Hello andrew.

21 Jan 03 04:55, andrew clarke wrote to Mike Tripp:

 ac> Sat 2003-01-18 10:32, Mike Tripp (1:382/61) wrote to Bob Jones:

 >> A DOS32 port would work provided the extender support equals that
 >> of Squish. My guess is that there is a reason (beyond laziness)
 >> that Scott did DOS32 Squish, but no MAX386 (or MAX386P for that
 >> matter).  The only thing I recall him publicly stating was that
 >> there would be no point due to the amount blocking and thunking
 >> present during device I/O, and that performance might actually be
 >> degraded.  Sounded more like hypothesis than experience at the time
 >> he said it, though.

 ac> Did you ever play multiplayer Doom via a null modem cable?  Doom used
 ac> DOS4GW (Rational Systems' 32-bit DOS extender that came with Watcom
 ac> C), ie. the same one Scott used for the 32-bit DOS version of Squish.
 ac> I don't recall there ever being any performance issues with Doom
 ac> relating to serial comms.

Sorry, I muddied two different points within the same paragraph:

1.  I was suggesting that Scott may have run into showstoppers doing DOS32
support for Max, since he accomplished it in Squish and did not for Max. It
is clear from the Max docs that he certainly recognized the memory
management advantages of DOS32.

2. The blocking/thunking arguments were used to explain the OS2 release
being 16-bit and not 32-bit, due to the amount of 16-bit code still in the
OS APIs (not just comm ports, but disk, screen, keyboard, mouse, etc) .


Have you tried your DOS4GW/Doom/null modem experiment under OS/2? :)  I'll
bet it works, but doesn't quite provide the same response on the same
hardware. Seems to run OK on my daughter's Gameboy, though, too.

.\\ike

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