Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Did you know that your graphics card starts up emulating an 
> IBM-manufactured video board from 27 years ago? And then you have to run 
> special driver software to turn off all the pointless emulation and put 
> the card into 24-bit, memory-mapped mode at a real-world screen 
> resolution. Go figure...

In theory a modern PC ought to be completely backwards-compatible with
the 16-bit PCs and thus, in theory, you ought to be able to run MS-DOS
in a modern PC. (All the required hardware is still there, most of it
artificially dragging the old technology for backwards compatibility,
the BIOS still supports all the system calls used by DOS, etc.)
However, I would be *really* surprised if you actually got MS-DOS
running natively on a modern PC.

There are many hurdles that you'll encounter. Firstly, you'll need a
hard drive that's small and old enough that MS-DOS will actually be able
to use it. Also, you'll need a PS/2 keyboard because MS-DOS has no idea
what USB is. There are also probably many problems you will encounter
due to the fact that your CPU is so damn fast.
(Also, be aware that MS-DOS has no concept of keeping the CPU in idle
mode. It will run it at 100% capacity all the time, so be prepared for
some noise. Luckily it will only keep one core at 100%. The others won't
even start.)

You *might* be able to make it at least boot up, with luck and a lot
of work, and perhaps even run some programs, but eg. the majority of
old DOS games probably won't work very well. Even if a game by some
miracle runs (rather than just crashing because the computer is a
thousand times faster than even the fastest that the programmers
expected), you won't get any sounds, and you won't be able to use a mouse
(unless you have a PS/2 one).

The thing is, nobody runs MS-DOS natively anymore, and haven't done so
for well over a decade. If you really need to run an old DOS program
you'll use DOSBox anyway. Not only will the program work, it's a million
times less hassle.

So why is the PC architecture dragging all the useless stuff for MS-DOS
compatibility, when nobody's running MS-DOS anyway?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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