wierd_w wrote on 2024-03-28, 13:41:I have a 7th gen intel i5 equipped dell xps 15, with nvidia gpu. […]
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cyclone3d wrote on 2023-03-05, 19:00:A lot of the newer Dell laptops have Legacy(BIOS) and UEFI boot modes. […]
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rasteri wrote on 2023-03-05, 17:23:
Any idea what CPU/chipset is the last one with a normal BIOS?
A lot of the newer Dell laptops have Legacy(BIOS) and UEFI boot modes.
As long as the BIOS has the legacy boot mode, you should be able to use DOS on it though you are going to be stuck using PCIe to PCI adapters in order to get stuff like 3dfx cards and VESA video modes working.
What would be cool is if FreeDOS was actually updated to support UEFI boot and also bug fixed to fix other issues that have apparently been around forever.
I have a 7th gen intel i5 equipped dell xps 15, with nvidia gpu.
Sadly, the vesa driver baked in is premium dogshit, and does very stupid stuff. It cant even handle testing of the modes it claims to provide.
(Otherwise, setting up a memdisk based boot entry to start from grub2 would be a fun and profitable weekend project. This laptop has 32bg of ram installed, but jemmex can be told to limit this so that nothing balks.)
While not the scope of this project, an excellent companion project would be a modern revival of univbe for the 'modern' IGPs found in the target system generation (2005 to 2015, being about the sweetspot, it seems), as the combination would be very powerful.
Some of these newer GPU do no even have full VGA compatibility, AFAICR, so that might be something worth looking at in addition to VESA issues.
That being said, if we keep going in that kind of direction, while we may still be running DOS on baremetal, with increasing tmemulation of I/O perioherals (sound, video and probably others), a retro focused virtual machine might start looking more practical while still being close to baremetal CPU performance. I write this in the context of BIOS/CSM being on the cusp extinction in favor of pure UEFI, which will pose further challenges to running DOS on baremetal on newer machines. Please don't take this as a critique or a put down, but only as a reflection on a practical aspect of things (and if we all wanted to be purely practical, we would likely not be in this hobby).
That being said, more options are always a good thing and the work being done on the audio front for DOS compatibility is marvelous and very useful.
EDIT: @RayeR , you beat me to it on VGA (in)compatibility