Re: [Freedos-user] Dosemu on its own - does it exist?
The original version of vmm386 was a fantastic dos multitasker, even to the point of allowing multiple dos programs write to the screen via bios calls. I wanted to use it for some things back when it was new shareware, and I even called and got to talk to the developer. The problem for me was that my screen reader intercepted the dos interrupts for writing to the screen, so when I was using vm386, the screen reader would talk both programs simultaneously. Needless to say, that made for rather confusing operations. It worked just fine though with programs that bypassed the bios calls, and just wrote to video memory, since those my screen reader didn't intercept. On the other hand, it made the programs harder to use, so I didn't spend a lot of time using vm386 myself, but I did hear of others using it for all kinds of things, including running bbs software to handle multiple lines. I know they've tried to make an openssource version of it not so long ago, but that's not from the original sources so far as I could tell, so I don't believe it will/does work quite as well as the original program does. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping someone from grabbing a copy and installing it and running it on a machine nowadays, since the folks that made it started the opensourcing process, I doubt anyone would complain if someone used it these days. On 3/28/2023 7:17 PM, Rugxulo wrote: Hi, On Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 8:47 AM Liam Proven wrote: DR DOS does have some source code available, and includes TaskMaster, which can do full-screen multitasking of DOS sessions. This *does* work on bare modern hardware in my testing. IIRC, DR-DOS 7.03 (circa 1999) had task swapping for 286s and preemptive multitasking for 386s (TASKMGR.EXE). But you had to use their DR EMM386.EXE (no HIMEM.SYS needed) with their built-in DPMI enabled. (It had a lot of bundled / hidden .VXDs or whatever.) It was limited to 64 MB per task (despite the false claim of XMS v3 support). And no FAT32 support. Lineo/DeviceLogics president and CEO Bryan Sparks said all CP/M derivatives are free to use, modify and distribute last year. DR DOS is a derivative of CP/M-86 which is a derivative of CP/M. I think it could be used. They stopped selling DR-DOS online back in 2018, right? But I'd be surprised if DR-DOS was still considered a true derivative of CP/M-86. Almost all of the CP/M support was probably stripped out. I'm overly skeptical about that. (The so-called "OpenDOS" was only kernel and shell for "non-commercial use", AFAIK, and wasn't even patched with the latest Novell fixes.) It seems to me that if the sources of Multiuser DOS could be obtained, and if it's covered by Mr Sparks' edict, then it would give a lot of what people want from a DOS nowadays. Minix 2.0.4 (circa 2003) could run atop FAT16 (e.g. DOS). It wasn't perfect but still quite good. It could multitask its own binaries (a.out variant). I've been wanting to try to build 8086tiny (ecm's fork) under it. But even Minix choked on machines with lots of RAM. I don't think it booted atop FAT32 either. I personally wanted to try again under VirtualBox one of these days. Or just develop in standard C (or Modula-2) atop Minix [DOSMinix, booting atop FAT], with its multitasking for faster development, and later transfer your sources to DOS to compile natively. You could also run old Slackware 11 (ZipSlack) atop FAT (Linux 2.4 kernel, UMSDOS). IIRC, it had GCC 3.4.6. Maybe even an old DOSEMU would run there. Multiuser DOS was the last and final descendant of CP/M. It's a native 32-bit OS, multitasking but DOS compatible, with FAT32 support. It supports up to 4GB of RAM and apps can get both EMS and XMS services. Memory is such a mess (and I don't mean 16-bit). So many things have corner cases or bugs. In case it wasn't obvious, I did buy DR-DOS (online in 2004), but I rarely used their multitasking. The main potential uses (to me) would be 1). finding files in the background (or grepping), 2). compiling some sources, or 3). file compression. But I rarely needed to care. (Most people would also prefer listening to music or downloading files.) As a workaround, locally in FreeDOS, I always (weakly) tried to simplify things (build processes), use speedy tools, better algorithms, etc. Running atop RAM disk and/or cache also helps a ton. DJGPP can be quite slow (and worse with LFNs enabled). You know, if everything is quick and efficient (and accurate), you don't need to multitask as much. (But I hate brittle makefiles that are easy to break. I'd rather just rebuild slowly from scratch via shell script.) It has modest hardware support: CD, DVD, sound, mouse, a few other things. It supports a few network cards, and can talk TCP/IP and SMB. There are some brilliant apps that use the mouse (e.g. JED), but I rarely relied on it. Sound is the weakest link in DOS (and probably not crucial to "real work" for most people). Network can be very useful but isn'
Re: [Freedos-user] Dosemu on its own - does it exist?
Hi, On Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 8:47 AM Liam Proven wrote: > > DR DOS does have some source code available, and includes TaskMaster, > which can do full-screen multitasking of DOS sessions. This *does* > work on bare modern hardware in my testing. IIRC, DR-DOS 7.03 (circa 1999) had task swapping for 286s and preemptive multitasking for 386s (TASKMGR.EXE). But you had to use their DR EMM386.EXE (no HIMEM.SYS needed) with their built-in DPMI enabled. (It had a lot of bundled / hidden .VXDs or whatever.) It was limited to 64 MB per task (despite the false claim of XMS v3 support). And no FAT32 support. > Lineo/DeviceLogics president and CEO Bryan Sparks said all CP/M > derivatives are free to use, modify and distribute last year. DR DOS > is a derivative of CP/M-86 which is a derivative of CP/M. I think it > could be used. They stopped selling DR-DOS online back in 2018, right? But I'd be surprised if DR-DOS was still considered a true derivative of CP/M-86. Almost all of the CP/M support was probably stripped out. I'm overly skeptical about that. (The so-called "OpenDOS" was only kernel and shell for "non-commercial use", AFAIK, and wasn't even patched with the latest Novell fixes.) > It seems to me that if the sources of Multiuser DOS could be obtained, > and if it's covered by Mr Sparks' edict, then it would give a lot of > what people want from a DOS nowadays. Minix 2.0.4 (circa 2003) could run atop FAT16 (e.g. DOS). It wasn't perfect but still quite good. It could multitask its own binaries (a.out variant). I've been wanting to try to build 8086tiny (ecm's fork) under it. But even Minix choked on machines with lots of RAM. I don't think it booted atop FAT32 either. I personally wanted to try again under VirtualBox one of these days. Or just develop in standard C (or Modula-2) atop Minix [DOSMinix, booting atop FAT], with its multitasking for faster development, and later transfer your sources to DOS to compile natively. You could also run old Slackware 11 (ZipSlack) atop FAT (Linux 2.4 kernel, UMSDOS). IIRC, it had GCC 3.4.6. Maybe even an old DOSEMU would run there. > Multiuser DOS was the last and final descendant of CP/M. It's a native > 32-bit OS, multitasking but DOS compatible, with FAT32 support. It > supports up to 4GB of RAM and apps can get both EMS and XMS services. Memory is such a mess (and I don't mean 16-bit). So many things have corner cases or bugs. In case it wasn't obvious, I did buy DR-DOS (online in 2004), but I rarely used their multitasking. The main potential uses (to me) would be 1). finding files in the background (or grepping), 2). compiling some sources, or 3). file compression. But I rarely needed to care. (Most people would also prefer listening to music or downloading files.) As a workaround, locally in FreeDOS, I always (weakly) tried to simplify things (build processes), use speedy tools, better algorithms, etc. Running atop RAM disk and/or cache also helps a ton. DJGPP can be quite slow (and worse with LFNs enabled). You know, if everything is quick and efficient (and accurate), you don't need to multitask as much. (But I hate brittle makefiles that are easy to break. I'd rather just rebuild slowly from scratch via shell script.) > It has modest hardware support: CD, DVD, sound, mouse, a few other > things. It supports a few network cards, and can talk TCP/IP and SMB. There are some brilliant apps that use the mouse (e.g. JED), but I rarely relied on it. Sound is the weakest link in DOS (and probably not crucial to "real work" for most people). Network can be very useful but isn't well-supported (lack of packet drivers). That vaguely reminds me. I think I once suggested someone use FreeBSD and QEMU as a sort of way to multitask DOS. You don't even need X11 installed. The minimum (last I checked) for FreeBSD was 64 MB of RAM (486 DX or better), but of course probably much more required with a guest running. (They've had their own hypervisor, bhyve, since 2014 or so, using VT-X [EPT], but I don't specifically know if they ever bothered running DOS with it. I think they did have some shims for BIOS-based Windows. But stick with the QEMU package for now.) > It's not a true DOS, it can't run DOS device drivers, and has > functionality that's irrelevant today, such as serial terminal > support. But if someone could chase down a final version of the > source, it could have some obsolete stuff stripped out (NetBIOS and > IPX/SPX support, RS/232 terminals, etc.) and could be useful to > someone somewhere. > > I tried to contact 3 or 4 vendors of Multiuser DOS mentioned in my > article. Most didn't reply. Even Minix 3, formerly with lots of funding, still dried up in 2016. It's sad, but most people don't want a 32-bit only OS that doesn't have USB support (very complex). Well, except Intel for its Management Engine. ;-) I was always impressed by Minix and how much they accomplished, even in the 2.x days. I'm sure there are dozens of improvements we could make to
Re: [Freedos-user] TASM under an emulator?
off topic but interesting? https://yeokhengmeng.com/2023/03/building-a-dos-chatgpt-client-in-2023/ On 3/23/2023 12:44 PM, Rugxulo wrote: Hi again, On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 12:53 PM Alvah Whealton wrote: Thanks for providing me with better direction. I'm already pursuing some of your recommendations. Just to reiterate, the official recommendation of FreeDOS is to use OpenWatcom and NASM. (OW's whelp.exe is their documentation reader. For something like DJGPP it would be Texinfo, e.g. "info libc a printf" although other Info readers exist.) But a lot of other assemblers are incompatible, and old source code (e.g. 80xxx snippets) will mostly be in other dialects. YMMV, caveat emptor, etc. * http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/asm/nasm/0.98.39/8086host/ * https://pushbx.org/ecm/doc/insref.htm * https://www.nasm.us/pub/nasm/releasebuilds/2.16.01/dos/ (latest 32-bit DJGPP build) * https://www.nasm.us/pub/nasm/releasebuilds/2.16.01/doc/html/ * https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/ambread.html (see OSDN's samples, e.g. 8086 reference) Just for completeness, although not directly DOS-related, I also want to tell you about Ray Seyfarth's x64 .PDF book, it's very cheap ($5), and I think it uses YASM. He has some helpful tools (e.g. his EBE IDE). * https://www.rayseyfarth.com/asm/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Dosemu on its own - does it exist?
On Tue, 28 Mar 2023 at 09:23, tom ehlert wrote: > > we have DeskView386 which does exactly what you describe. Do you mean DESQview? It exists but with multiple drawbacks. • DESQview 386 means DESQview + QEMM386. Two separate products. • I have both. I have been unable to get QEMM to run on bare metal on any machine as new or newer than a Core 2 Duo. • Neither DESQview nor QEMM are FOSS or even freeware. Symantec says it lost the source. DR DOS does have some source code available, and includes TaskMaster, which can do full-screen multitasking of DOS sessions. This *does* work on bare modern hardware in my testing. Lineo/DeviceLogics president and CEO Bryan Sparks said all CP/M derivatives are free to use, modify and distribute last year. DR DOS is a derivative of CP/M-86 which is a derivative of CP/M. I think it could be used. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/the_many_derivatives_of_cpm/ However saying that, are there any new DOS device drivers in the 21st century? Will there be? It seems to me that if the sources of Multiuser DOS could be obtained, and if it's covered by Mr Sparks' edict, then it would give a lot of what people want from a DOS nowadays. Multiuser DOS was the last and final descendant of CP/M. It's a native 32-bit OS, multitasking but DOS compatible, with FAT32 support. It supports up to 4GB of RAM and apps can get both EMS and XMS services. It has modest hardware support: CD, DVD, sound, mouse, a few other things. It supports a few network cards, and can talk TCP/IP and SMB. It's not a true DOS, it can't run DOS device drivers, and has functionality that's irrelevant today, such as serial terminal support. But if someone could chase down a final version of the source, it could have some obsolete stuff stripped out (NetBIOS and IPX/SPX support, RS/232 terminals, etc.) and could be useful to someone somewhere. I tried to contact 3 or 4 vendors of Multiuser DOS mentioned in my article. Most didn't reply. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Dosemu on its own - does it exist?
> Hi, > I am a bit late but... +1 > On Wed, 2 Sept 2020 at 15:50, ZB wrote: > If I'm correct, Dosemu uses "virtual x86 mode" of 386 and later processors. > But Dosemu of course needs "host OS". > I wonder does there exist any utility that offers "virtual x86 mode" and > acts as "host" by itself? Suppose we have (quite modest for today) computer > with 386/486 and 4 MB RAM. Theoretically it should be possible to run quite > comfortably four DOS "instances" each one having 1 MB just for itself - and, > say, switching among them with - like among consoles in Linux. > So concentrating on using DOS - because 486 is much too "weak" for Linux of > today - I mean utility whose duty is just to switch CPU into "virtual x86 > mode", split RAM among established "instances" and then just share hardware > resources (keyboard, CD-ROM, video, sound... everything) among them. we have DeskView386 which does exactly what you describe. Tom ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
