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ARM version of MSDOS (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 19.01.2024, 01:02

> When I have DOS binaries already, I would not recompile them for another
> processor type. Even for open source DOS binaries, I would be too lazy,
> given that you can run existing DOS and/or PC emulators on ARM-based
> operating systems which also emulate a classic x86 CPU.

Given that most "open source" apps are a pain in the neck to recompile (if not downright impossible), I don't blame you. It takes a surprising amount of work to make things easy for end users (but it's worth it, IMHO).

I've wondered about bytecode / p-code lately. Usually it's slower, but it's at least neutral. Maybe compiling to bytecode for redistribution then the end users can optionally recompile to native code with localized tools. (No, I don't mean LLVM.)

> Note that DOS apps do not usually need much CPU speed,
> so the emulation speed loss is no big problem.

I disagree with this. I've seen significant slowdown with software emulation (and bugs). For "normal" apps it's okay. But there are a lot of apps which are painfully slow (e.g. DJGPP, but often even 16-bit is slow as molasses). Fast emulation is possible, but few care.

However, MS emulates x86 (and x64?) apps on ARM64 Windows, so it's not a bad idea. (Supposedly they also support DirectX 9-12.)

> Of course you would save some energy by using apps compiled for native ARM,
> but then I would already have many native Linux or other apps for ARM in
> that case and again no need for a special DOS version running natively on
> ARM itself.

IBM is one of the biggest businesses in the world and commercially supported DOS for over 20 years. It's not so much times changed: people changed. It's more their personal taste than raw technical requirements.

> Of course tastes may differ and I remember that porting FreeDOS to other
> processors has already been a topic many years ago, so you can expect that
> your target audience does exist, but I myself do not expect it to be large.

DOS/NT (predecessor to DOS-C) ran atop 68k processors for a client, right? But it was very limited. Full MS-DOS portability is harder for other architectures (needing some emulation).

 

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