Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! From: "Ray Andrews" <randrews@xxxxxxxxx> > 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. So you think that people will buy a 486 just to run Arachne on it? Get real! Most people will probably run Arachne on whatever old hardware they have at their disposal, as an alternative to throwing it away. Most people on this list run Arachne on old machines while saving newer ones for OSes that their old hardware is not powerful enough for. MP estimated that there were 10000 Arachne users in the world, and I would be surprised if that number had significantly risen since then. 486 machines tend to be used for playing games today, or as routers running Linux. I don't think that there are many people who would use them as surf boxes, and if they do, they will probably not be running Arachne for that purpose. And you do not even support standard VGA anymore? Well, at least you will know why people won't use your core. > 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. Well, I would say that 99% of all Arachne users have enough Conventional Memory so that 100 KB more do not help. Whereas the 1% who do not have Upper Memory because they cannot run EMM386 or UMBPCI since they do not have a 386 might need it, but those are the ones who might also suffer from removing the support for old graphics cards. To me this is pretty pointless. You are removing support for hardware that might still be in use only to have a few more KB of unused memory that you can show off with. Udo -- The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de -- This mail was written by a user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/ Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --