Tested the floppy installer in 86Box with an 80286 machine, the "[ISA]
MR BIOS 286 clone" board (because I like having a BIOS setup menu and a
PC/AT doesn't have one) with a 1200KB 5.25" floppy drive and a
1024:16:63 (504 MB) IDE hard drive.
The readme says an EGA is required, so I intentionally disobeyed that
instruction out of curiosity and emulated a CGA instead. No issues
there. (But maybe this BIOS's CGA INT 10h handler is better than that of
an IBM 5150 BIOS.)
For my first attempt, it turns out that 512 KB of RAM is not enough, 640
KB seems to be needed. (Or maybe the first attempt at installing fails
and one needs to try again.) The error I got with 512 KB RAM was:
FATAL ERROR: error code #2, unspecified error with "DOC\KERNEL\Z6B37QYM.GZ"
Failed.
It happened after the "FreeDOS is an open source DOS-compatible
operating system that you can use to..." blurb after putting the first
non-boot disk in.
(Another metric is I went with 6 MHz at first, but then bumped it up to
25 MHz for the second attempt as the speed was painful. Not sure if that
would have been the issue though, but mentioning it for completeness.)
For some reason, the installer says "Install FreeDOS files for 386."
despite it being a 286. After some digging, it seems that, when the
TTAGS variable is being set (which is the one responsible for displaying
that message), it forces the CPU detection to report a 386 at a bare
minimum.
Anyway, in the second attempt with the RAM upped to 640KB, it all seems
to install and run fine albeit with a program reporting an "Invalid
Opcode at B564 F000" after loading FreeCom when doing a boot with XMS
enabled. The FDXMS286 driver still appears to installed and I guess the
XMS_Swap stuff seems to be working... well, at least after a cold boot -
after Ctrl-Alt-Del it complains about VDISK being installed and nothing
gets XMS'd and also SYSTEM and COMMAND use notably more conventional memory.
Overall, for a pre-386 CPU, it seems to do alright. I haven't done a
stress test to see how well it behaves once things are installed.
My main complaint actually is that the installation process is very
slow, taking about 11 minutes per 1200 KB disk - ideal speed assuming
the floppy disk is the bottleneck and everything else can run in the
background would be about 32 seconds, and I'm not sure why it would take
notably more than twice that. I keep wanting to point the finger at UPX,
but for a 25 MHz 286 it's providing something like a 0.5-second worst case.
I'm somewhat tempted to explore that rabbit hole and see what it would
take to get the installation time down for 2.0 (or 1.5 if we're still
struggling with Windows 3.1 Enhanced Mode support by the next release).
- Ben R
On 02/04/2025 00:55, Jerome Shidel via Freedos-devel wrote:
Hi All,
The FreeDOS 1.4 “Gold Master” is now available for download at:
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/
If all is as expected, the plan is this build will become the official
FreeDOS 1.4 release.
Both the “1.4" and “Latest" software download and update repositories
have been brought current.
All projects on the FreeDOS GitLab Archive that are included on the
release have been tagged with “FreeDOS-v1.4” to mark their state at
release time.
:-)
Jerome
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