Geri wrote:
linux with x11 (and i think windows xp) will use the vbe, why to fight with win9x?
Windows 9x is actually at the same level of people here who have made their own OSes, with the same sort of bugs and limitations that can be corrected, so it's logical that I use it. I feel it right at my current development level as to allow me to do interesting stuff.
For me it's a direct door to the raw PC platform (it's not platform-independent like Windows NT/XP/7 so I will find PC development details no matter what I do and still will be in Win32 with Win16), to DOS and to load my own kernel using DOS as a boot manager.
I know that if I understand how to develop that sort of things under Win9x, it will guide me to understand it as well in X11 or anything else, and the most important is that it will be oriented specifically to allow me to learn the details of the PC platform.
That's what I'm specifically interested in too, learn about the PC, the demos, tricks, etc., from the past, understand its source code, and use all that to learn the foundations of all computing, but I need that system to access directly the features of a PC as its own hardware API.
By the way, here's a mirror of ProgrammersHeaven.com with 4.3 Gigabytes of 90's code and information for the classic PC. It's very important, the sort of stuff that makes using DOS, Win9x and a PC with all ISA features and devices, make sense:
http://archive.org/download/2014_10_16_Programmersheaven.com_Mirror/2014-10-16--programmersheaven.com.zip_______________________________________________________
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Linux is also platform-independent like NT, unfortunately, mixing code for PCs with that for many other architectures.
If there was a cleanly separate code base only for the PC (ISA, PS/2, PCI, UEFI) and also for each architecture, it would be ideal to learn lots of things without having to decipher what is actual functional code and what are lines of compatibility layers to manage all of the architectures in the same code.
It's considerably slower and harder, but it would need to be taken as a study project to develop to extract the actual tricks as they aren't so easy to find just with Google.