Re: App database, libsynth

Ryan Underwood
2003-07-12T22:40:26Z

Hi Bart,

On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 09:57:05PM +0100, Bart Oldeman wrote:
> >
> > Are you certain about emulation necessary for 16bit apps? I look at the
> > developer's overview for hammer, and it starts out with:
> >
> > "The x86-64 architecture supports legacy 16-bit and 32-bit applications
> > and operating systems without modification."
>
> look carefully. x86-64 has three modes (instead of the familiar real
> and protected modes) that can only be (normally) switched between
> by rebooting:
> real -- legacy -- long
> 16bit 32bit pm 64bit pm
> 16bit pm 32bit pm (compatibility)
> vm86 16bit pm (compatibility)
>
> dosemu runs in legacy mode but then your x86-64 is just an Athlon on
> steroids and other processes cannot use more than 4GB of memory.
>
> In long mode there is no vm86.

It looked like the long vs legacy mode could be toggled on a per segment
basis in the rest of the information I pasted. What do you think that
refers to?

> DOSEMU is intrinsically a little more difficult to configure (primarily
> because it needs an independent DOS rather than having one built in) and
> no matter how good FreeDOS gets it seems there will always be some who
> really want to run another DOS in it.

:)

> At least xdosemu+freedos should be
> as easy as possible (it's been easy since 1.0.2, it's just that extracting two
> tarballs in one's home directory is a little unusual -- that's why I tried
> to simplify the systemwide compilation and installation from source, so
> making RPMs and DEBs should be easy)

The initial setup at least on Debian is a breeze today, it's just
finding the right settings for some application that tends to be the
annoying part, which hopefully gets solved through the application db.

And, many users don't like to hand edit config files, which is why I write
that script to at least partially automate that.

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