but if there's anyone with the knowledge and the drive to do so, go for
it! someday i envision loading up win95 under dosemu, and having an
identical window of explorer.exe under wine right next to it.
there is no 'sky' when computing. we have no limits.
> > > > As I understand it, there are only a few commands that
> > > > can't be properly virtualized on the i386 processors. Is
> > >
> > > They will trap with 'invalid instruction', and can (in
> > > theory) be deassembled and emulated JIT...
> > > [well, _can_ they??? I don't know enough about x86 to really know]
> >
> > anything can be emulated. don't ever think otherwise. there is currently a
> > working nintendo 64 emulator for win95. *anything* can be emulated on
> > *any* hardware (provided the display is suitable).
> >
> > > > it possible that there are only a few tiny patches to the
> > > > Win95 `binary' that need to be made to make it behave itself
> > > > in a virtualized 386 environment? Perhaps someone who knows
> > > > more about this than me can comment ...
>
> Sure, anything can be *emulated*, but the real problem is
> running the emulated binary at near to full speed as possible.
> This is why virtualizing the 386 is a better approach (given
> that writing a really good JIT compiler for 386 opcodes is
> difficult).
>
> I don't know the full intricacies of this, so this should be
> taken with a pinch of salt, but as I understood it, various
> instructions which should cause traps don't. An example is
> popping a stack word into the flags register which could alter
> certain system-specific flags in kernel mode. The hypothesis
> (not proven) is that Win95 probably doesn't do such things
> in many places, and so it might be feasible to patch the binary
> where it does this to make it behave in a virtualized 386
> environment.
>
> Of course, you are then open to MS changing the way future
> releases of Windows work to make these patches more and more
> difficult to achieve, particularly if this approach were
> to be successful and everyone started running their Win
> programs under Linux :-)
_ _ __ __ _ _ _
| / |/ /_ __/ /_____ | Nuke Skyjumper |
| / / // / '_/ -_) | "Master of the Farce" |
|_ /_/|_/\_,_/_/\_\\__/ _|_ nuke@bayside.net _|
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