Hey guys,
So I'm not a trendy person, I don't buy modern hardware. But a lot of my older machines have died, so I ended up getting a new PC earlier this year that has a (circa 2010) Intel Nehalem Westmere 32nm processor (Core i5 650 3.2 Ghz dual-core). And I installed FreeDOS 1.1 test#3 (unofficial, not formally finished or released yet) inside VirtualBox. And yes, the emulated packet driver works too (for you networking snobs, heh). EDIT: DOS386, don't worry, I'm actually triple-booting on that machine: FreeDOS, PuppyLinux, Win64.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmere_(microarchitecture)#Westmere



Okay, I'm far from a guru on all this junk, but apparently VT-X is really good, esp. nowadays, e.g. you can even (I think?) run a 64-bit guest OS atop a 32-bit host (surprisingly). Even Win8 will supposedly come with Hyper-V, but (so far) that needs VT-X and is 64-bit only (despite some 32-bit builds of Win8 existing). Even Win7 (Business / Enterprise / Ultimate only, not Home Basic or Premium) with WinXP mode (under VPC) originally required VT-X (though they later "fixed" that, heh). I think AMD has had "paged real mode" (similar? different?) for a while, but I never tested it (and that old laptop is long dead too, ugh).

The real problem is that not all cpus have VT-X (nor the latest revisions), e.g. this 2009 laptop here (45nm Penryn, Pentium [Core2-ish] Dual-Core, 2.2 Ghz). AMD seems to include VT-X (aka, SVM ??) on more models than Intel, for whatever reason.

Long story short: Tomasz's Kelvar works (with sound!) in VirtualBox 4.1.4 atop Win64 (Core i5) for me. So that's great news. (Tomasz loves his "flat real mode", heh, and yet it's notoriously unpopular in emulation.) Presumably other hypervisors / emulators / whatever (Xen? KVM?) have some partial support for VT-X also, but I haven't tested.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/339/kelvar.png/

The "flat real mode" (or "big real mode") is usually emulated perfectly, it is the 32-bit unreal mode that is almost never emulated properly.

Heheh, sorry, the terminology still confuses me, and I can't claim to know which is used where.

Very Cool read, i find it better to be in pmode and switch back to realmode when needed, eg its possible to have a fully working 32bitPM dos this way.

COOL

> Okay, I'm far from a guru on all this junk, but
> apparently VT-X is really good

Why put up with 20'000 transistors (8086) and 100 KiB (DOS) when you can invest 3'000'000'000 transistors (Westmere) and 50 GiB (Vir***** + Win*****) to achieve the same effect: get 16-bit DOS stuff working

> Long story short: Tomasz's Kelvar works (with sound!)

I never got any sound from the thing

Anyway, please test the sound support when booting aforementioned FreeDOS (MPXPLAY, JUDAS, ...) http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=10911

What did you expect? Traditionally, recompiling / rewriting / porting was too expensive, so binary compatibility is (or was) everything.

Besides, what do you think will be first up on the chopping block? 16-bit compatibility (esp. thanks to AMD64)!!



%BLASTER% set?? Anyways, I'm more surprised at his choice of .WAV than anything.



Doesn't work.

NO, RTFS - where in Kelvar do you see %%BLASTER%% reading?



What did you expect? Vorbis? FLAC? WAVPACK? TAK? MP5? BLAC (Banana-Lossless-Audio-Codec) ?



So MPXPLAY detects the chip correctly but isn't able to use it then?

Mpxplay doesn't work, just plays noisy static.

However, RayeR's recent recompile of Judas 2.10c with latest PCI i.d.s (or whatever) from my card appears to work for those apps (JP.EXE, ANAL.EXE) only.

(This post pertains to real native HDA hardware, aka native FreeDOS, not VirtualBox.)