Gecko/20101207 Thunderbird/3.1.7   
   comp.os.os2.misc,comp.os.os2.beta   
   UTC)   
   mp.os.os2.programmer.misc:1885 comp.os.os2.misc:2831 comp.os.os2.beta:11   
   From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard    
      
   > This is VirtualBox 2.0.4 btw but I don't think it changes - still    
   > works on 4.0.0 which is the latest that I've tried (USB is another    
   > matter which is why I'm still on 2.0.4).   
   >   
      
   Versions are important.  (-:   
      
   I've tracked down the source for the ROM image that VirtualBox uses.  It    
   doesn't have, as I surmised, Plug-and-Play support.  Interestingly,    
   there's a common ancestry here with the ROM image used by Bochs, from an    
   earlier version of which the VirtualBox source was taken, and which    
   (since then) gained skeleton Plug-and-Play support somewhere in between    
   version 2.4 and version 2.4.5.  VirtualBox hasn't kept track with the    
   Bochs improvements, it seems.   
      
   What Bochs has isn't enough for real world use, however, so even if    
   VirtualBox caught up with Bochs it wouldn't be enough.  It only    
   implements the version check.  All other functions fail with an error.     
   This is pretty useless.  So I suppose that we're lucky that no-one with    
   Bochs 2.4.5 spoke up.  (-:   
      
   This is exceedingly annoying, because these virtual machines don't    
   operate like real machines in this regard.  (Real machines have had    
   fully implemented Plug-and-Play firmware support as standard since the    
   late 1990s.)  But its one more datum supporting the point that I've long    
   made that x86 virtual machines don't set out to exactly duplicate real    
   hardware.   
      
      
   --- Internet Rex 2.31   
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