Okay, there are a lot of different statements here with varying degrees of truth in them. In honor of the Pats kickin' [domesticated donkey], I'll use a scale of 1-10 with 1 being an outright falsity and 10 being boy-scout-truth to rate them:
Xp is probably one of the stablest os'es privately available
Technically true, but with minor caveats. I'll give it 7 Pats. While WindowsXP is "one of the stablest" OSes out there, DOS is even more so. If you change the word "stablest" to "most compatible with new-ish hardware", then I'll throw in the last three Pats.
it's not tempermental.
2 Pats. It's temperamental, so this isn't an accurate statement. However, it's less temperamental than any previous versions of Windows (except maybe NT 3.51), so I'll give some creds.
Since we're comparing DOS to Windows XP here we're talking in relative terms.
Windows 1/2/3/WFW3/NT/95/98/98SE/ME/2000/XP are all more temperamental than DOS 6.22. In DOS, the only thing you had to kludge was the silly 640K of conventional memory and a quick optimize using QEMM fixed that straight away.
In fact, the 640K conventional memory ceiling wasn't even an issue until Windows 3.1 needed it.
Also who said you can't turn on/of windows with just a switch? I do it all the time, as long as it's 2000 or xp you don't have any problems.
9 Pats.
Very true, but you're missing one detail and one exception: As long as you're using Windows 2000 or XP
with NTFS you will be in the minute minority if you ran into problems. NTFS, unlike FAT/FAT32 is called a
journaling file system, which essentially means it keeps a log of what it's going to write before it writes it, then when it's done it erases the log. There's still a chance of messing something up, but it's greatly reduced.
If you were to, say, shut off the power to your computer from your cheap $3 power strip that Bob-down-the-street had under his desk for 20 years when he used it with his XT and it somehow sent a power spike through your system while your hard drive heads were moving and not parked (<-- Yes, that's a technical term) you might cause some physical damage to your hard drive. I suppose, technically speaking, any power spike might have some potential for effecting the operational stability of your PC, but you're even more at risk for your hard drive in particular.
Even if it's 98 you usually don't have any problems.
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0 Pats. Shutting off your PC with hard drive caching on and without a journaling file system is plain
bad. DOS (with SmartDrive) gets away with it because there's a whole lot less OS to be cached, but you still run the risk of damaging any files that are in use.
Also I'm not sure what kind of boot time you get, but with a stripped down version of windows I get something like 10 seconds. No it's not as fast as dos, but your willing to sacrifice all of the added choices/tools/applications only available on windows for a boot time that shaves off another 6 seconds?
9 Pats.
I'll have to agree with you here. You can get Windows to boot up pretty fast if you really want to. Besides, I'd rather have a graphical boot screen than a cryptic text one any day for any 'kiosk'-style machine.
Application availability is definitely a plus for Windows, but in context, it really only counts for MAME and MAME-related applications. Sometimes, however, the benefits of some of the applications that run on Windows still don't make it worth it.
If you want functionaly then you need a real os.
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0 Pats. Blatantly untrue. See below.
Screensavers aren't even an option in dos unless you want to hardcode it into gamelauncher
My interpretation of Wade's question is obviously different than yours: I thought that's what he was asking?
and making one that did what you said in dos would most likely require multi-threading, something you can't do in dos.
1 Pat. True, you can't multithread in DOS. Good job!
However, you wouldn't require multi-threading if the program itself (Game Launcher, in this case) were doing the screen-saving.
Yes there are tsrs, but they generally cause havoc with a complicated app liek gl.
I wonder how some of them
old school demos managed some pretty neat graphics without 'a complicated app liek gl'?
Dos is dead, deal with it.
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0 Pats. DOS is not dead. Deal with it.
The only reason you should run dos at this point is if your machine has less than a 350 mhz processor. Otherwise your just hurting yourself as there are no benefits of running dos on a modern pc and many benefits of running linux/windows.
Depending on what your objectives are, sure there are plenty of reasons to run DOS instead of Windows:
- Less OS overhead - this means more PC for your buck.
- Out of the other OS options that run MAME, it's the easiest to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.
- Less expensive than any Microsoft Windows flavor.
- It has a higher hack factor when doing simple things like, say, when running two trackballs as two player one and player two?
- Faster boot-up time, if that's a major concern.
- As I pointed out earlier, it's reletively safer to have a DOS system in a kiosk environment than it is for any other FAT/FAT32 (and since you brought up Linux, EXT2)
Not including any subjective comments, you averaged 3.625
s! Way to go!
/Steve
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