30 Aug
2006
30 Aug
'06
2:10 a.m.
On 8/29/06, fd0man™—The Magical Floppy Man <fd0man(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 19:34 -0600, ShadowFlare wrote:
Hmm, I'm not sure if it is really even necessary to directly support DOS
programs. One thing I thought of that I should mention here is that
Microsoft doesn't even support DOS programs at all with their latest Windows
versions (Windows XP and Server 2003 x64 Editions). However, that isn't
really a problem since there are alternatives to Windows' DOS support (which
wasn't really even that great in some ways in Windows 2000 or XP to begin
with anyway).
I don't know why, but for some reason I'm thinking it would just kind of
be a waste of time to implement NTVDM for ReactOS if the developers working
on it would be able to work on other parts of ReactOS. Hmm, it might be at
least somewhat worthwhile to work on a NTVDM alternate that could run on
both ReactOS and Windows (possibly even x64 editions), though.
Well, just my opinions on the matter.
-ShadowFlare
Doesn't NTVDM also handle WOW (Windows on Windows) sessions with 16-bit
Windows applications? I seem to recall when I worked at AT&T having (quite
a few) applications that the only way they could be killed was to kill NTVDM
and another process (old[something]app or something?) and then restart the
application. In any case, there are still quite a bit of software
applications that are available online that would make use of these types of
subsystems—and it would be nice, I think, to continue supporting something
that Microsoft does not, and improve upon it, because that would just be
another point in favor of getting people to use free software. Right? :-)
— Mike
Heh, I still think that an actual NTVDM implementation might not necessarily
be the best solution, though. Well, if it could run on x64 editions of
Windows then it would be fine, but if it couldn't, then that's why I was
suggesting an alternative. Of course, the alternative still wouldn't have
to be just for DOS programs either, it could also be for 16-bit Windows
applications as well.
Hmm, if there could be an implementation with no kernel-mode code or at
least something that could somehow work when running AMD64 CPUs in a 64-bit
OS, then that would be a good thing to work toward. Then if ReactOS was
later made to support the API for Windows x64, then it could have 16-bit app
support, while Microsoft's 64-bit OS doesn't. :)
-ShadowFlare