From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andrey Romanenko Subject: Re: BCC, ELKS 24 Bit addressing mode Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:44:40 +0200 Message-ID: <4423BF88.7090802@infopulse.com.ua> References: <4422801D.2000006@sentvion.com> <4422EF6B.20804@gmail.com> <4422E782.1030302@sentvion.com> <20060323210950.G88845@agora.rdrop.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20060323210950.G88845@agora.rdrop.com> Sender: linux-8086-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: Linux-8086@vger.kernel.org Dan Olson wrote: > I hate to ask, but why bother with a 186 in the first place? As I > understand it, the only real difference (other than some hardware > integration) between the two is that the 286 has a 24 bit address > space....which you'd need if you're going to use 16M of RAM anyway. > > Dan That was something I was thinking about after that post. I wonder what the benefits to have addressing mode even more constrained than found in 286 and still bother with those crappy 64kb segments? Is that hardware really cheap or wide spread around? Anyway, it looks like you may add this addressing mode handling to EXE image loader that would change all cross-segment access addresses to be compatible with this addressing mode. You may want to try it under plain DOS. Btw, seems this way you still keep all EXE compatible with 8088. Andrey