x86 hardware support (no V86 mode, no VT-X). Heck, they haven't had a proper release in over four years. Who knows if GCC (or MSVC or whatever) has improved enough since then to show any speedups. Feel free to recompile it yourself and test (yeah right, I probably wouldn't). Actually, I heard that a 64-bit build was slower than a 32-bit one. Gotta love the 64-bit hype that "everything is faster" (yes, I personally blame you, MarcoV, heheh). It uses SDL 1.2, which I don't think?? is multi-threaded although it may?? offload the audio to a separate thread (don't quote me!). No idea when or if "core=dynamic" works the way we expect. Honestly, it's just not meant for anything besides old games, and they've clearly accomplished their goal, so I blindly guess they don't care as much anymore or have better things to do. Even ReactOS NTVDM seems mostly motivated by trying to get old games working.

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