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Compatibility woes / deprecation (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 15.02.2009, 20:26

> the main purpose to run it is FPC, something that takes 1-2 mins on a
> Core2 2.4GHZ. VMs are annoying.

VMs are fine, just slower than normal (although VT-X helps, e.g. VirtualBox). BTW, you can't expect everyone to have a Core2, e.g. netbooks.

> On laptops it is even worse, hidden vendor partitions make it
> more difficult. Then how to get ... (binutils, GDB)
> being typically old and odd.
Hidden restore partitions or hidden NTFS pieces (Dell??)?

And actually, tons more OSes have ports of BinUtils than I originally expected. That's why the ridiculous amount of obsolete Emacs stuff scared me. Why delete what isn't broken?

> > Memory limitations? Not in flat model.
>
> DPMI 64MB limit in w9x iirc.
I haven't used Win9x enough to know definitively (maybe -1 or Auto fixes that). DOSBox 0.72 comes pre-configured to 16 MB and can be extended only up to 64 MB max. Even virtualization can typically only use half the total RAM (due to Windows limits). And Win16 was worse, 16 MB max. I think, per DOS box. Kinda strange when even DOSEMU works better than Windows.

To be honest, NT was never exactly DOS-friendly, and I guess it's a more limited rewrite. I guess they never knew how to fix it (and thus didn't care as much). Even Quake 2 was developed for Windows, not DOS (although HX can supposedly run it).

Anyways, for real DOS, you don't have such DPMI memory limits. X32 can use 3 GB, WDOSX and CWSDPMI and PMODE/DJ can use 2 GB, HDPMI32 can use 2 GB (or more??). So blaming Windows' memory limits on DOS isn't fair (although I know what you're saying ... obviously people use and develop on Windows a lot).

> WinME is near 10 years old.
8.5 :-P

> The world has moved on.
No, MS moved on and the world got stuck anyways (although I'm not saying ME was the best ever). Some people here even prefer Win98SE over it.

> The push to
> unicode is massive in Open Source projects.
> The w9x phasing out already started.
I don't think that's why Win9x is less utilized. And Unicode isn't nearly as important in the U.S. (almost entirely monolingual) as in Europe, etc.

> Sure there are ways around (MSLU and the like, and there is even a GNU
> substitute), but that is another DIY job to figure everything out.
MSLU has some weird license (as usual) and the GNU substitute is only half-finished and seems abandoned. Actually, the rewrite is what Firefox used to use, I think.

> No it doesn't, since their stance on user interfaces is totally different
> and they actually lead the way there.
Try "export LANG=eo:en" sometime and see how much is still shown in English. All the interfaces in the world can't get translations. It's because it's not a priority to most people (for good or bad).

> Yes, and PDPs neither. But they are also old and killed off.
But there is no reason to kill off DOS / Win9x / Win2k support that works fine. It's not exactly rare and unknown. That's the whole point!

> > Not true. Win2k was pretty light on resources (comparatively) unlike
> > Vista.
>
> The ratio XP(org)/2k(sp3) was not that different from Vista/XPsp2

Um, I think XP can install in a GB of space, but Vista requires like 16 GB.

> I ran w2k on a 128MB machine, using Outlook,word (2k), Mozilla milestones
> and adobe acrobat. Later when I got 192MB I could even run them
> concurently.
Word, Firefox, and Acrobat are all huge, huge RAM pigs.

> Yes, and 2k (and one more back, NT4 which could run happily with 32MB
> before they brought in IE) were such magnitudes further down. IMHO you are
> idolizing XP. And unfairly so.

I in no way love XP to death. It was worse in many ways to Win9x. And Vista is even worse still in compatibility (not just DOS but Win32 programs as well). Which is bad, really annoying, should've been 100% avoidable.

> For most XP is mainly so great because it
> was their first oasis of stability after w9x.

Whitix is probably pretty stable too, but it doesn't run my apps.

> > And XP -> Vista broke
> > some things ... unlike 2k -> XP,
>
> That's partially true. XP couldn't run some 2k drivers, and there were
> some apps broken early on when run in Themed mode (the early Teletubby
> mode was full of bugs), but it was relatively minor. Still that is not
> what the outrage about Vista (which is IMHO exaggerated) is about.
Vista can't even run all XP drivers. I read somewhere that MS at the last minute broke driver compatibility for some unknown reason. And obviously you're aware that Vista won't run full-screen CMD prompt anymore. So what little gfx support was in Windows has vanished.

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