Do you really need DOS/WIN16 Support?

[Pete]

Hi Andre

I am probably responsible for the DOS/Win16 discussion in the ArcaOS thread. I asked if DOS/Win16 support would still be installed if deselected. The answer seems to be Yes, because a subset of DOS is still needed as, apparently, some OS/2 device drivers and low level systems need VDM support.

I have to say that I have yet to discover which OS/2 drivers and low level systems have this requirement... Definitely nothing in use on several desktops and laptops here.

I have at no time suggested DOS/Win16 support should be removed from the installation options of OS/2 systems. Should we suddenly find ourselves with a soundcard driver with DOS support I may well want to reinstate DOS myself although the few odd DOS games that I play run fairly well in DOSBox.


Regards

Pete

[Fahrvenugen]

Hi,

I definitely need the DOS support. 

One piece of hardware that I run at a radio station that I work at is an RDS encoder that lives on a PC card.  The hardware is quite sensitive to hardware timing, and the custom software runs on either real DOS and a 286 / 386 *or* I've been able to make it work on a newer computer with OS/2's DVM by tweaking the various hardware and timing settings that IBM so nicely provided.

The same hardware won't run under Dosbox, Freedos, and the like.  It doesn't work under Windows (and there has been no software update to it since the original DOS release)

The benefit of running it under OS/2's dosbox is that I can not only keep the thing running with newer hardware, but by tweaking various settings and using the SIO drivers I've been able to add in network capabilities to a system that was never designed to be network capable beyond a simple serial port and modem access.  Between REXX, OS/2's Dosbox, SIO, and  network stack I've got it doing things that it was never designed to do.

As for WinOS/2 support, I still use Pagemaker quite a bit.

So yes - I still find value in these aspects of OS/2.