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Huge necropost but hoping to reach out to the Sandmann on this
(complete original message follows)


On 5/27/2014 12:42 AM, Charles Sandmann wrote:
>> "Rod Pemberton"  wrote in message news:op DOT xft25kb26zenlw AT localhost...
>
>> I'm sure you've probably answered this before, but why was a
>> replacement (MWDPMI) for CWSDPMI planned originally?
>
> CWSDPMI required a commercial compiler TurboC (which wasn't free)
> to build.  Later I started building with BorlandC (also not free) when I
> wrote my own libc routines.  The resulting code is not very tight
> (not a lot of optimization happens without the developer rewriting
> code to make it happen).  It also had some areas of the code which could
> be cleaned up.  The goal was to build with a GNU provided
> toolchain.  Eventually Borland made TurboC free so users could build
> it themselves.  Windows provides built-in DPMI.  So the need
> decreased while the authors' time became less available.
>
> When DJGPP v2 was in development, we had concerns about what
> DOS users would do.  Stick with v1?  Be forced to buy commercial
> DPMI to run the free compiler and executables?  The original plan
> was always to have DPMI be fully built with the toolchain (using
> DJASM and GCC).   But that was a big project at the same time we
> were trying to get v2 feature complete and bug free.  So I did a quick
> modification of DJ's GO32 and got a very minimal DPMI server working in
> a few weeks of work.  Go compare the GO32
> source to CWSDPMI sometime.  So CWSDPMI was always
> just another week or so of effort before it would be frozen as
> good enough and we would work on the next generation.   There
> never were a lot of CWSDPMI releases - r1 to r3 were in 1996,
> r4 in 1998 ... and the rest was just minor updates and big memory
> handling.  You can probably check the archives for the
> number of times I said this will be the last release of CWSDPMI.
> I'm glad other people have had the time and motivation to
> provide alternatives so I don't have to worry about it.  I still hear
> about distributions using older versions (like r3).
> Never underestimate the effort to bring something to production
> that talks at a low level to the hardware.  There were issues with
> some types of machines, or hardware interrupts, that took months to
> track down and debug with CWSDPMI.  In the early
> releases there were lots of people testing with simple test programs.
> Still today occasionally I hear about new hardware
> that doesn't handle A20 quite right (who cares anymore?)  But
> there just wasn't the time (or drive) to finish MWDPMI.  I
> still have an ancient Compaq laptop that DPMIOne will hard hang in some
> configurations.
>
> CWSDPMI had a big installed base, so commercial companies
> also helped out - like Symantec sending me a patches to work
> around bugs in Intel chips.  They got Intel to help them figure that out
> ... things dealing with instruction sequences.  I also got feedback from
> id on the Quake user issues early during
> the betas.
>
>

You mention stuff with id.  What was is that they worked with you on and 
what did you implement?  Is any of the correspondence saved?

I read some more ancient threads from Quake's heyday on here and it 
appeared that they wanted a Ring-0 version of CWSDPMI and some stuff 
with nearptrs.

Sezero and I have been successfully using regular CWSDPMI.EXE instead of 
CWSDPR0.EXE in QDOS, Q2DOS, and uHexen2 with no issues...  Though I 
switched backed to CWSDPR0.EXE in my QDOS project since the original id 
game used it as such.  I haven't noticed any serious performance 
degradation or increase between using one or the other.

Apologies for the necropost, but was looking over old archives and this 
caught my attention!

Frank

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