On Thu, 17 Oct 2024, Steve Lewis wrote:
I follow all that (on the DEBUG.COM notes) and appreciate the notes - that
will save some time, I look forward to trying a few things out tomorrow.
I forgot to do VER explicitly, but on boot up it is saying MS-DOS 2.00.
And just now, I recalled that on github there is MS-DOS source (and bins) -
I think Dave's Garage, he recently did a video on building and booting
MS-DOS 4.0 from that source. Maybe I should use this as an excuse to try
a 2.0 build? Or least, reading through the FORMAT.ASM, I see all the
DOSVER checking stuff - helps confirm patch addresses, or maybe try just
recompiling that one utility without this check.
Reading through the CONFIG.txt in the MS-DOS 2.0 github repo, it's
interesting near the end: (the use of forward slash instead of backslash,
ha! and just above this, the comments mention /dev/<dev>)
"A typical configuration file might look like this:
BUFFERS = 10
FILES = 10
DEVICE = /bin/network.sys
BREAK = ON
SWITCHAR = -
SHELL = a:/bin/command.com a:/bin -p"
GOOD
So, you should be able to patch FORMAT 2.11 ti work on the DOS version
that is running.
BUT, whether Format /S or SYS will work remains to be seen.
I have seen cases where the opening banner does not quite match the stored
version number, such as 4.01 V 4.00
and a conditional jmp needs an exact match.
So, definitely run VER
and/or
in debug A(Assemble)
MOV AH,30
INT 21
INT 3 ; ends program and displays registers
and see what it shows in AX
(running that in CMD of my Windows 7 gives 0005 (5.00)!)
One of the early homework assignments when I taught PC Assembly was to go
into DEBUG and patch LINK.EXE and EXE2BIN.EXE to eliminate DOD version
checking.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred [email protected]
