8 ms·

DOS + Win 3.11 was very fast compared to Windows (9x, XP, 7 and 10), OSX or Linux nowadays and there were lots of good games written for the platform (MOO1, CIV

DOS + Win 3.11 was very fast compared to Windows (9x, XP, 7 and 10), OSX or Linux nowadays and there were lots of good games written for the platform (MOO1, CIV1, Duke Nukem 3D). I read about the problems with Windows 3.11 protected mode, does FreeDOS 1.2 allow you to run Windows 3.11 in 386enh and protected mode? A certain Jeremy David wrote support for it, and I read that a windows 3 compatible kernel was available in FreeDOS 1.0 under the name Winkernel. It should be used without EMM386 but with Japheth's versions of HIMEMX and SHARE, allocating at most 256 MB of RAM to HIMEMEX. With some tweaking of the Windows config, it is possible to use 1 GB, but not more. Do not use protected mode disk drivers. There is SVGAPatch: a tool to patch svga256.drv to make it VESA compliant so Win 3.11 can be used within Virtualbox. http://web.archive.org/web/20140202233045/http://www.japheth.de/dwnload1.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140202233045/http://www.japheth... http://stephan.win31.de/w31mm_en.htm http://stephan.win31.de/w31mm_en.htm https://www.kirsle.net/blog/entry/nostalgia-for-windows-3-1 https://www.kirsle.net/blog/entry/nostalgia-for-windows-3-1 Conceivably it could be used to access the internet somewhat with Win32s in combination with Dillo of D+ browser. http://dillo-win.osdn.jp/index.en.html http://dillo-win.osdn.jp/index.en.html https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/ I remember that for DOS semi-multitasking you could use DESQview, does that work with FreeDOS and are there better (more efficient or open source) alternatives? I am asking as you could make a very lean and fast OS, booting form USB, extracting itself to a ramdisk, allocating 500M (with tools, editors and games) and 500M for windows. Perhaps HaikuOS, NT 3.51, Windows ME with KernelEx or the new OS/2 5 (ArcaOS), or Win7PE or Win10PE are more capable and similarly faster compared to Ubuntu, Windows7/10 or OSX. https://www.arcanoae.com/current-release-timetable-arcaos-5-0-blue-lion/ https://www.arcanoae.com/current-release-timetable-arcaos-5-... http://theoven.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=4883b8169b752f637e3611673a7ce3ea&topic=1336.0 http://theoven.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=4883b8169b752f637e361...

decaysackparity 10y ago
Took the words right out of my mouth, we just became best friends.
yuhong 10y ago
I wonder if anyone still have a copy of the Global EMM Import specification.
jerf 10y ago
"DOS + Win 3.11 was very fast compared to Windows (9x, XP, 7 and 10), OSX or Linux nowadays" You either have some seriously rose-colored glasses on, or you need to put an SSD in your current computer because a lot of the slowness of modern machines lies in the increasingly-obsolete hard drive. (Due to the increasing prevalence of cheap SMR [1] drives in consumer-grade gear, I'm not just saying "increasingly-obsolete" for rhetorical purposes; cheap hard drives are actually regressing in performance lately.) I remember multi-minute boot times and multi-minute load times for things like office suites and such, which are now entirely foreign to me. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording
- shakna 10y ago
  I think the speed of hardware has far outpaced software. I still use a 3.1 machine for some software that got "upgraded" for more modern computers and became unuseably slow and feature-less compared to the old. But, that machine has a lot of more modern hardware now. It's little more than a Linux kernel and DOSBox, so no true hardware access. But it still boots, loads Windows, loads my programs to their last state, in less than 10 seconds. By comparison, Windows 7's file manager takes longer on double the hardware.
  - fsiefken 10y ago
    Hi Shakna, if you'd boot FreeDOS and Windows 3.1 directly, perhaps it would even be 4 seconds as you skip Linux booting and the DosBox latency.
    - shakna 10y ago
      I've been watching FreeDOS for this for a little while. Unfortunately getting the particular program to install requires a little fudging as it tries to detect Win, and underlying DOS, and wants particular numbers to be present in the versions.
      - fsiefken 10y ago
apatters 10y ago
I don't recall DOS + Win 3.11 being anywhere near as fast as the setup I use today, which is basically just Ubuntu and xmonad under a Gnome fallback session. Plus I would say the productivity gains of being fluent with GNU tools, RESTful APIs and any scripting language save more time in the long run than whatever milliseconds get shaved off of a UI response.

decaysackparity 10y ago

Took the words right out of my mouth, we just became best friends.

yuhong 10y ago

I wonder if anyone still have a copy of the Global EMM Import specification.

jerf 10y ago

"DOS + Win 3.11 was very fast compared to Windows (9x, XP, 7 and 10), OSX or Linux nowadays" You either have some seriously rose-colored glasses on, or you need to put an SSD in your current computer because a lot of the slowness of modern machines lies in the increasingly-obsolete hard drive. (Due to the increasing prevalence of cheap SMR [1] drives in consumer-grade gear, I'm not just saying "increasingly-obsolete" for rhetorical purposes; cheap hard drives are actually regressing in performance lately.) I remember multi-minute boot times and multi-minute load times for things like office suites and such, which are now entirely foreign to me. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

shakna 10y ago
I think the speed of hardware has far outpaced software. I still use a 3.1 machine for some software that got "upgraded" for more modern computers and became unuseably slow and feature-less compared to the old. But, that machine has a lot of more modern hardware now. It's little more than a Linux kernel and DOSBox, so no true hardware access. But it still boots, loads Windows, loads my programs to their last state, in less than 10 seconds. By comparison, Windows 7's file manager takes longer on double the hardware.
- fsiefken 10y ago
  Hi Shakna, if you'd boot FreeDOS and Windows 3.1 directly, perhaps it would even be 4 seconds as you skip Linux booting and the DosBox latency.
  - shakna 10y ago
    I've been watching FreeDOS for this for a little while. Unfortunately getting the particular program to install requires a little fudging as it tries to detect Win, and underlying DOS, and wants particular numbers to be present in the versions.
    - fsiefken 10y ago

apatters 10y ago

I don't recall DOS + Win 3.11 being anywhere near as fast as the setup I use today, which is basically just Ubuntu and xmonad under a Gnome fallback session. Plus I would say the productivity gains of being fluent with GNU tools, RESTful APIs and any scripting language save more time in the long run than whatever milliseconds get shaved off of a UI response.