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DUGL Player 1.0 Alpha1 (Announce)

posted by RayeR Homepage, CZ, 01.03.2026, 15:52
(edited by RayeR on 01.03.2026, 16:46)

> yes SMP with DOS isn't easy, as we need to make DOS kernel threading
> aware/reentrant, but a first SMP impementation that just use the other
> cores, and save the state of MMX, XMM registers on thread switch and with
> the constraint to never call DOS/BIOS functions outside a single thread.
> should be doable. let's see.
I don't think that multithreading DOS would be necessary for such application. It's not so complicate to program APIC to start more CPU cores and there is a demo code to do this for many years (by Michael Choudarkis or so?) but there was not real usage in DOS/nobody wanted to mess with it. I think that a video decoding/player is a typical application that can benefit from SMP and if you have time to mess with it can be done. You can offload some computing functions to other cores which wouldn't need to call DOS/BIOS services - this would very simplify things as DOS/BIOS wouldn't need to know that anything else is running on other cores. I think that you just allocate some memory for code and buffers, start some decoding functions on cores and in main thread poll when decoding done. I think that ffmpeg use pthreads or such library so you would need to write some wrapper for it that may be the harder part...

BTW playing youtube would be hell-endless fighting with google anti-downloading. Have a look at youtube downloader project what they have to challenge (e.g. running some javascr*** crap) and how often they need to do some changes to keep it working.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

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