X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to djgpp-bounces using -f From: Rugxulo Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: VIRTUAL BOX and my GAME - Mr Rod Pemberton Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 17:32:35 -0800 (PST) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 57 Message-ID: References: <125997 DOT 8962 DOT qm AT web45113 DOT mail DOT sp1 DOT yahoo DOT com> <83mxm6s2h9 DOT fsf AT gnu DOT org> NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.13.115.246 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1297301555 26239 127.0.0.1 (10 Feb 2011 01:32:35 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse AT google DOT com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:32:35 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse AT google DOT com Injection-Info: p16g2000vbs.googlegroups.com; posting-host=65.13.115.246; posting-account=p5rsXQoAAAB8KPnVlgg9E_vlm2dvVhfO User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13,gzip(gfe) Bytes: 4171 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Hi, On Feb 8, 2:20=A0pm, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > From: "Rod Pemberton" > > Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 09:45:25 -0500 > > Bytes: 3360 > > > For all practical purposes, DJGPP is dead. =A0It's frozen in time. =A0I= t > > tried to move to XP, sort of... =A0It hasn't, yet... =A0That's still in > > Beta. =A07 years of Beta... > > I don't know what you are talking about. =A0DJGPP v2.03 works very well > on XP, and is rock solid there. =A0I'm using it for the last 7 years to > maintain the DJGPP port of Emacs. =A0There's no need whatsoever to go to > the beta-quality v2.04 (which, I hear, is also much more stable than > some release-quality packages out there). (corrections welcome, obviously Eli knows 1000x more about this than I do) Only with patchlevel 2 (backported from 2.04?) did 2.03 (circa 2000) become "stable" on Win2k/XP, thanks to CWS' workarounds (leaking selectors?). And DJGPP still can't even pretend to be at the same level of functionality as on Win9x. Various things broke, gfx support is weaker, etc. But we grudgingly accept it because XP is more stable (well, and we don't have much choice anyways, it's the popular OS. Or was.) Besides, Win9x won't barely run, if at all, on modern hardware and isn't even half as well supported, in apps or drivers, as XP. Even Win2k is too old for most developers. So those are even more difficult options. XP came out in (late?) 2001. Since this was the first NT version meant for home users, they declared (stand-alone) DOS dead. SP2 came out in 2004 (luckily not "yet another" OS release). SP3 is about a year or so old. MS calls XP "old" and "deprecated". They don't sell it on new machines anymore. Clearly they aren't going to fix all our NTVDM woes. XP Mode (via VPC) for Win 7 (Business, Enterprise, Ultimate only) exists as optional download, but it's not meant (or allowed) for home users. Sure, XP works "fairly" well for DJGPP, or at least better than Win2k3, Vista, 7, 64-bit (nada), but that's not really saying much. Oh, and VS2010's runtime doesn't even support older XP versions anymore. Software developers barely still support XP, and obviously testing/support for it is seriously waning (ahem, McAfee). In other words, even if I (barely) like XP and it works, I can't rely on it anymore. Extended support (or whatever) ends somewhere around 2014. Then even XP will truly be dead. :-( P.S. The changes in 2.04 were pretty much CWS' work (right??). He's been too busy to finish it. Perhaps he will one day, but he will probably need all our help. Better support for 4 GB files, better memory management (??), symlinks, etc. I actually (barely) prefer it and use it though admittedly 2.03p2 is "close enough" for most things. Yeah, I'm not ready to give up on DJGPP yet. It's "good enough" for my DOS needs. :-)