Hi, I think it would be really interesting to have PCMCIA drive, for example compact flash, support in DOS. Not with hotswapping, but a nice idea would be a device driver which initializes PCMCIA to activate the IDE controller to the CF card, and then tweaks BIOS data (40:xx data segment and maybe EBDA) to tell the BIOS that there is now one IDE controller more. Then the driver can access the disk with help of the BIOS (or read the sources of the DOS UDMA driver to learn how to do directly... well, actually PCMCIA does not normally support DMA at all, but the IDE controller communication is still very similar). It can read the partition table and offer the FAT partitions as normal block devices (comparable to RAMDISKs) for normal DOS access.
Some nice code fragment which could help to get such a driver project started (you will have to add code from kernel initdisk and from a RAMDISK plus the abovementioned BIOS and/or IDE magic) has been donated by Deskwork (shareware GUI with file meta-info- database instead of long file names, and with some built-in drivers) project: http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~eric/stuff/soft/by-others/deskwork-unit-pcmcia.pas Not that I would have any time for a PCMCIA driver project, but maybe it is good to remind the people of the list that we already do have several building blocks for one :-). Eric PS: Another interesting project would be a read-only block device which is fed by a disk image (possibly compressed!) and thereby only uses little XMS. It can use int 2f.122x (meant for NLSFUNC in the first place) file open / read interface to avoid most re- entrancy problems (apart from not being able to load country sys from the diskimage device ;-))... ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: InterSystems CACHE FREE OODBMS DOWNLOAD - A multidimensional database that combines robust object and relational technologies, making it a perfect match for Java, C++,COM, XML, ODBC and JDBC. www.intersystems.com/match8 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
