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Plasma Active Three releasedPlasma Active Three releasedPosted Oct 22, 2012 5:13 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)In reply to: Plasma Active Three released by nix Parent article: Plasma Active Three released
The 386 does run 8086 software just fine. Sure some runs too fast or whatever but the CPU has the appropriate guts to run 8086 software in a VM and that feature was in use at the time. For example Concurrent DOS 386.
Of course the rest of this is high speculation as it wasn't what happened.
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Plasma Active Three released Posted Oct 22, 2012 15:21 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I know it does. But if insn-level emulation was required, it couldn't possibly have (i.e. if it had done what dosbox et al do now).
Plasma Active Three released Posted Oct 22, 2012 17:12 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Win3.1 with virtual memory enabled and WinNT, Win95 had the same problem so how they solved it should be sufficient. DOSBox does better but that may because it creates virtual video, sound and network devices in its VM. I don't think it does any more instruction emulation/trapping than a WinNT DOS window.
Plasma Active Three released Posted Oct 24, 2012 15:49 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The two are quite different. Win3.1/NT/95 were all 32-bit systems, so they had the benefit of being able to use VM86 to do 90% of the work for them. In long mode (64-bit mode), vm86 no longer exists, so this approach cannot be used.
Plasma Active Three released Posted Oct 24, 2012 16:27 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Thanks for the clear response, I hadn't thought about that. I'd forgotten about the differences between 32bit and 64bit mode on modern CPUs, and that dosemu and dosbox aren't the same thing.
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