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32-bit MSDOS (Announce)

posted by tom Homepage, Germany (West), 28.06.2021, 20:47

> > > I guess I could create an INT 31H that just
> > > redirects you to INT 21H if that would help.
so you are completely clueless about the INT 31H interface.
and unfortunately completely unwilling to learn.

> There are multiple 32-bit DOS-extenders. DOS32A
> comes close to what I decided was "clean" myself.
there is no such thing as a DOS-extender standard.
however, virtually all DOS extenders gave you a runtime library which gave you

malloc(many MB);
write(handle, buffer, many MB);
32-bit pointers without segments


and so on, and translated this transparently to 16-bit MSDOS (or any other OS). the translation layer is absolutely undefined and is provided by some runtime library. but the boundaries are clear: DPMI and INT21H on one side, STDIO.H on the other.

so basically you offer/implement your own DOS extender, and require everyone to recompile. this is simply not going to happen.

> Win32 doesn't use segments anywhere within the
> application and I agree with Microsoft that
> that is clean.
DOS extender applications haven't used segments for what you intend to do for the last 30 years. 'hello world' applications don't need segment registers.
GCC has been ported to DOS, 30 years ago.

UNLESS it was *really* necessary because some functionality was required that wasn't covered by this DOS extender, so the application had to call BIOS functions directly.

think "load VGA character font".

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