[ros-general] dos support in reactos

[Guido]

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004 11:05:07 +0000
"theUser BL" <theuserbl at hotmail.com> wrote:

> >Why waste your time with DOS? There is already FreeDOS freely available.
> 
> Short answer: Because WinNT, Win2k and WinXP support DOS, two.
> 
> Longer answer: Because there existing still a lot of programs created for 
> DOS, Win16 and so on. And it would be nice, to can all this older programs 
> run.

Funny, you initially linked to DOSbox. The main reason for creating DOSbox in the first place was the fact that WinNT, Win2k and WinXP have poor DOS support, meaning that older programs (mainly DOS games) would not run properly. It was written portably by using SDL, so that it now runs perfectly fine on MacOS, Linux, BeOS, etc. Of course DOS support for Linux has existed for ages by using DOSemu, which uses the FreeDOS kernel.

One last note on FreeDOS32: don't bother with that. As the name suggest it is based on FreeDOS too, but AFAIK it has been going virtually nowhere from the beginning.

Besides, ReactOS already has its own cmd.exe, supporting many/most basic DOS commands.

- Guido