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1. Embed this notice
   Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Mar-2026 20:40:11 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

   in reply to

   • Hailey
   • Bojidar Marinov
   • Moses Izumi

   @moses_izumi @hailey @bojidar_bg yes i will watch

   • Embed this notice
     Hailey (hailey@hails.org)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Mar-2026 20:40:13 JST Hailey

     in reply to

     • Bojidar Marinov
     • Moses Izumi

     @moses_izumi @bojidar_bg yep heaps crashier. It doesn't attempt to virtualise much hardware like win9x does with VxDs - only really the BIOS keyboard service. DOS retains full hardware control otherwise and both OSes are sharing the hardware with basically no coordination. It's enough to make the demo video in the readme work and not much more :)

   • Embed this notice
     Moses Izumi (moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Mar-2026 20:40:13 JST Moses Izumi

     in reply to

     • Hailey
     • Bojidar Marinov
     @hailey @bojidar_bg
     Good to know.
     Always had a feeling that porting Re-Volt (RVGL) and Serious Sam to DOS would be a better excursion.
     
     next up: diving into the coreboot weeds just to bring DOS back to the BIOS chip ( @libreleah better watch out )
   • Embed this notice
     Moses Izumi (moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Mar-2026 20:40:15 JST Moses Izumi

     in reply to

     • Hailey
     • Bojidar Marinov
     @hailey @bojidar_bg
     Any crashier than Windows 9x?
     Guess I'll just transplant some Debian install and see how things go.
     
     The github description was pretty vague, so thanks for explaining how it actually works.
   • Embed this notice
     Hailey (hailey@hails.org)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Mar-2026 20:40:16 JST Hailey

     in reply to

     • Bojidar Marinov
     • Moses Izumi

     @moses_izumi @bojidar_bg doslinux just boots a linux kernel from dos while taking care to preserve dos memory so that it can be resumed in vm86 mode later (just like how win9x worked) It's a real linux kernel so you can do anything you could normally do under linux. The project is more of a fun hack than anything serious though, it's really crashy in practice

   • Embed this notice
     Moses Izumi (moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Mar-2026 20:40:17 JST Moses Izumi

     in reply to

     • Hailey
     • Bojidar Marinov
     @bojidar_bg @hailey
     Already knew of the doslinux project.
     If it has graphics support (framebuffer, x11, wayland, secret fourth thing) I guess I'm golden.
     
     Chainloading into a small hand-crafted Gentoo/TinyCore system through loadlin is also an option, if I'm desperate for results and want to learn something that can be applied to the modern world.
   • Embed this notice
     Bojidar Marinov (bojidar_bg@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Mar-2026 20:40:18 JST Bojidar Marinov

     in reply to

     • Hailey
     • Moses Izumi

     @moses_izumi That said... the "DOS subsystem for Linux" /https://github.com/haileys/doslinux by @hailey might be a promising approach: if you could run a whole Linux kernel on DOS, then you could run WINE on top of that. Wonky, but hey, it is called a _tower_ of abstraction, after all 😂

   • Embed this notice
     Bojidar Marinov (bojidar_bg@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Mar-2026 20:40:19 JST Bojidar Marinov

     in reply to

     • Moses Izumi

     @moses_izumi As someone who hasn't dealt with WINE code or DOS, I would still say... borderline impossible, but you can maybe reuse pieces.
     WINE depends on there being a Linux kernel underneath for forking processes, scheduling threads, and dealing with inter-process communication. None of that exists on MS-DOS, so you'd need to, at minimum, supply a whole kernel-like part that does these things, and then also patch it all across the WINE codebase.

   • Embed this notice
     Moses Izumi (moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Mar-2026 20:40:21 JST Moses Izumi
     How feasible would it be to port Wine to MS-DOS?
     
     DOS already has a well-known port of the GNU tools (DJGPP), and I'd appreciate the ability to run Windows 95 (and later) software on such an austere operating system.
     Bonus points if it's possible to get better VESA performance than the official Basic Display Adapter drivers.
     
     I'm not familiar with C (or derivatives), but there are probably worse places for me to start.
     
     #askfedi
     #retrocomputing
     #wine