Hi, On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 11:37 PM Mercury Thirteen via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Darn. I was hoping that, in light of the early MS-DOS clone market, there was > something maybe released by a third party > to help users determine if their DOS was MS-DOSsy enough. A reach, I know, > but... oh, well. If I end up making one, I'll certainly share! :)
This always happens for systems (or compilers or languages or ...). End users (or implementers, aka cloners??) have to do most of it themselves to fill in the gaps. "Dark corners", as they say. (Unrelated but similar compatibility links mentioned here, for loose comparison): * https://www.standardpascal.com/p5.html * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237527&ref=hvper.com * https://github.com/alexfru/SmallerC/tree/master/v0100/tests * http://sed.sourceforge.net/local/tools/sedcheck.sed.html Yes, there were a lot of MS-DOS clones, but no, none of them really cared much about sharing public information. If anything, I'd say they dropped the ball, and FreeDOS was left to pick up the pieces. I'm very grateful that FreeDOS exists, but in some ways it's shunned because it's too platform (x86 + BIOS) specific. To some, that lessens the value, but "more portable" systems also have many heavy dependencies. Several years ago, I bought used a small book (roughly 120 pages) titled _MS-DOS Functions_ (by Ray Duncan). I never did much with it, but it's a cool reference. You can find used copies on Amazon fairly cheaply. It may not be the test program you want, but it's pretty good at listing compatibility (up through MS-DOS 3.3, which is "classic", IMHO). It might actually be better to have many small programs rather than one large test program. You know, test character I/O, file operations, memory management ... each tested by a separate util. Of course, you could just always rather test the "big dogs" of the DOS world: Turbo C, Lotus 1-2-3, Doom, QBASIC, etc .... I don't know of a good list of tools off-hand, but obviously things like DJGPP or OpenWatcom or FASM (or maybe small *nix utils like sed) might make for good tests. The standard (ISO) libc from *nix is pretty much what functionality many OSes tried to support (with a few exceptions). Obviously DOS lacks some things, as do many systems, but the "standard" (simple?) stuff can be tested. Maybe that should include POSIX (which?) functions, too. Take a look at documentation for DJGPP's (POSIX) libc or Free Pascal's (TP) units. * http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/libc/ * https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/dos/index.html _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
