Are There Any Open Source Dos Operating Systems?


Anhaedra

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May 9, 2004
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I know there was OpenDOS, but it seems to be gone now. I was thinking someone could port a version of DOS to the GP2X and write the appropriate drivers for sound, etc, and then we could play dos games at a good speed.
 
theres freedos (didja use google?)
i doubt any dos game will run on the gp2x due to the fact it has a arm proccessor, not a x86. So no dos binaries will work. And since dos was POS OS that did nothing lots of dos game code involved hardware manipulation which would all have to recoded for the gp2x as well. with that much recoding itd be a lot easier to just port them to linux which actually handles some hardware for you, and memory managment. And is multi threaded... etc. good luck
 
That shouldn't matter though, should it? Most things are coded for the OS, not the platform, unless I am mistaken.
 
No. At a high level, you may use functions and other stuff that are specific to a software platform (ie an OS) and a high level language source code is generally platform independant as it's just plain text (though it will usually require some tweaking before you can compile and run it on a different OS), but the compiled binaries are machine code, which is hardware (architecture) specific. So binaries for the x86 architecture will use the x86 instruction set, and binaries for the ARM architecture will use te ARM instruction set. These are totally incompatible. So you'd have to emulate the different architecture, or recompile the games targetting the ARM processor, so in other words you can only do it for games the source is available for.
 
the problem is dos was never a very high level OS and didnt provide many features. so even if you recode an open source DOS and port it to arm and the gp2x, it wont provide all the features games use. DOS never provided anything for graphics, all the games had to code for the hardware them selves, so you'll have to recode all that and more for every game you port as well. it'll be an unbelivable amount of work.
 
Anhaedra posted on Dec 6 2005 at 12:01 PM said:
That shouldn't matter though, should it? Most things are coded for the OS, not the platform, unless I am mistaken.

It doesn't matter if it hooks into the OS; the binary executable is still in x86 machine code. So is the OS itself, and I'd bet most of the open-source DOS distributions are crammed full of assembly language. You can't copy an x86 Linux program right to a PowerPC Linux computer and have it work.

An x86 is one of the hardest architectures to emulate quickly (especially if you want to emulate all the hardware that comes along with your average DOS PC).

We should really build a pinned thread for this one of these days.
 
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