RE: DOS as a modern OS - hardware abstraction by BIOS

Hi,
we once had a PC by TI which tried to emulate DOS by wrapping the DOS and
BIOS interrupts that DOS would use to the ones that the actual BIOS of the
TI "PC" and its special DOS version were using.

In theory, this would make DOS programs work. In reality, hardly any DOS
program ran, because DOS programs are very much used to accessing hardware
directly. And the TI "PC" had quite different implementations of the keyboard,
serial, parallel, disk and graphics interface. The BIOS only used interrupts
beyond the first 32 ("reserved for x86 processors") ones, being much more nice
to the CPU than your common IBM PC one.

Whatever, nice idea, but not tooo realistic. I think Dosemu is very much
what you recommend: It has a special BIOS and some simulated PC hardware,
but does not simulate everything (e.g. no Adlib sound, and the CPU simulation
is no actual simulation, but DOS simply runs in v86 and protected mode tasks
of the real CPU, depending on whether you run a normal program or a protected
mode DOS program. Of course, access to the simulated hardware involves some
simulation).
If a program inside Dosemu uses the special BIOS, it is possible to directly
trigger some Dosemu function, or alternatively to have the BIOS use the
simulated hardware very much like a normal BIOS would do. Depending on the
finetuning of the BIOS visible for DOS programs inside Dosemu :-).

By the way, anybody experienced with the Dosemu hardware simulation
stuff wanting to help me to implement a simulation of the special hardware
of the TI "PC", so I could run some of the programs written for it in
Dosemu? Another thing that would be cool for Dosemu would be to have a
plugin version of FreeCOM command.com ... Dosemu can have the shell running
outside the DOS memory space and save lots of DOS memory that way, this is
what I mean by plugin. The current command.com plugin of Dosemu is quite
simplistic.

Eric