Comment by kragen

6 days ago

MS-DOS was a reasonable bootloader for Linux and Windows 95; I imagine FreeDOS might be a better one if you wanted to do hobby OSDev. Historically you could get hard real time performance for things like controlling steppers from your parallel port under MS-DOS, but nowadays you'd just use Freeduino or an iCE40. Also maybe brushless motors.

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kragen

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1313ed01  6 days ago

FreeDOS is no good at all for booting anymore, since BIOS support is increasingly rare. No way to boot FreeDOS (or MS-DOS) from UEFI. And of course also no point in trying to run it on ARM or any other non-x86 CPU. Looks like the future for FreeDOS will be to run in virtual machines only. A bit sad, since running FreeDOS on the bare metal of a 21st century computer (even one from 10-20 years ago) has been a nice way to experience just how fast modern hardware is.