Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!
On Sat, 31 May 2008 06:23:10 -0400, Jason <jasorn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I suppose the 99.99% (where did you get this figure?) who allegedly do
>> not need CGA *and* EGA will not need the Real Mode version of Arachne,
>> either, once the DPMI version is working perfectly. And the 0.01% who
>> need it because they only have an XT class machine probably might not
>> enjoy the few KB very much if this means that Arachne will no longer
>> work with their graphics boards. So what is the purpose of this change?
> This is THE question in my mind. It is only to those running old
> machines who will really need the kb and it seems me that supporting
> older hardware is at least as important as efficiency of memory and code
> for this very reason.
It's a very valid question, this issue of where the cutoff point is
for old hardware, and honest disagreement is to be expected. But we
must move beyond theory. Yes, in theory it would be nice to support
the Commodore 64 and CGA and MDA. But realisticaly ... in this
real word ... how many CGA monitors are there still working? Is there
even one person in the world using Arachne who uses a CGA? Even if
such a person exists, they can still run the std. distro, although
to tell the truth, I could never get even the VGA16 mode to work
on my 486 never mind EGA or CGA. My target is 486 machines and
better, since Arachne runs fine on them, with full performance.
486's have been 'throw away' for almost a decade! Do I need to
support museum hardware? No, not if doing so will encumber code
for 486 and better (which it does). My distro needs 486, SVGA and
XMS.
However, free memory is still an issue as long as one is running in
DOS regarless of how powerful your machine is so those efficiencies
are not wasted.
Regards,
Ray Andrews
.
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