Back to home page

DOS ain't dead

Forum index page

Log in | Register

Search:  
Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view

ARM version of MSDOS (Announce)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 06.11.2022, 17:50

> > I'm not even after 1% binary compatibility. I'm after
> > source code compatibility, and even willing to compromise
> > on that depending on what the question is.
>
> How is source code compatibility for MS-DOS being defined? DOS does not
> even expose a C API. It provides a system interface via interrupts, mainly
> 21H, accessible to X86 machine code. It is that system interface that is a
> main characteristic of MS-DOS and which compiler vendors faciliate to build
> their hopefully at minimum ANSI compatible C libraries around.
Good question.

Step 1 is to define a C interface for MSDOS.

And then have source compatibility with that.

That's my current opinion, anyway. Happy to debate it.

My suggestion for the C interface is this:

https://sourceforge.net/p/pdos/gitcode/ci/master/tree/src/pos.h

But I'm open to negotiation on that too.

Note that Pos* was inspired by OS/2's Dos* which
I thought was neat.

> For my opinion, if you don't provide that interface you may call your
> software a DOS, but not MS-DOS.
When each of those C functions match directly onto
a documented MSDOS interrupt, in my opinion it is
MSDOS. If Microsoft had published that in say 1985,
would you call it MSDOS then?

The fact that Microsoft were slackos is no reason
to invalidate the moniker, in my opinion.

BFN. Paul.

Post reply
 

Complete thread:

Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view
22049 Postings in 2034 Threads, 396 registered users, 119 users online (0 registered, 119 guests)
DOS ain't dead | Admin contact
RSS Feed
powered by my little forum