28 Jun
2007
28 Jun
'07
5:07 p.m.
--- Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 26 Jun 2007 at 14:48, Chris M wrote:
umm, well I posted some of the correspondence right
here on the list some time ago. I'll do it again as
the mood strikes me (and I'm able to locate it). The
scheme relied on a scant bit of logic that would ring
bells whenever certain IO or memory locations were
accessed, and divert to a handler that could, well,
handle it. I know what you're saying, the differences
in the serial ports and k/b and whatnot, but the guy
seemed to believe he could manage all of that. It
seems at least partially credible, but I had some
questions myself.
Maybe it would produce only 82.5% compatibility. All
I know I wanted some friggin games to run on my old
T2K, and I would have been happy. Anyone remember
Starflight? First thing I had loaded on my ITT Xtra XP
(hybrid '286). OI Except for DOS that is!
FWIW, I was in contact w/a dude in the Chicago
area
some time ago who had been working on a mod for
the
Tandy 2000 that would make it 100% PC compatible.
It
involved an extensive rewrite of IO.sys, which I
had
thought would be a big no-no, but from what
you're
saying, not really. I do believe he was hacking
Tandy's specific DOS though. Never finished it
sadly.
Not possible, unless you mean by "100% compatible",
compatible on a
BIOS level. That might well be possible, but it's
small comfort,
given the number of old DOS programs that twiddle
the hardware
directly. I wonder if the 80186 in the 2K might also cause
some programs to
mistakenly assume that it's running on a 286, as the
186 has a number
of the 286 instructions not present on an 8086.
What programs determine which uP they're running on
"on the fly"? Isn't that usually determined at the
beginning?
There was some discussion on a Usenet group regarding
*slight differences* between *identical* instructions
on the 8086 and 80186, causing some s/w to
malfunction. This didn't have to do w/the '186's
integral peripherals, but rather subtle differences in
the way instructions executed on the 186 (?). As to
what the problem was, or what they were even talking
about, nah, I haven't a clue.
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