Hi again, On Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 12:25 PM Tom Ehlert <t...@drivesnapshot.de> wrote: > > more experiments. > > METADOS is a very advanced, very spaghetti BATCH project, > which in the end connects you with TCP, downloads components > (MEM.EXE below) from the internet and more interesting stuff. > unfortunately, *very* spaghetti.
.BAT doesn't have loops. It overuses "goto". It's not Turing complete. Frankly, it's very weak, but at least it does some minimal things well. The advantage is that it's familiar syntax (well, to DOS luddites) and uses simple text files, so it's easily modified. The less precompiled binaries, the better. That way it's easier to vet the sources. (Unfortunately, FTP [8086] isn't enough, so I have to also use that to grab WGET [386, DPMI] for retrieving other things.) Using certain tools (not installed yet) relies on downloading via stub .BATs. In addition to avoiding the burden of carrying around GPL sources for a billion different utils (that aren't directly needed, at least not in most circumstances), the advantage is also smaller disk footprint, e.g. floppy image. If I included everything, I'd have to use .VHD or .ISO or similar. Granted, most people can use bootable USB nowadays, but I still wanted to try to keep things as small and simple as possible. > anyway, FreeCOM 0.84-pre5 prerelease doesn't behave a) as expected, > and b) not really in a reproducible way. > > what I did: > > everything in a current VirtualBOX, 32 MB memory, no hard disk I usually use 128 MB (and 50% of that for RAM disk), but sometimes I need 512 MB for some few tests. > boot from > http://www.drivesnapshot.de/freedos/metadosd1.zip > > enable/disable ECHO ON (which shouldn't change behaviour, but does) > and put 4 different command.coms to be selected by boot menu (which > shouldn't change behaviour either, but does as well). > > observations: > original Pre2 command works as expected. maybe it's only lucky, but it > works. Yes, it works fairly well with very few (noticeable) bugs. > gcc seems to work (205 files created), but > MEM > which pulls MEM.exe from internet crashes the virtual box. > > MEM also *sometimes* crashes the turboC pre5 Like I said, it was reporting "Invalid opcode" for me. Though it didn't crash any VMs (though I've rarely seen that happen before, too, which is probably unintentional). Note that things do behave differently (under VBox) depending on whether you have VT-X enabled or not. (This laptop never does, and I think JEMM386 is one particular bone of contention. It's also tons slower, so some heavy tests using DJGPP [p7zip?] take hours longer.) > these effects may depend on the environment; they may also depend > on the packet driver. Only two packet drivers are included. AMD/PCNTPK is default. The other NE2000 was mostly for ancient QEMU builds (0.13?). > I am just out of ideas for the moment, and unfortunately this disk is > not compatible with SoftICE as it uses protected mode :<< We've long ago jumped the shark in cpu requirements. Most things, even in DOS, require 386 (and/or DPMI, etc). I'm totally in favor of keeping 8086 compatibility when feasible (or even just as long as technically possible), but it's harder than it sounds. Just saying .... > if anyone feels like playing himself with this ... > > good luck I know it's convoluted, but it's not *that* difficult. A .BAT can only handle so much complexity, even if using third-party tools for various things. At least, to me, it's fairly obvious what tool does what. (But maybe not.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
