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Is there a port of DOS for RISC-V?

• anyfoo 7y ago
  I don’t think so, at least not in any “sensible” way. DOS, x86, and IBM PC compatibles (and what came out of that) are very much intertwined. You could make something for RISC-V that looks like DOS in a lot of ways (command prompt, filesystem...), and maybe is similarly structured, but no program, or driver, would work with it unless you have full blown PC emulation—in which case you’d just run PC DOS. That’s part of what I originally meant: DOS is so barely even any OS at all, almost any software for it still does a lot of talking to the hardware itself.
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    > You could make something for RISC-V that looks like DOS in a lot of ways (command prompt, filesystem...), and maybe is similarly structured, but no program, or driver, would work with it unless you have full blown PC emulation—in which case you’d just run PC DOS. There were some programs that would run fine with just a DOS-compatible API rather than full PC compatibility; WordStar was a significant program that relied only on the DOS API (and thus would run on otherwise relatively incompatible systems) , for instance.
    • anyfoo 7y ago
      True, but besides being increasingly rare (WordStar was very early), they’re still x86 code. ;) The point is, unlike e.g. CP/M, DOS is utterly useless without, at the very very least, x86 emulation.