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Ranish Partition Manager revived (Announce)

posted by Zyzzle, 18.11.2022, 01:12

> In my opinion the greater risk of DOS someday not beeing usable anymore on
> modern systems is not the large disk support but the removal of legacy BIOS
> API support from modern UEFI-enabled boards. But even in that field there
> is work going on to reimplement that. The guys from ArcaOS (OS/2) seem to
> have had some success with that:
>
> https://www.arcanoae.com/uefi-support-in-arcaos-5-1-update-for-february-2022/
Thanks for the link. I had not heard about it, Sounds very promising. Quoting from the description:
"Essentially, this is a 64-bit environment which will provide a rather complete BIOS emulation for the ArcaOS kernel, including VGA services for video display."

Impressive, since it provides BIOS emulation *and* VGA compatibility, in a sense, creating a de-novo "16-bit legacy" system inside a UEFI bootshell.

SEABIOS has also attempted this. The main problem is getting 100% VGA-compatible code into the abstraction layer of the "new" 16-bit VBIOS, "replacing" the VBIOS and making it compatibile with 30+ years of 16-bit DOS code, etc.

This is a difficult project, but I have no doubt that those of us who want to run DOS baremetal in the future will work together to circumvent this artificial castration that Microsoft, Intel, and others have worked so hard to foist upon the world for "security reasons". Talk about a damn walled garden!

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