[GEM Development] Liam Proven! DOS in VirtualPC

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 9 Dec 2017, Liam Proven wrote:

> On 9 December 2017 at 17:00, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
>>
>> I did specify both Microsoft and IBM... if there's anything they want to
>> omit, well, there's probably not enough that it would be all that difficult
>> to replace. :P
>
> But someone would have to go through and remove all that. And those
> someones, because it'd need a big team of experts, would need to be
> given a comprehensive list of everything that had to come out -- which
> doesn't exist.  Or they'd need to sit with MS programmers, only those
> MS programmers are long gone or moved on to senior positions.
>
> And then, when they were done in this impossible-to-arrange task, they
> couldn't work on the result, because they would know the offending
> code, so they couldn't re-implement it cleanly. So you'd need
> virtually everyone in the world who could do this, and afterwards,
> they could never work on it again.
>
> So, doubly impossible.
>
> This assumes that there are clear lines between MS code and non-MS
> code. Which I doubt there are, or ever were. So it's triply
> impossible.
>
> So there are 2 outcomes:
>
> [1] MS gives the code away freely, from the goodness of its heart.
> Seems unlikely.
> [2] It's never ever going to happen, so stop dreaming.

Well, there's the 2.11 code.  Most of the important stuff was in there 
before 4.0, so who knows.  Maybe trying to get 3.3, and then update it, 
would be less impossible.  Still, as you said, there are alternatives:

>>> But DR-DOS 7.01 was opened, albeit briefly.
>>
>> Yeah, but DR DOS is a bit weird... in places where the behavior of DR DOS is
>> different from MS/PC DOS, I prefer the M$ behavior.
>
> That's exactly what I just said about FreeDOS.
>
> DR-DOS is a *lot* closer to "real" DOS than FreeDOS. And while it's
> not unencumbered -- it's free for non-commercial use only -- it's
> better than nothing, no?

Yeah.

And even a free-as-in-beer option, if it had even DR DOS's level of 
compatibility, stripping out the DR-isms, might be useful to some people.

> Also, bear in mind MS-DOS' origins as a clean but very obviously
> "inspired" copy of CP/M. DR eventually did what they should have done
> years earlier, and turned CP/M (or rather CCP/M-86) into an improved
> copy of DOS. That's why it runs so well and is so compatible. It's the
> real original deal.
>
> It's a damned shame that DeviceLogics didn't keep it FOSS -- but the
> last ever versions of DeviceLogics DOS included the kernel of Udo
> Kuhnt's version.

I've...heard about that. *cough* They mooched some code from FreeDOS 
without attribution too, IIRC.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS#Recent_versions
>
> http://www.freedos.org/technotes/press/2005-drdos.txt
>
>> Though that can probably be fudged?
>
> There's no real need.
>
> It has everything I need -- a good memory manager, CD extensions, a
> disk cache, a decent editor, etc.
>
> I kinda miss tools like MS-DOS Edit and MSD and DOSShell, but it's not critical.

Well, everyone's got different needs =p

DR DOS might make a starting point for something more MS-flavored.

-uso.