I personally think you're barking up the wrong tree. Not only would such a
thing be impractical to implement, there would be no pragmatic benefit to it
that I can see. Even different versions of MS-DOS have different
characteristics and features that would make such a program difficult, if not
really impossible, to fully implement. I think the best you could do would be
to limit the scope to a small number of critical compatibility features that
you consider "important", but your "important list" will undoubtedly be
different than someone else's. RBIL is pretty much the de facto "gold
standard" for list of features (including undocumented features) and
compatibility issues that have been discovered thus far, but even it hasn't
been updated in a LONG time. Even if you start with RBIL, though, you would
still need to check your program against real version(s) of MS-DOS and not
necessarily have 100% faith in RBIL. In addition, even if you find official MS
documentation on how things are SUPPOSED to work (which is unlikely since MS
never really did publicly document the DOS design requirements) you can't
necessarily believe that's the way it really DOES work -- MS-DOS has bugs in
it, too. Plus, when you start adding in device drivers and TSR's and memory
extensions (whether from MS or somewhere else) the testing problems compound.
This is reminiscent of what the USB group has tried to do with USB
compatibility tests. They've produced a compatibility test suite, but it only
works on Windows. So, it depends on the underlying Windows USB foundation
built into the Operating System to even get started. However, it is well known
that Windows itself is not compliant with the USB standards, which really makes
the compatibility tests invalid. In the end, the way the USB world works is
that you need to copy (to the best of your ability) what Microsoft does instead
of what the USB standards actually say.
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