I am trying to setup FAT12 drives so that I can test doslfn and doslfnMS which have been very recently updated.
I can only work via bare metal mode (usb BOOT disk is C:\ with also partitions D:\ and E:\). To date I have created a FAT16 partition (D:\) which both Windows and FreeDOS can recognize and work with. I cannot find a way to reformat just the D:\ partition into a FAT12 - neither via Windows, CMD or so far by FreeDOS. I was aiming for a 256 MB FAT12, but if this is not possible then a 32 MB FAT12 will do. I also tried using a USB floppy drive as a FAT12 test drive, but strangely Windows refuses to have anything to do with it. When in FreeDOS, attempting to read the USB floppy drive results in say a DIR listing of part of what's on the current FreeDOS drive followed by a lot of garbage - NO reference of what is on the floppy disk. If there are not any programs available to make FAT12 - is there a way to "manually" byte-wise change things on the FAT16 partition (D:\) giving the same effect as what FORMAT would have done? Richard ________________________________ From: Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> Sent: Saturday, 23 April 2022 8:01 PM To: freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: [Freedos-devel] Update on website usability test Hi Jim, hi everybody, sorry about being so late with the review. I hope the (rather critical, but of course not intended to be personal pouting & nagging) comments below still help. It may be my German bad understanding of fashion, but: A professional designer donated a new website design and the result was that in a test, 2 out of 5 topics were almost impossible to find. That does not sound like an "overall ... good" and professional product to me. The fact that your students commented that the website now looks like other websites about software sounds like "we are following a global trend to make websites look nicer while making them less usable"? :-p On the other hand, I guess it will be easy for you to make the important things easier to find on the news website, so we will get the best of BOTH worlds: New looks and an easy to use website. For me, it is always good to find the LIST OF PACKAGES with descriptions and versions quickly. At the moment, it only takes 2 or 3 clicks: "Download FreeDOS", then go to "What's included" and enjoy that packages are grouped by category in one large list, with each package name being a link to some HTML rendering of the LSM metadata. Your test tasks 1, 3, 5 are immediately answered by the start page of the current version, while the install instructions are in "download" and the mailing lists are in "forums", very few clicks away. In the new redesign, tasks 1, 2, 3, 5 are immediately linked on the start page, with 4 being hidden behind the two steps "contribute" and "join the forums" which is a code for "mailing lists" ;-) However, only 1 is one of the topics linked with an image on the start page, all others are not. Next, the new download page ONLY gives you download disks. Why does the new download page REMOVE all other GOOD to have links found on the old download page? Being "how to install", "verify", "what's included" and "read the readme", as well as "how to write IMG" and a link to the individual package file archive? All of those are very useful to read in context of downloading and I agree that other software websites also fail in providing this information in easy to find ways. But we should not follow that bad example! The current design focuses on "download" and "news", while adding common other topics on the top menu bar and social media (only as non-accessible graphical logo links) and other things in the bottom menu bar. The new design largely preserves the menu bars, but tucks away the news behind a small text link which does not have any glitter added. While it is very nice and unusual that a project as FreeDOS still has regular interesting news and is not one of those retro projects which have not been touched for years. So the news should get more shine. Instead, the new design gives more spotlights to the youtube channel, system requirements (which are rather boring: it SHOULD run on every PC, but on very new PC, you will need a VM or emulator to compensate the lack of BIOS and, not mentioned in the new design at all, almost every game will need those for sound anyway), "about", games, application and programming, However, "about" just is an optional detour to reach the games, application and programming pages, why? With a rather short text about the why of FreeDOS, with a typo "sofwtare" ;-) The new "games" section links to several online games collections, but does not provide hints on the sound issue. And there could be a number of shiny game screenshots on it as well :-) The new programming section looks like a quite useful collection of links to compilers, notably INcluding several freeware ones but EXcluding the open source DJGPP, why? Also, offering 3 Borland Pascal and 2 Borland C/C++ (you mistakenly called Turbo C 2.01 Turbo C++ 2.01, I think?) downloads next to DeSmet, Digital Mars, Smaller C and, oddly, PDcurses puts too much weight on Borland, I think. I certainly like Borland compilers, but it would be enough to give them 2 tiles on the new download page: One with all 3 Pascal download links and one with all C/C++ download links, to making the Borland offer look a bit more humble ;-) The new applications section starts with VisiCalc, AsEasyAs and Ability Plus (Office), which seems a bit of an arbitrary choice, then continues with links to 4 large DOS app archives combined with a link to Mercury's tiny archive and a link to a simple toolkit for caps and num lock, again a bit arbitrary in choice. I guess that is part of the new design being a reduced test edition for the moment, but the mix still feels odd. Nitpicking regards, Eric PS: Why does the start page say you need INTEL CPU? How about AMD, Cyrix and all other brands? Excluding ARM, Apple and Motorola, but still... _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
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