Re: [Freedos-devel] Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020

[Rugxulo <ru...@gm...>]

Hi,

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 8:17 AM, Andreas K. Foerster <ak...@ak...> wrote:
> Am Sonntag, dem 19. Nov 2017 schrieb Rugxulo:
>
>> Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020
>
> HORRORS!!!! THE SKY IS FALLING!!! THE END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR!!!!
>
> No, as long as there are pc emulators with a traditional BIOS,
> there will be a place for a free DOS implementation!

It's not that simple. No emulator is perfect. (Is anything?)

I still run FreeDOS natively almost every day on my 2011-era Lenovo
desktop. But of course it has APM, VT-X, and barely-supported HDA,
none of which this 2010-era Dell laptop has (although I boot a RUFUS'd
USB here occasionally; at least VESA, PC speaker, mouse also work
here). Native is also much faster than anything else (although VT-X
[still somewhat rare??] helps a ton).

Some emulators are hard to find, buggy, poorly maintained, not very
portable, rely on exotic build tools, excruciatingly slow, have
license issues, or won't run without hardware VT-X. (Etc. etc. etc.)

But I do like QEMU/KVM or VBox a lot. I have been using them fairly
often in recent years (but not for graphics or sound). I'm still
partial to DOSEMU and DOSBox, too.

That doesn't mean I'm happy about CSM disappearing. I also don't think
it's the literal end of the world, but it will probably make things a
lot harder for us.

I'm sure they have fairly good reasons for doing so, but it's not like
we could stop them even if they didn't.