Hi All,
Glad to be on the list.
Thanks to James for sending the confirmation (I'd received no messages
other than his)
This dosemu thing is really interesting and I hope it will help me break
my last few dependencies on "gatesware" since I cannot bear their
cynical behaviour any longer.
I run a Pentium3 system at home with Linux Mandrake 8.0 although I cust
my teeth on Esix UNIX SVR4 some ten years ago I am however still by no
means expert. At work I have recently installed the first Linux system
at my workplace (for my own use) and I have this up and running with all
the usual bit for interfacing with "gatesware". I have however several
old dos programs which even though they are old are extremely powerful
these are mainly cad programs and assembler/emulator stuff for 8051
processors and it is for these that I want to use dosemu.
The main application I wish to use is one called Mcad a 2d cad system
which utilises the old dos mda interface for the text interface the main
graphic being displayed on the main screen.
I have made some progress with making this app work but I have hit a
problem. At home I can get the mda interface to work (although not yet
with the program) I can switch screens with the mode mono command and do
a directory listing and it will display on the mono monitor doing a mode
co80 will switch me back. I had to make an suid root version of dosemu
before I could do this. However on the machine at work this will not
work. After some research I have discovered that the AMI bios on the
motherboard of this machine has no INT10 support even though it was
expressly bought with ISA slots so that it would!!! (Beware Gigabyte
GA-7IXE4 and AMI!!!!) I thought I was stuffed here (scuse the term) but
not to be beaten I did some more research and I found out that someone
else had had the same problem. I finally tracked down a small bunch of
assembler files name mda4ami on Simtel.net and I thought my problems
were over. I have tried and tried these files and although they appear
to install and run as invisable tsr's I still cannot get anything out of
the mda screen. Mode mono will disable the main screen with no problem
but the output of a directory listing does not appear on the mono sceen
as it does on the home machine suid or not.
I was under the impression that dosemu was virtual machine and had hoped
that it would be minimully dependent on the machines bios but I guess
this is not the case. I have seen it hinted in the docs that I might be
able to get a result by using the Xserver for the mda card but there was
no indication as to how this could be achieved. Alternatively if I had a
clue as to what function may be missing from the mda4ami assembler files
I might be able to add it (I have the full bios listings for an Olivetti
M28 which might provide a clue).
If anyone can offer any help with this or even just a clue as to what to
look for or how to debug this sort of this it would a great help.
Whilst doing all this I had to compile the latest stable version of
Dosemu and I came across a problem which was reported a number of times
on the latest mailing list archives. There were number of people who
couldn't compile the package becuse of a problem with
srr/tools/periph/hdinfo.c beleive it or not what actually happens is
that the compiler actually deletes hdinfo.c and if it gets past this one
(cus youv'e made it read-only like I did) it just deletes the next one
in the Makefile list. The cause of this is the -MD option passed to
gcc-cpp and is a bug in the Mandrake gcc-2.96 compiler (this bug may
also be in some of the later Redhat compilers) It has been fixed in the
Madrake version but in order to apply the fix one has to upgrade glibc a
dodgy business (although I risked to prove the point!!!). If you don't
want to do this edit the base-configure.in and base-configure files to
remove it from the build system and remake the Makefiles. This worked
fine on Mandrake 8.0 but there may be dependencies on other
distributions.
Regards,
Colin Close
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