It drove me mad

Francois-Rene Rideau rideau@clipper.ens.fr
Mon, 31 Jul 95 23:02:48 MET DST


> Well, Rene'! Now you know how building my own hardware and writing
> my own assembler for my project actually *saved* me a lot of time :-) :-)
   Yes, you're right ! However, TUNES is a software project: few of us can
afford hardware development, and I don't feel a hardware solution can be
useful (remember our motto) before we could demonstrate the value of our
concepts by a software implementation, as no one would even care for it.


>> ..., I couldn't fully debug the PM<->RM module, necessary to do IO.
> 
> This is a big mistake! Forget the BIOS. I know it is easy for me to
> say this as I know the PC's hardware details very well. But I think
> it will ruin Tunes if it switches to real mode for IO.
   I intend to make it clear how using the BIOS is a temporary hack that
will help me debug everything. However, I feel we need some real-mode
access later, and there are still services (like VESA BIOS, custom hardware,
etc) not easy to reprogram and update ourselves. Not to talk about later
having V86 and R86 access to allow users to run DOS-in-a-Box. So I'd really
want to have working such accesses anyway.


   Currently, I have problems with m4 whose diversions seem to be completely
buggy, so I cannot use them to emulate segmentation :( :( I'm beginning to
feel like I'd rather program a quick LLL first in any language (aka C or
FORTH), then do it all from there...

--    ,        	                                ,           _ v    ~  ^  --
-- Fare -- rideau@clipper.ens.fr -- Francois-Rene Rideau -- +)ang-Vu Ban --
--                                      '                   / .          --
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		   TUNES is a Useful, Not Expedient System
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