Re: [Freedos-user] cannot boot installation media
Hi! Not all USB sticks are enabled for booting. And maybe it is disabled in your BIOS setup. The MBR of the stick may matter as well, and whether you boot UEFI style (not possible with FreeDOS) or classic style ;-) ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] How can I make FreeDOS correctly display the "ã" character?
Hi Robert and Davi, The system's keyboard and layout are already configured to "br" (for Brazilian Portuguese) and working perfectly. Other accentuated characters display just fine. That is the case of "á", "à", "ô". However, "ã" shows as something else entirely. Image below: oIh6TW8.png How can I get FreeDOS to correctly display those characters? You probably have to load DISPLAY and use MODE to set the codepage to load a font which has all accented characters at the place where your already Brazilian keyboard configuration expects them :-) See the HTMLHELP system for details. There should also be some examples on the web. It should work similar to this: First, load the DISPLAY thing. You can do this in your autoexec to load it automatically at boot, or manually at the prompt: LH DISPLAY CON=(EGA,,1) rem or maybe for example DISPLAY CON=(EGA,858,1) or similar? Second, use MODE CON CODEPAGE (shorthand MODE CON CP also works) to first prepare (shorthand PREP) and then select (shorthand SEL) the codepage for your country. In my example the codepage is 858, which happens to be in EGA.CPX, which is a compressed version of EGA.CPI - some less common codepages will probably be in other CPX files. MODE CON CP PREP=((858) C:\FDOS\cpi\EGA.CPX) MODE CON CP SEL=858 You can do those two MODE invocations in autoexec or at the prompt as well. You can use MODE /? for help, too. The internet says that Brazilians prefer codepage 860 :-) Regards, Eric 1) How do you enter "ã"? 2) Is that a separate key on your keyboard? 3) What does https://bootablecd.de/fdhelp-internet/en/hhstndrd/base/keycode.htm produce, when you hit that key or key combo? Interesting questions :-) Maybe all falls into place with CP860. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Dial-up emulation?
Here is a neat summary of the DOS PPP drivers: http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/internet.html#I ...but, someone has already raised this question: Do you have a "counterpart"? I mean - a dial-in service answering with a modem and a PPP stack. Or at least a null-modem connection to a PPP "server", such as pppd running on Linux. Or possibly Windows running the "server side of RAS" would work too. On BTTR, there is a thread about this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLVHXn79l8M "Let's Make a DOS BBS in a offensively modern way" 00:00 - Intro 00:15 - A Word from our sponsors 00:39 - What is a BBS 05:16 - How does a BBS work 13:15 - Lets get modern (containers) 23:51 - Kubernetes 26:56 - Build a server install Kubernetes 31:30 - Ceph, lets store some files 38:09 - Doors 42:38 - Lets make a helm chart 49:03 - Dial in and modems 53:17 - fTelnet 55:28 - Fidonet 58:13 - Thanks https://github.com/jgoerzen/docker-bbs-renegade Might fit with the topic discussed here, but on the other side, it might not answer the question which SLIP or PPP servers can be recommended and whether you connect them to real or rather simulated modems? I have not watched the video yet. Let me know :-) Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] GIT news via BTTR
Hi :-) Following the postings on BTTR, I collected some GIT links for you: 1. Japheth has released VSBHDA (Virtual SoundBlaster for HDA, I guess) now with 16-bit support, improved emulation and Runtime Error 200 fix. https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA/releases 2. The DIY SoundBlaster 1.0 clone "Snark Barker" comes with a free/open diagnostics tool SBDIAG, which is nice for everybody. https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker 3. A new version of the MicroWeb browser, 2.0 has been released. It supports Unicode and GIF and creates PNG/JPEG placeholders, if I understand things correctly and can now use EMS memory. https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/releases/tag/v2.0 4. USBDDOS is a DOS driver stack for USB by Crazii: https://github.com/crazii/USBDDOS Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Adapter PCMCIA to CF
Hi! If I have to guess: If your CF is at least a POTENTIAL boot device, the BIOS may add it to the list of harddisks for which no DOS drivers are required. If it is not, then it is just some plug and play device which may come and go and for which you would probably have to find appropriate DOS drivers to let DOS handle the coming and going properly. Similar things happen with USB flash sticks: If you boot from them, they may behave like internal harddisks, but if you do not, or if you remove one stick and plug another stick while DOS is already running, DOS and/or the BIOS may not notice the "disk change", causing all sorts of problems. Regards, Eric OK, apparently the PCMCIA -> CF adapter must be added to the BIOS boot list. Otherwise FreeDOS doesn't detect it. So everything is fine, 100% functional. Can someone explain to me why I have to add it to the boot list in the BIOS? I don't want it to try to boot from the adapter. If you can give me a website to read, that'll be enough for me. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Directory comparison program
You could try a DOS port of (GNU, diffutils?) "diff", for example from the Delorie DJGPP compiler website. Diff can be used to list differences in text content of files or directories full of files, but you can also use it with options "-qr" to just get a list which files only exist in which of the two directories and which files exist in both with different contents. Files which exist in both and have the same contents will not get listed, unless you add the option -s Whether file sizes differ is covered by whether contents do, but diff does not tell you whether date and time differ. You could abuse the dry run mode of rsync for that, maybe, but this would probably be a weird solution for the task. So I suggest: diff -qr onedirectory otherdirectory or, at your choice, diff -qrs onedirectory otherdirectory :-) Eric Yes indeed. It would be recursive too. Report the absence or presence of files/ directories, differences of file sizes, date/ time. On 2024/03/20 10:38, Thomas Cornelius Desi wrote: You mean it would list filenames differing from a Dir /foo and Dir /fuzz like in a diff program? Does any know of a directory comparison program? John ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] QEMU - Max size of Linux access folder
Hi Jim, while this is a bit off-topic: Turning a 32-bit Ubuntu into a 64-bit one is tedious, so the recommended way is to just install the new over the old and keep your home directory. A few commands in the shell can help you to, more or less, clone your old package selection into the new system, but there is no wizard to help you with that at all, which I found very disappointing given how smoothly their upgrade wizards usually lift you from one version of their whole distro to the next if you stay within the same bit-ness. So people just decide that 32-bit is dead and you end up with no longer getting updates from your distro, being forced to re-install more or less from scratch. In my case, I could not have stuck to the outdated packages, because the new graphics card only had 64-bit drivers. Nevertheless, I liked the time when dosemu could just use hardware vm86 for fast CPU access on 32-bit Linux. Now you always get emulated CPU, which of course does have advantages in some cases - such as running on ARM or emulating more aspects of real and protected mode. Also, dosemu2 gets FAR more frequent updates than dosemu. Regards, Eric PS: It also frustrates me that 4 GB are not enough for a few dozen browser tabs in 2024, neither with 32- nor with 64-bit Linux under the hood. I want efficient apps instead of repeatedly having to add more RAM or SSD swap. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] QEMU - Max size of Linux access folder
How about using Dosemu2? When you add their PPA, you get frequent updates. Unfortunately focused on 64-bit distros, but performance is quite okay and it can map any Linux directory to a DOS drive letter, so size is "unlimited". Eric Hi Jim Thanks again. My problem is that I have assembler source code from 40 years that occupies about 680Mb that needs to reside on one drive in order to assemble. Then there are the application programs. All this currently resides on an ancient XP machine. I have stayed with Lubuntu 18.04 as the later versions use SNAP and no longer support old hardware. Newer versions are very slow. I have removed snap and tried all the tips to improve speed and responsiveness without success. The current system error appears to have no obvious impact. I have located the logs and nothing jumps out at me. QEMU has improved. I tried QEMU over 2 years ago and gave up. It fell over every time while trying to run Borland's Sprint word processor. It now works correctly. John ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Ramdisk
Hi! You probably want to use XMS based ramdisks, not EMS. Also, the max size for FAT16 ramdisk is a bit below 2 GB and you can only have far less than 4 GB combined size because some of your first 4 GB address space are used for graphics etc. You can use "super extended" XMS 3.5 for a combined size of more than 4 GB, though. Several FAT16 drives, there is no FAT32 ramdisk that I would be aware of yet. The concept of XMS 3.5 is experimental, a special XMS driver and modified ramdisks for it can be found on: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HimemSX ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] C programming guides
Hi Thomas, many screens will resize the signal you send them to full screen, probably with black bars either on top and bottom or left and right to match aspect ratio. This will usually give you large pixels or a fuzzy, blurred experience, so it has downsides nevertheless. So it is not common to get a physically small image from low resolutions. Some laptops did that, but they typically had a hotkey to enable scaling, something done by hardware and/or BIOS? Anyway, I would suggest that you either use MODE to activate one of the more classic modes, or some VESA based utility to activate any of the modes offered by the VESA VGA BIOS. This, however, will give you more characters on screen, but not larger ones! If your screen does scaling, the characters will actually be smaller if you have more of them. So you could rephrase your question: Is there a DOS text editor which uses high resolution VESA modes and high resolution character fonts, for large and sharp character outlines? I think Blocek uses graphical fonts, but I am not sure which font sizes it includes. Editors with vector based fonts could scale dynamically based on screen resolution. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] C programming guides
Hi Ed, Is there any major differences between FreeDOS and MSDOS under the hood? FreeDOS aims to be highly compatible with MS DOS, so even if you rely on some "reasonably inner workings" of DOS beyond the normal int 21 interface etc. everything should still work very much the same with FreeDOS. A well-known exception is Windows: If you use 386 enhanced mode or Windows for Workgroups and open multiple DOS windows in parallel, Windows will rely VERY much on deeper inner workings to be exactly as in MS DOS to make this work with DOS, which normally does not run several times in parallel. This only has rather experimental support in newer FreeDOS kernels. Probably no issue for you, though. I did notice differences in DosBOX as this has the SVGA drivers built in so you can use high definition modes up to 1024x768 in 256 colours iirc. That is not actually a property of DOS: It is a property of your DOS applications and whether your hardware (or simulation of it, if you run DOS in a DOSBOX window) is compatible with what your applications expect. It also depends on whether your VGA BIOS is compatible with what your application expects. That said, SVGA will work equally well with MS DOS and FreeDOS, because DOS itself does not participate in SVGA infrastructure. SVGA just is something used by your apps, provided by your hardware and BIOS. In exciting related news: There is a new project to create a simulation of a classic Sound Blaster soundcard, figure out what sound it would produce, and then send that sound data to a modern standard HDA or AC97 sound chip which is more likely to exist in your modern real hardware PC than an old ISA slot with an old soundcard. This can be very useful because your old games are likely to hardcode expectations about sound hardware which simply are not met by modern sound chips. So there are no easily swappable drivers and the simulation is a good workaround. Yet again, your old games communicate directly with the real or simulated sound hardware. There are no interfaces for this provided by DOS, so it makes no difference whether you use MS DOS or FreeDOS when it comes to sound in apps. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] News from the forum
Hi! Here are some recent news from the BTTR forum :-) Japheth has updated JEMM, DEBUG and vSBhda: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=21356 - VSBHDA is a fork of crazii's SBEMU which creates a virtual SoundBlaster and sends the sound to your real HDA, ICH, nForce, VT82c686, VT823x or SB Live or SB Audigy sound with the help of HDPMI32 and JEMMEX protected mode APIs - DEBUG has some bugfixes in version 2.01 and 2.02 this year - JEMM 5.84 improves simulated I/O QEMM QPI API compatibility (which is relevant for VSBHDA, for example) Some person who created a HMI style HDA sound driver now also offers something called AHCIWRAP .sys: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=21336 The fork implements audio and raw secctor functions, as well as controller PCI addresses != 00:1f.2 on top of AHCI.SYS https://github.com/PluMGMK?tab=repositories Laaca recommends the same developer because of the mentioned HMIDRV_HDAUDIO driver for DOS games with HMI driver framework: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=21335 https://github.com/PluMGMK/hmidrv_hdaudio I wonder which games use HMI. Apparently Rayman and Watlers World. There is a new version of the ASTRA "Advanced Sysinfo Tool and Reporting Assistant" from sysinfolab as well as a new HWINFO: http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=16853 https://www.hwinfo.com/download/ HWINFO 6.2.3 2023-12-29 http://www.sysinfolab.com/download.htm ASTRA 7.0 2023-12-12 (free for non-commercial use, with SPD, SMBIOS, chipset info) Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] AUTO SHIFT keyboard on DOS??
Hi! So it would need a »timer« to count from pressed key to released. if >500 ms, it should send an ASCII We understood that. But be aware that you normally set the typematic function to start typing MULTIPLE characters after a selectable delay of between 250 and (at most) 1000 msec. So if you hold the "a" key for more than 1 second, would you want it to type multiple "a" or rather multiple "A"? And would you need this "hold for at least 500 ms to get A instead of a" only for A-Z or also for other keys? Bret mentioned the example that people want to keep "=" pressed to type "" lines and I myself would want to keep "left" pressed to move the cursor further left etc. example uppercase A = DECIMAL code 65 lowercase a = DECIMAL code 97 Difference between lowercase and uppercase is 32 In my example with MKEYB, you would not actually manipulate the ASCII value. Instead, you manipulate whether the BIOS believes whether you have pressed SHIFT ;-) The actual key to ASCII conversion stays in the reliable hands of the BIOS. Would this work? Sure. You would not even need a new timer for it, because you already HAVE a system timer tick counter. So you just look at that counter when a key is pressed and look again when it is released. Then you calculate the difference and based on that you decide whether the special driver pretends SHIFT was pressed at the moment the key got released ;-) Of course this means you have to modify the source CODE. It will not make the driver much more complex. Feasible. The other suggestion was that you could press some key which is otherwise not used BEFORE typing the "a" to tell the driver that you mean "A". This is very similar to the well-known feature that you can press ^ followed by a to type â and so on. A driver which already has support for such accent combos could probably support new combos for upper case chars by simply editing the CONFIGURATION without editing the CODE. You could probably use a key like one of the windows keys, the scroll lock key or some accent you do not really use as "the accent/special key which makes the next character you type an upper case one" :-) Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] AUTO SHIFT keyboard on DOS??
Hi! Indeed I was hinting at "manipulating 40:17 does not automatically sync the physical LED, but we might not care for auto shift anyway". Regarding your idea to show shift LED status on screen, check out the old LOCKTONE with audible feedback: https://auersoft.eu/soft/ Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] AUTO SHIFT keyboard on DOS??
Hi! https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/keyb/xkeyb/xkeyb-1994/XKEYB.TXT This seems one of those nifty keyboard drivers, but it has not time-critical functions I was more thinking in the direction of MKEYB or other int 15.4f based drivers: They see all key press and key release events and are able to manipulate things before they return control to the BIOS keyboard routines. The idea is as follows: If the driver sees a key press event, it could record the current time (counter at 40:6c) and, if a temporary fake shift was active (see details below), deactivate it now. If the driver sees a key release event, it could check if the corresponding key press event was long enough ago. If yes, it could make the BIOS believe that SHIFT would have been active at the moment. The driver can set some flag for itself, so it knows to undo the fake later. Return to BIOS. To fake shifts, one can just modify the flags at 40:17 and 18. It will not update the keyboard LEDs, but that is acceptable. The BIOS itself uses 40:96 and 97 to track its own status. Of course the details can get a bit more complicated, as you also have press and release events for shift keys etc. and special E0 ... key combinations and so on. But if you are happy with just the most mainstream keys acting in that "long press means shift" style and only while no actual ctrl, shift, alt or similar modifier keys are pressed, it should be quite feasible to implement this. Note that you will also have to manipulate the autorepeat functionality of the keyboard or BIOS. For example our MODE CON RATE=... DELAY=... command shows how to do this. It just uses BIOS function int 16.0305, no low-level trick. You can also think of the driver keeping track of WHICH key is in progress of being pressed for longer, for extra control over the interaction of typematics and autoshift. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] AUTO SHIFT keyboard on DOS??
Hi! I am not aware of such drivers, but it would not be hard to write one. I think there already are drivers to make shift keys sticky, or to give audible feedback, as in my ancient locktone experiment inspired by Mielke.cc :-) Eric is it possible in DOS (using BIOS?) to implement a tsr or so which allows the following: holding a key longer to return a SHIFT-key on screen? Example: press key »a« and HOLD the key for e.g. 500 milliseconds, => print shift-a = »A« on screen. Anyone around who has an idea or knowledge if this is possible or has been done or any hints where to look? ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] One use case for FreeDos
Hi Thomas, actually I was looking for a laptop with FreeDos using a photovoltaic system… That should be relatively easy. Photovoltaics can output 12V DC, 230V AC with an inverter, or higher DV voltages directly via USB-C which some newer laptops use for charging. However, those will not usually have a BIOS, only EFI, so they cannot run DOS on hardware. Running DOS on a not too new laptop is generally easy, but you will almost never have WiFi / WLAN drivers for DOS and whether popular DOS text or graphics modes look okay on the laptop screen will vary depending on the model. Maybe a trial and error thing. Or maybe some people here can recommend some laptop models :-) I once tested DOS on an eeePC, which was okay, but as far as I remember, popular resolutions had to be displayed either with black bars or in a distorted and somewhat fuzzy zoom mode, so it would probably take some experimenting to find a smooth mode. Also, eeePC are too tiny for real work, I was just curious there. (Is there DosBox for iPhones :?? ) There probably are some PC and/or DOS emulators for Android. Interesting that you already knew Velotype! Regarding mouse movement: In text mode, the mouse will jump one character at at time. Of course there are graphics mode based editors for DOS, too, like Blocek. Which may also have the advantage that you could pick a graphics mode with better match to your laptop screen size. printers understanding plain text or PDF are easily available. However, remember that text editors for DOS do not directly output PDF, so you will need additional tools and steps from text file to printout on paper. I agree that Centronics no longer is popular for printers, but if you want to run old printers on new PC, use an USB to LPT adapter cable. I would hope generic DOS drivers exist for that. Interestingly, with modern hardware, printing from DOS through wired LAN to a network printer with PDF and/or PS or plain text support might actually be less effort than using USB, but those printers are probably more bulky than certain USB printer types. Which brings in small external "print server" devices where you can plug USB printers and a network to make printers networked. Maybe some can also do the PDF rendering for "dumb" printers, but the whole idea is getting close to "just use Raspberry Pi or all that modern hardware and run a DOS window on that" ;-) Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] One use case for FreeDos
Hi! Why a typewriter? Because where I write, I don’t have electricity (!). Well there always is sun and photovoltaics... What type of text input hardware would you like, given that you dislike the current style of keyboards? Apart from sliding a pen over an on-screen keyboard? Is your goal to enter text quickly? Maybe learn to Velotype :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velotype The estimated energy consumption of a Google search query is 0.0003 kWh (1.08 kJ). The estimated energy consumption of a ChatGPT-4 query is 0.001-0.01 kWh (3.6-36 kJ) [...] That means a single GPT query consumes 1,567%, or 15 times more energy But 36 / 1.08 would even be 33, not 15? Every first letter of a new sentence appears with a lower case letter. Autocorrect could fix that. The road map of FreeDOS seems to me include compatibility with advancing storage devices. And USB devices such as printers. Maybe networking. I think it already does support printers and WIRED networking. For wireless, you can use a small external device as a proxy. Note that some printers are not smart enough and have to be fed pixel data, for which DOS drivers usually are not available and not planned, but printers understanding plain text or PDF are easily available. You can connect printers using USB, printer port or network. And you can again use small external devices as proxy, or even adapter cables, to make more combinations work with DOS. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Using HDMI monitor and USB keyboard/mouse on FreeDOS
Hi Bill, Today I built an adapter that translates USB keyboard and mouse to PS/2 signals. https://docs.pikvm.org/pico_hid_bridge/ It works great! Great to hear :-) From another thread on another forum, here are some suggestions for VGA to HDMI converters: - the current best choice might be the OSSC (open source scan converter) device for somewhat above 100 Euro: https://videogameperfection.com/products/open-source-scan-converter/ The OSSC converts SCART, component and VGA to DVI and HDMI, with some choices in scaling style (scanlines, rectangular pixels, etc.) and you can add audio from the OSSC audio jack input to your HDMI signal. See also https://www.retrorgb.com/ossc.html - "Foinnex VGA adapter cable" to convert VGA to HDMI up to 1080p, code X000PPZ323 and probably quite affordable - ATEN.com VC180 VGA and audio jack to HDMI converter with audio, up to 1080p, price unknown, but exists since at least 2014 - the future https://oummg.com/ CRT Terminator which is an 8-bit ISA card which connects to your VGA card internally, via the feature connector, to add DVI-D output to it for further conversion, such as USB3HDCAP bridging mentioned below, planned to be available for around 200 Euro Projects and devices with a focus on old game consoles: - there is a DIY Raspberry Pi based project called RGBtoHDMI: https://github.com/hoglet67/RGBtoHDMI - Ligawo scaler from SCART (with RGB), composite or S-VHS to HDMI, various models, below 100 Euro and it might be feasible or even easy to convert VGA to SCART-RGB? - XRGB mini Framemeister by Micomsoft with composite, JP21-SCART, RGB, HDMI, ... inputs, apparently. 300 Euro, specializes on retro looks with square pixels and scanlines and similar You could also use another PC as a bridge: - any PCI or PCIe framegrabber with VGA input - StarTech USB3HDCAP video grabber for PC with USB3, inputs include DVI (see above), HDMI, component, composite 210 Euro Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] shutdown and USB Stick ?
Hi! Does the Shutdown- Command merely provide for those »spinning down« delays to... The idea is that it is better for mechanical harddisks to first spin down and park heads before you switch off the power supply. Spinning down may take a moment. Also, this gives the disk the chance finish writes from the internal cache of the disk, if it has one and it is enabled. The latter also is useful for SSD. If you do have a software cache with delayed writes, such as SMARTDRV or NWCACHE with the respective features activated, it may also be useful to wait a moment after triggering the cache flush, but actually: Could somebody who HAS those caches TELL me whether this is necessary? It could also be the case that the caches do the complete flush in a blocking way anyway. So when I give them a hint that they should flush, they might block all other DOS activities until they are done with flushing? In that case, no additional delay would be necessary. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] shutdown and USB Stick ?
Hi! FAT is always a finicky filesystem, especially if you're utilizing a caching or BIOS emulation for USB HDDs. Are you using a caching program like lbacache, cdrcache, smartdrv, etc? Of those 3, only SMARTDRV can cache data before it gets written. Even this delayed write caching is a config choice of the user. The other 2, as well as Jack's drivers with built-in caches, always send writes to the disk immediately. They only use the cache to speed up reads. The don't delay writes as in collecting them in DOS-based cache RAM and then sending them to disk later. However, various types of harddisks and SSD have built-in caches which can collects written data before it actually gets sent to disk. And even without a cache, a shutdown or reboot can easily happen at a moment where some disk contents are being sent to disk and only some of them have arrived yet. As a rule of thumb, it is generally safe to disconnect drives or shutdown or reboot DOS as soon as you are back at the DOS prompt and the disk activity light has stopped. Maybe wait an extra sec. Longer waits or explicit flushes of write caches should only be necessary if you have explicitly enabled such caches. SMARTDRV, when you tell it to enable delayed write caching (DR DOS NWCACHE also has a "write pooling" mode as a "smaller" write delay choice) will monitor some activities to trigger flushes itself: For example, it would flush the write cache when an app exits (or returns to the prompt) or when you press ctrl-alt-delete or when there were no disk accesses for some amount of time. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Using HDMI monitor and USB keyboard/mouse on FreeDOS
Hi Bill, group. The short version: With the coming of Wayland I have little choice but to get new display adapters for all of my Linux machines. You probably are not technically forced to use Wayland: Most distros give you a choice of drivers to pick from, even when they recommend one specific framework as default. My FreeDOS system is hosted on an old mainboard - an Asus P5A-B. This board does not have USB ports and does not have emulation support That is a Socket 7 board with EDO/SDRAM DIMM, AGP, PCI and ISA. Are you sure that you need a board THAT old for your DOS tasks? According to https://www.anandtech.com/show/116 P5A-B should have two USB ports. Maybe you just need a slot bracket to access them. If that fails, you can still use a PCI USB adapter card. I agree Bad or missing USB legacy support in the BIOS may be an issue, but: I could install a board with USB ports, but that does not help FreeDOS. Without BIOS support, try DOS USB drivers. I guess it would be acceptable to have to connect a PS/2 keyboard directly, without a KVM switch, for BIOS setup purposes once, as long as DOS can use the USB keyboard properly after booting with USB drivers loaded. The Raspberry Pi Pico is not a full-on Pi. It is a microcontroller much like an Arduino, though with quite a bit more processing power. Good to know. I checked what "USB PS/2 Arduino" brings up, so in case somebody else is curious about alternatives: - Stackexchange says flexible USB keyboards can do PS/2 data and clock on USB D- and D+ respectively, and of course +5V and GND, so that is the wiring which your USB KVM switch MIGHT support: https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/54853/how-to-convert-usb-to-ps-2 https://i.stack.imgur.com/tXhcw.jpg - Instructables has an Arduino PS/2 to USB adapter project, but that is for connecting PS/2 keyboards to modern computers. - There are Arduino libraries to use PS/2 keyboard or mouse, so that again is easier than the other way round, simulating them. - Arduinos default to showing up as serial port devices when you plug them via USB, but there are versatile libraries like V-USB: https://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/index.html My quick search did not bring up a ready-made solution for what you were looking for, I just THINK it should be possible with much less computing power even than an Arduino style RPi Pico. At $4 a Pico is also cheaper than most Arduinos. :-o Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Using HDMI monitor and USB keyboard/mouse on FreeDOS
Hi Bill, if I understand you correctly, your Linux PC stopped to support VGA or PS/2, so you upgrade everything, including the DOS PC, to HDMI and USB? It should be no problem to use HDMI and USB directly with DOS. The BIOS will have USB legacy support to convert keyboard and mouse data into PS/2 simulations made visible to DOS. You could also use DOS drivers, but using the BIOS is easier. You cannot use both at the same time for the same controller, but you often have more than one controller: You could run one with a driver and leave the other to the BIOS, if you have the need to use DOS USB drivers for special hardware. Modern graphics cards (think all sorts of GeForce etc.) have slowly degraded with respect to their compatibility to DOS and VGA, so for example the 8x14 font may not be installed (you can load a driver to fix that) or only the most popular graphics modes (320x200, 640x480 and 1920x1080, I guess) will work correctly, while exotic gaming modes may show garbled screen contents. I would not use hardware converters unless you really need to use them. For example a PC without AGP, PCI or PCIe where you cannot install a graphics card with DP, HDMI or at least DVI output. Those three luckily are close enough family of each other, so graphics cards may automatically assist mostly passive adapters or adapter cables. Your "receive VGA, calculate HDMI" converter, on the other hand, is basically a computer itself, with limited compatibility. I would not use a complete Raspberry to convert PS/2 to USB or back either if your DOS PC already has USB anyway. Also, Arduinos have enough power if you do want a PS/2 to USB gadget. Regards, Eric PS: Here is a short thread on 4k screens in DOS ;-) https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=21010 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] SNMP agent for DOS?
Hi Anton, The machines are indeed physical with custom made ISA Bus controller cards, built on prototype board, and only 4 were made, 2 in production That sounds exciting! plan is to eventually replace ... with something more ubiquitous. Looking at other forums, people do impressive things combining old and new hardware. For example there are tiny modern microcontroller based extension cards for old PC, emulating all sorts of classic boards, people convert from TV to HDMI using DSP based boards and DOS expert RayeR is working on a way to connect classic ISA sound cards to modern mainboards through the LPC bus on the TPM header! For more general purpose things, Raspberry Pi style computers can be a good option, natively running Linux, sometimes other operating systems, or emulators for retro operating systems inside Linux, while at the same time offering a variety of GPIO and bus systems suitable for different control projects. Have a good evening, too! Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] sound blaster emulation for modern hardware - SBEMU and forks
Hi folks! As you know, crazii has taken the idea of VSB on a whole new level by writing a simulation of a Sound Blaster 16 for DOS, which is able to output the calculated sound on modern HDA sound hardware, ICH, nForce, SB Live, SB Audigy, VT82C686 or VT8233, -35 or VT8237. Checking Vogons again, I noticed that there are 2 threads with a total of 75 pages of posts about SBEMU by now. Development is really active and there already are 3 forks! SBEMU-X adds support for some additional sound hardware (in your real computer, not virtual) and VSBHDA by Japheth fixes compatibility with HX. I hope the forks will eventually merge, but I guess we should already add at least one of the versions to our distro. Note that they all need HDPMI32 and JEMMEX with QPIEMU or QEMM. https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU https://github.com/sbemu-x/sbemu-x https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA All variants together feature quite a few supported sound chips and sound cards and I am sure they are getting the deserved attention on Vogons, but I also am sure that they will enjoy feedback from testers who have one of the lesser tested chips! Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS or DOS based mail clients
Hi Jose, > PS: The older POP3 only allowed access to the inbox, > while IMAP also allows access to your other mail folders, > so I expect most mail providers to support IMAP now. I thought that folders were a client-side convention, and mail (POP3, IMAP) servers kept all incoming mail to one address together. Folders are something managed on the server and you can use either IMAP or webmail to access them. With POP3, you can only access the inbox, so you would have to use the client to move individual mails to folders stored on your local disk. The mails in those client side folders would not be visible on other devices or webmail, so I assume and hope that most providers support IMAP today, so all devices can share the same folders :-) According to the google support website, IMAP will always be active for gmail in the future. No idea how old the article is - probably the future already is now :-) In the past, one had to manually enable it using some online menu. The google support website recommends that you do not store sent mail on the server manually, as sending mails via google will automatically do that already. It also recommends to save drafts, but not deleted mails on the server and it recommends to not move deleted mails to the trash can folder, as they would get permanently deletted after a month in the trash can and google prefers old mails to stay forever :-p It recommends that you set your client to just mark deleted mails as deleted where they are. Servers for Gmail: smtp.gmail.com TLS port 587 or SSL port 465. imap.gmail.com SSL port 993. pop.gmail.com SSL port 995 (but IMAP is better). Use the email address as user name to log in. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] roundcube, is freedos, or dos based mail clients?
Hi! a few years back, before the Pandemic, we had a serious Shellworld crash. At the time I sought to contact them, did not reach a person, however. Likewise at the time, I believe? they did not allow mail to be sent. it has been a few years. If you use a Linux mail client to access your gmail from a shell, then the mail itself will still be stored and sent by google, not directly from your shell account. Note that this only works with mail providers which support imap and smtp and with clients which support the security protocols required by the providers. For some mail providers, one first had to enable imap etc. access using a menu item on their webmail portals. GMX & web.de are two mail providers having that issue as far as I remember. Regards, Eric PS: The older POP3 only allowed access to the inbox, while IMAP also allows access to your other mail folders, so I expect most mail providers to support IMAP now. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] roundcube, is freedos, or dos based mail clients?
Hi! Thanks for your roundcube webmail tests! Both interesting and annoying that most features work with most text based browsers - except sending mail, due to JS in the send button! Anyone at all know if roundcube has a support team? This tool could be amazing with some slight JavaScript fixes. https://roundcube.net/support/ lists a community forum, bug tracker, several mailing lists (probably not what you need) and an IRC chat. The bug tracker, forum and chat should help you. A quick search in the forum suggests that roundcube used an editor called tinymce to compose mails, I wonder if it would be possible to switch off the editor to be able to write mails with less javascript usage? It may help to switch to text-only instead of HTML mail composition, if there is an option which lets you choose. There is an interactive drop down menu to edit either in HTML or plain text, but I guess that uses a script, too? User preferences or configuration should have an option compose HTML messages, choices always / never or similar. Related keywords may include HTML editor or rich text. https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/issues/5937 "Send a reply and archive in one action button" is vaguely related because whoever addresses that feature request will also know how send buttons are to be processed. Trying to find an answer on roundcubeforum.net I got the impression that people did not get answers at all when their questions were not specific/detailed enough. Sometimes people report that send mail button does not do anything and got the reply that the roundcube server was misconfigured. I guess this can be excluded in your case and you have tested that sending DOES work okay if a fully javascript enabled web browser is used? Some skins (graphical look and feel choices) appear to have send buttons arranged in different ways. Sometimes there is more than one send button visible at the same time, with the extra buttons using javascript to "press" the main button, if I read correctly between the lines. There also seems to be the issue that TAB switches to the next form field or button (for example send) which annoys people who want to type TAB as part of a mail. If roundcube manipulates this, it may affect usability. https://www.roundcubeforum.net/index.php/topic,29737.msg75552.html has somebody find out that their browser plugins interfere with whether the send button works. Not helpful for your problem, but suggests that this button indeed contains more complexity than necessary in some way. I am probably not very good in navigating advanced search in forum or bug list. Maybe asking on IRC works better? Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] freedos, or dos based mail clients?
Hi! As it seems that sshdos (ssh) and the links text mode browser for DOS support current security protocols and https: Does anybody here have experience with using a squirrelmail or roundcoube webmail in links? Might need less java script compared to gmail to use those, and one could forward the gmail mail to a mail provider with squirrelmail or roundcube. Another option, given that shellworld offers access to Ubuntu Linux servers, would be to use any of the current or less current text mode email clients. As long as they support imap (or pop3) etc. they should work with gmail? For example mutt, pine, alpine, cone, or the old mailx. Graphical mail clients for DOS are not the answer here. Regards, Eric PS: I also wonder whether it is an option to run a Linux email client in a shell directly on the router at home? ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] New versions: R. Swan's A72 assembler 1.05 and 1.05c
Hi! Forwarding from Rugxulo on BTTR: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=20850 R. Swan's A72 assembler 1.05 (self-assembling, 8k .COM) posted by Rugxulo A72 1.05 was released on Oct. 9 on Github. Changes: * Listings are generated by default along with binary output. To have only one or the other, use the /L or /A switch, respectively (e.g. "a72 my.asm /a") * Listings have line numbers * Symbol tables, alphabetically sorted, are appended to listings * More modular construction; in particular, the CPU-specific assembler module is exchangeable (6502, 8085) * HIGH, LOW, INCBIN, ECHO, TITLE, PAGE directives added * Lines can be 255 characters long (previously 120-something) and generate an error otherwise * LF now recognised as valid line terminator alongside CR * 8087 not supported after 1.04 until I have figured out how to work with floating point numerics and encoding https://github.com/swanlizard/a72/tree/master/1.05 N.B. As of four days ago, there is also a minor update, but it has been renamed to RA. I don't know if major work is going on there or what will happen. https://github.com/swanlizard/a72/tree/master/1.05C ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] SBEMU soundblaster emulator news?
Hi! SBEMU is a project based on MPXPLAY, DOSBOX, HX and JEMM superpowers to create a virtual SoundBlaster soundcard on real computers with more modern sound hardware (HDA, AC97 etc.) which sounds quite exciting! The BTTR thread has been silent since mid-March, so now I wonder whether there have been new developments worth discussing here or on BTTR and whether more testers are needed, and if so, which modern sound hardware needs testing or other support :-) https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=20131=0=time=0 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62=89304 The 2023-03-19 beta can be downloaded here: https://www.vogons.org/download/file.php?id=160136 Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] DosView, a modern image format viewer and converter
Hi! SuperIlu is has recently released version 1.1 of DosView: https://github.com/SuperIlu/DosView It uses Allegro and compiles with DJGPP 12, so with a 386+ CPU, enough RAM and VESA, you can now view those WEBP, JPEG2000, TIFF and other modern file formats in truecolor graphics modes on DOS. You can convert images to other formats with DosView as well :-) A thread about it on BTTR: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=20798=0=time=0 Interestingly, the newest DosView EXE UPXes from 1.5 to 0.6 MB :-) Cheers, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MSdos 7.1 question
Hi! I said it before but I'll re-iterate - any filesystem with proper journaling would be a total banger. I still remember how Rayman ate my FreeDOS and I still have dosfsck in my fdauto as a preventative measure. It's slow as molasses in January however. The same program under Linux blows it out of the water. Do you have enough cache (Jack's drivers or lbacache for example) and enough RAM, and/or made sure that CWSDPMI will not use swap? See the documentation for CWSDPMI, or try using another DPMI, such as DOS32A or DPMIONE, to run the DOS version of DOSFSCK. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] 7zip for dOS?
Hi! I did download Eric's file, as I do not use freedos. While you get extra package management features by opening our zipped app packages with a package manager, unzipping them with any UNZIP style tool will usually be sufficient. So you should be fine. The information indicates that it might be a port of a windows package. My search suggested that I should fine an executable called 7za, or even just 7z, but it is not there. the p7z file does not work at all. There are two EXE files in the download: 624292 bx defX 09-Mar-05 00:00 ARCHIVER/P7ZIP/P7ZIP.EXE 542956 bx defX 09-Mar-04 23:48 ARCHIVER/P7ZIP/P7ZIPR.EXE When you run p7zip -h or p7zipr -h they will show the help text which makes me assume that they are two different compiles of a standard 7-zip binary. I have no idea why they got renamed to p7zip here? The directory also contains various text documents and a subdirectory with a HTML manual. In addition, there are APPINFO, LINKS and SOURCE directories. The former contains metadata about the package, the latter contains a zip with the source code and the LINKS directory contains a batch file which seems to be meant as a wrapper to be put in your path to call p7zip.exe without having to add the archiver p7zip directory to your path. It does not pass the command line arguments, though, which confuses me. In short, you should be able to just copy the exe and maybe the .1 documentation files from the ARCHIVER/P7ZIP directory into a directory in your path and keep everything else around at a place of your choice for some extra documentation. You do not need to use a package manager then. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MSdos 7.1 question / Sound in DOS and FAT huge file support
Hi! You use to promote MSdos 7.1. Have you ever found a way to get sound on it. Sound, network and graphics are not related to DOS as operating system: Because the kernel does not support those, the applications, not the operating system, are the ones who have to support it. This also means that apps with support for those will have support for them on all versions and brands of DOS. It should be possible to use MPXPLAY to get DOS sound with modern hardware: https://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/ It might even be possible to get old games which expect ISA SoundBlaster hardware to work on modern hardware with the help of SBEMU or DOSBOX-X. Those have drivers for modern sound chips (AC97 and HDA standard, I guess) and provide simulations of old SoundBlaster soundcards: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=20131=0=time=0 https://dosbox-x.com/ I have never tested those two myself, so I would love to hear from others how well they work :-) I deleted a command called KILL on it. Do you know what that command does because I don't? It might be for killing tasks. DOS itself does not support multitasking, but MS DOS 7 is the DOS which ships with Windows 95 and 98, so maybe it simply is a Windows command line tool to stop Windows tasks. I love the large file size that it supports. Freedos is limited to 2 gigs and PCdos stops a 8 gigs. It would surprise me if PC DOS supports 8 GB files. Technically, the bottlenecks are the ability to seek and the file size. For relative seek, you can only go +/- 2 GB from the current point. Absolute seeks could be defined as 0 to 4 GB from the start or the end of a file. A flag when opening/creating a file with int 21.6c determines whether int 21.42 seeks should work 2 GB style or 4 GB style for that file. According to our kernel source code at https://github.com/FDOS/kernel/blob/master/kernel/dosfns.c FreeDOS does not yet support 4 GB file open and seek! But it does treat dirent.dir_size as ULONG, max 4 GB. The file size can be up to 4 GB on FAT filesystems, but one could check the cluster chain length or put a few extra bits somewhere in the directory entries? I do not know which DOS and Windows brands support such extensions for FAT filesystems, but I think EDR-DOS is one of the brands working on this and proposing an interface for it? Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Testing quite a few DOS games with modern graphics hardware
Hi! Before rebooting my Linux to activate the newest kernel updates, I have booted into DOS to find out how DOS games deal with my new GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. It is surprisingly bad as a VGA. According to VESAINFO, only packed pixel and direct color modes are supported, with 256 or 65536 colors or 32 bits per pixel. VESA packed pixel modes: 640x480, 800x600 (1024 bytes per line), 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 (1664 bytes per line!). Modes with 2 or 4 bytes per pixel also all have "round" numbers of bytes per line (1280, 2048, 2560, 3328, 4096, 4120, 6144, 6656 or 7680, all multiples of 128 as you can see). Resolutions up to 1920x1080 :-) As the USB mouse is not supported in my current BIOS settings and I was too lazy to change them, CTMOUSE only attempted to use a non-existing Mouse Systems RS232 mouse. So games requiring mouse input were not actually working, but that is a different story. My board still has a serial port, so I could try an old mouse ;-) Unsurprisingly, quite a few games throw error 200 or run too fast, including the popular Jazz Jackrabbit and the Kamango memory game. IGO works in VGA mode, also in monochrome VGA. Somehow it does not show MCGA properly, maybe tweaking it? For Hercules, CGA, EGA and Tandy, it reports that it could not activate the mode. GOPART (GoPartner by Ingolf Hellmann) sort of works, but one can see that the graphics font is incomplete. It is supposed to work with CGA, Hercules, EGA and VGA. I guess it tries VGA. WARI (Kalaha by ImagiSOFT) fails to enter graphics mode: You would have to play blindly while still seeing DOS text. Ballgame and Mahjongg (by Nels Anderson) also fail to enter graphics mode. I guess this happens with all EGA or CGA apps. Bananoid, which I think uses a tweaked MCGA mode, would work if I had a mouse. A cute little Arkanoid clone. Breakfree, a 3d Arkanoid clone, works, including speaker sound. 20th Century Frog shows no graphics, apparently it uses EGA. I would have thought that it uses VGA. Laserbeam by Proline just shows a blank screen, no idea. Shooting Gallery would work if I had a mouse. MCGA + Speaker. Descent would work, but runs too fast. Probably MCGA, too. The IUS intro, which uses an interesting graphics mode, shows something graphical, but not similar to the intended graphics. Crystal Caves and Commander Keen 1 effectively stay in text mode, apparently failing to switch to EGA (VGA?) mode. In Captain Comic, switching to EGA fails with a message instead. Commander Keen 4 claims not enough RAM is free if no EMM386 is loaded, or crashes if JEMM386 X=TEST ALTBOOT MEMCHECK is loaded. EGAroids (Asteroids) and Alley Cat (an ancient CGA game) fail to enter graphics mode, so once again, you see garbled text. Lemmings does not work, but I may have failed to try all the conceivably supported graphics modes for that one. I once bought a decent Windows port of it on CD, by the way :-) I have not tested Lemmings 3d (needs EMS etc.). Zeliard does work! I would have thought that it uses EGA just like all the other games which do NOT work. Interestingly, the Display Port output is native resolution of my screen at 60 Hz, so the graphics card automatically upscales the resolutions. Raptor does work (not sure whether it would support PC speaker for sound, I just got none) so space shooter bases are covered. Tank Wars (a small MCGA artillery game) basically works, but some areas of the screen are garbled. Maybe a font problem? You may know the genre from Worms and from QBasic Gorillas. Antix (Anti-Xonix) is almost playable in spite of not reaching a graphics mode. Maybe it was meant to be text mode anyway, but the font is off and the game runs too fast. Xonix basically works, just custom chars end up wrong, maybe the VGA BIOS simply provides an incomplete font charset here. Konggame (meant to use CGA 160x100 text graphics) and Pacman just end up in some sort of garbled text mode, not playable. Sint Nicolaas (MCGA Jump and Run) works, with PC speaker. Digger (DigDug clone) also works. Maybe MCGA instead of CGA/EGA? Squarez also works, as does the WOW tracker (MOD player) when you switch it to PC speaker output. Probably MCGA as well :-) Jill of the Jungle does work, MCGA with PC speaker sound. The tiny Super Mario clone "Mario" by Mike Wiering works, althought there is some tearing in the animations. Claims to be 256 color VGA, but probably just uses MCGA graphics? It is interesting that many CGA and EGA games fail to enter graphics mode and fail to detect that they failed. I guess the hardware just supports a subset of VGA and games think VGA support implies support for everything older than VGA. Some games do detect the failure, though! I wonder whether some games would be troubled by the less flexible bytes-per-line with this hardware, but I assume EGA still would not work if you were to use N * 256 bytes per line for it. I expect VESA games to be smart enough to respect the bytes per line of the BIOS
Re: [Freedos-user] 7zip for dOS?
Hi! According to https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/report.html you can download http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/unstable/archiver/p7zip.zip for 7zip. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Some USB-Stick problems
Hi again, see the new, separate thread for more USB-printer solutions :-) A new thought: I got a VERY good suggestion for the problem of FAT filesystems and file contents getting corrupted by those power outages when the drivers restart the engines of the trucks. You remember, I wondered whether running DOS in some emulator in Windows or Linux would be better or worse, given that those use other filesystems like NTFS or EXT3, not FAT. The suggestion is A LOT easier: Buffer those 12 Volts before you send them to the inverter! No more crashes, thus no more worries which filesystem or operating system suffers most or least from those crashes. I should have come up with THAT. Given that the outages are very short, various solutions are possible. Maybe even something trivial like charging a cap from the 12V through a diode and connecting the inverter to the cap instead of directly to the car battery. Or, for more stability for longer interruptions, charging a small 12 Volts battery, of course. I assume the printers also need 230 Volts? If not, a solution without the inverter might be possible. The Thin Client may even work directly from 12 Volts, but this is out of specs. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Using USB printers with a parallel port adapters or software tricks
Hi again, somebody in another DOS forum pointed out that you can get ready to use LPT2USB online, although expensive, from various shops: https://www.future-x.de/rotronic-secomp-parallel-adapter-usb-ieee-1284-schwarz-p-7343484/ https://www.profishop.de/p/ak-nord-adapter-lpt-lpt2usb-v2-nt-202573 https://www.secomp.de/de/item/konverter-kabel-parallel-nach-usb/12021074 I also got the suggestion (once more) to use LAN for printing, either with the evil MS CLIENT or by any other means. I guess depending on the printer, a bit of NETCAT, CURL, WGET etc. may be sufficient, or using a library like wattcp or (I forgot the other names) directly in the DOS app. Regards, Eric Hi! Moving this topic to a new thread: Next problem: I tried to get printer support via USB (currently they use classic LPT, but those printers get very rare). Asking around and looking around a bit, people have suggested to run DOS inside vDOSplus, DOSBOX-X, DOSEMU2, VirtualBox and so on with a Linux or Windows host operating system. I think when you run DOSBOX-X on DOS as host, it would not support USB printers. But it could support HDA, AC97 soundchips and simulate SB16 for the DOS inside? Sounds very nice! :-) Also, I wonder how Windows and Linux would react to those frequent power loss related crashes of the whole computer. Probably not very amused? Either way, I stumbled over a cool microcontroller based solution by Henrik Haftmann, with free EAGLE PCB data and circuit diagram and the corresponding firmware. Even an ultra low cost RS232 firmware install method is part of the project :-) https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/USB2LPT/lpt2usb.de.htm https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/USB2LPT/lpt2usb.en.htm Of course this is less superpowered than https://www.retroprinter.com/ mentioned earlier, based on a complete computer and able to convert old DOS printer data to output even for GDI printers if I got that right? The page also links some alternatives from other sources, but I found ALL of the linked products in the Gibt's schon / re-invented section to be no longer available. So better make some backup of Henrik's USB2LPT. Cheers, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] IDLE HALT=1 is working on my laptop?
Hi Ramon, If I use FDAPM APMDOS in my fdauto.bat I get the following message: Performing action: APMDOS If APMDOS slows APM not available, skipping APM setup. Going resident. This is because I have freedos poorly configured or because my hardware does not support it. (My laptop is about 12 years old) As you see, it goes resident nevertheless. Your BIOS does not offer APM support, so FDAPM uses a generic fallback instead. You could play with the FDAPM SPEEDn options (example: SPEED4) as additional trick. This will throttle the system by halting it half of the time in a fast rhythm, but be prepared that it may fail in bad ways, so do not put it in your fdauto until you have tested it interactively. It is possible that SPEEDn does not work at all, because FDAPM does not sufficiently understand your ACPI BIOS, or it is possible that it crashes the computer in some way. If that happens, you will have to hard reset it (if you have a reset button) or even power cycle it (for example by keeping the power button pressed for several seconds). Of course you do not need to use SPEEDn at all if normal FDAPM APMDOS already reduces energy consumption, heat and fan activity sufficiently. It is just an additional thing you COULD try. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] R-Alt does not act like L-Alt
Hi Aitor, I would assume that right alt DELIBERATELY does not act like a generic ALT key in EDIT: In German, for example, you need that right "Alt Gr" key for some accented characters, so it must not act as a function shift key. I remember not being able to use some other editor exactly because it treated any ALT like ALT, making me unable to type "@" because it wanted to treat it like "ALT-Q" or "ALT-@" with a special meaning for the ALT status instead of as an ordinary character. Maybe it would be useful to make this configurable in EDIT, but in a minimalist way, for example a checkbox whether R-ALT counts as ALT (for hotkeys) or is not to be interfered with. Regards, Eric Hello, Sounds like it could be a bug in Edit, I'll see about it when I have a little time. Now for the original question: is it possible to make R-Alt work like L-Alt? It should be possible to do that with FD-KEYB.The idea is to intercept Right-Alt and then emit Left-Alt, and get back to the BIOS driver. This trick is unlikely lo work in a pre-AT-class machines, but in this older machines, you can try and run FD-KEYB with the /9 and see if it works. The trick is like this: R-Alt is an E0-prefixed L-Alt, so you should define a new plane for the E0: [PLANES] ... ... E0 Then, make a new mappings sections that would just catch the R-Alt and emit a L-Alt (the scancode for Alt is 38h = 56 [KEYS:ralt] 5656/#0 Finally, add this new mapping to your Submappings section, at the end, so that it works as a fallback for the other cases (change the codepage for whatever you desire): [Submappings] ... ... 437 ralt If someone wants to give it a try and works, let me know, should be interesting stuff. You can apply the same trick to make "extended" keys work as non-extended. Aitor ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Using USB printers with a parallel port adapters or software tricks
Hi! Moving this topic to a new thread: Next problem: I tried to get printer support via USB (currently they use classic LPT, but those printers get very rare). Asking around and looking around a bit, people have suggested to run DOS inside vDOSplus, DOSBOX-X, DOSEMU2, VirtualBox and so on with a Linux or Windows host operating system. I think when you run DOSBOX-X on DOS as host, it would not support USB printers. But it could support HDA, AC97 soundchips and simulate SB16 for the DOS inside? Sounds very nice! :-) Also, I wonder how Windows and Linux would react to those frequent power loss related crashes of the whole computer. Probably not very amused? Either way, I stumbled over a cool microcontroller based solution by Henrik Haftmann, with free EAGLE PCB data and circuit diagram and the corresponding firmware. Even an ultra low cost RS232 firmware install method is part of the project :-) https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/USB2LPT/lpt2usb.de.htm https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/USB2LPT/lpt2usb.en.htm Of course this is less superpowered than https://www.retroprinter.com/ mentioned earlier, based on a complete computer and able to convert old DOS printer data to output even for GDI printers if I got that right? The page also links some alternatives from other sources, but I found ALL of the linked products in the Gibt's schon / re-invented section to be no longer available. So better make some backup of Henrik's USB2LPT. Cheers, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Some USB-Stick problems
Hi Woody, Unfortunately, using the internal IDE is out of question, since the whole process in that company is used to take that stick after the salestour, go into the office and plug it into a transfer PC, where some other software reads in all sales data, then updates the stick with new tour-data and maybe App- and Freedos updates. Well, you probably have a lot of control over the software, so you could modify it to just use the USB stick as vessel to transport sales data, tour data and updates while the software installation resides on the internal disk. Those sticks could boot into a tool which updates app and tours, checks the filesystem and creates a flag/lock file when done. Booting from the stick again would instead update sales data on the stick. In the office, people could have a tool (maybe a simple batch script) which gathers sales data from the stick, puts new updates and tour data on it and clears the flag/lock file again for the next tour etc. Still pondering non-USB and non-stick solutions: You may also install "extension cords" so people can plug CF cards as IDE storage. My PC has a Wechselrahmen which does let me connect a CF card with a mechanical adapter. I have stopped using it years ago, but you get the idea. There also are adapters with controller, for CF on SATA. Think about Delock 91687 or 91624 which only need a free slot bracket. Unfortunately, the T510 does not have any space for it, even a SATA cable would need a custom hole. Neither CF as IDE nor USB sticks are hot-pluggable in the DOS and BIOS scenario you are using, so there is not hot plug ability to lose, but getting rid of USB complexity still feels like a good thing to try out. Another possibility would be to replace the USB sticks by something which is less sensitive to power outages. Server SSD with supercaps come to mind, connected by SATA or via a simple USB enclosure if you must stick to using USB. Or you could improve the power supply hardware infrastructure. That 4Mb XMS limit was just because FoxPro doesn't need more. There are few apps which get confused when they get too much XMS (for example more than 32 MB of XMS 2.0, or more than 2 GB of XMS 3.0) but I would not manually set any limit unless you really have to to "protect" old apps. Windows 3 also does not like too much RAM, by the way. As said, I suggest that you do not use EMM386 style drivers unless you actually want EMS or UMB. If not, it reduces complexity to only use HIMEM style drivers. mediumtypes for the USB: Floppy, Zip and Harddisk. Those are basically predefined sets of CHS geometry. Floppy goes up to 2.88MB, ZIP is more like harddisk. You usually stick to harddisk and hope that BIOS and OS will use LBA instead of CHS anyway, to avoid any confusion about which geometry would be the best. You can also boot read-only CD/DVD or their images. Most FreeDOS bootsectors (SYS) and kernel autodetect LBA support of the BIOS, but for the FAT32 bootsector, some fixed choice is made when you run SYS, no boot autodetect. The issue of caches, crashes and power outages: You do not have to worry about the read-caches available in DOS, so you should be safe if you close files AND call those disk reset and cache flush calls after that as long as you only get crashes between flushing and the beginning of the next write. You can try to postpone writes during periods when crashes (engine restarts) are likely. This will protect you from getting half-written broken data. As said, DOS itself is barely able to cache anything in the sense of delayed or pooled WRITES. You can actually improve performance using READ caches like LBACACHE. It should not impact your data corruption problem. Only a WRITE cache would make your problem larger. Unfortunately, basically ALL storage media apart from floppy disks have intrinsic write "caching" in the sense that your data will get converted and sent to the actual disk or flash chip AFTER it got sent by the computer. So if your computer crashes while working on your files, unsaved or partially saved data gets lost or, worse, corrupted for obvious reasons. But if POWER to your drive is lost, MORE data can get lost. Some drives use backup energy (supercap or, for harddisk, using their mechanical energy) to mitigate that extra loss. USB sticks, however, are not in that category. Neither are CF cards. Their advantage is just having fewer interface and data conversion layers in the pipeline. Drives also tend to be configurable concerning whether they are allowed to pool or cache written data. Other people here may be able to recommend tools for this, but I would say it is hard to control those settings from DOS for USB drives and more feasible for SATA or IDE drives. In Linux, you would use HDPARM for this. Some drives (in particular some flash models, both SSD and USB sticks can suffer from this) also corrupt more data than necessary or even get completely bricked if a sudden power loss interrupts internal
Re: [Freedos-user] Some USB-Stick problems
Hi Woody! You probably mean a HP t510 thin client, with VIA Eden X2 U4200 CPU, VIA VX900 Chipset, 2 GB RAM, some flash storage, VIA ChromotionHD graphics (DVI/VGA), audio, GB-LAN, Atheros WiFi, 6x USB2, 1x RS232, 1x LPT, 2x PS/2, 65W 19V power brick: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03260067 According to this site, you can connect IDE storage, so a compact flash card with a suitable adapter indeed sounds like a great idea. CF usually support IDE I/O, which means that a simple mechanical adapter with a power regulator is sufficient, no extra controller or card reader necessary: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t510/ Depending on the model, the flash may also be SATA instead of IDE DOM (Disk On Module), which is even easier, but the mechanics can be problematic given the small housing of the whole computer. Also, the website says that using SATA SSD may somehow interfere with and damage the network interface (LAN, Broadcom NIC). There also is a tiny Mini-PCIe 1x slot, for WiFi extensions etc. The app itself was first on a 256Mb CompactFlash Card, which was attached with a USB cardreader to that PC. Why the extra step with the USB cardreader? The software booted from that Flashcards with a regular MSDOS6, no USB drivers etc necessary, seems all is handled by BIOS. When a BIOS can boot from USB, it will often be able to present USB storage as harddisk (or sometimes floppy or CD-ROM), yes. But it will usually not support changing "disks" on the fly. I then changed those Flashcards to real USBSticks and formatted them with RUFUS and FreeDOS (Kernel 2043), recompiled their App and now some "funny" things happen Using USB adds an extra layer of complexity and a BIOS with USB boot support at that time may have been very minimalistic, so for example you may only get USB 1 speed or writes would not be supported or only in slow and convoluted ways. I remember I once managed to boot DOS with Windows 3 from an USB stick on an old PC , but it was no fun to use and not really stable. Also note that certain brands of USB sticks seem allergic to power glitches or getting unplugged at the wrong moment, which can lead to data loss or even bricked USB sticks. Likely a problem with the extra complexity of the firmware running on the stick itself which prefers a clean shutdown. ... when they restart the engine, the 12V will get powered off for a short time, thus the PC just crashes and reboots. Nobody likes that, not even DOS. And USB sticks like it less than compact flash cards. Would it be possible to use a compact flash card connected directly to the IDE port of the thin client? Or some SATA device, assuming that LAN damage would not be a problem? there seems to be some caching involved. I am not aware of any free open source delayed write cache for FreeDOS, but I am not sure whether BUFFERS can pool writes to some small extent? You already call FDAPM FLUSH when the app ends, but you probably want to modify your app itself, so it can call the flush things itself (no need to use FDAPM then) each time when you close your files after using them. Would it be an option to improve power supply stability? If you boot DOS from USB, you are stuck with the BIOS USB drivers, so you cannot update DOS drivers to solve things. You should probably avoid USB storage completely, given that the thin client supports internal IDE or SATA disks. Even if you need some adapters and even if the - probably not used in the trucks - LAN or WiFi interface breaks, internal disks (CF, SSD, DOM etc.) are protected from the rough street life and are probably more rugged in terms of unplanned power loss or reboot than USB sticks. You could for example use USB just to install one of the computers (I also assume our USB images are meant more as installers than as live images for everyday use) and then clone the internal disk of that PC to create more internal disks for more thin clients :-) That also gives you full flexibility regarding whether to use FAT16 or FAT32 and whether to use only a part of the available disk space etc. With boot images, you could always get unwanted complexity such as embedded boot floppy or CD-ROM images, which you will not suffer from when installing to an internal medium. That said, you can probably just "dd" one of our USB images to a stick in Linux, keeping extra space empty. There must be Windows tools which allow you to just do a dumb 1:1 transfer of our boot stick image to USB. Other people on this list will know other boot stick creator tools for the Windows version you are bound to. Using DOSBOX as a tool for installation feels like at least three extra layers of unwanted complexity. Another recommendation: If you only need XMS and UMB space is no problem, avoid JEMMEX, JEMM386 etc. and consider using only one simple HIMEM or XMGR style driver. Yet another way to reduce complexities. As you have already found out, when you load DOS USB drivers (for USB printers) you
Re: [Freedos-user] IDLE HALT=1 is working on my laptop?
Hi Ramon! I have IDLE HALT=1 in my fdconfig.sys and in config.sys - FreeDOS 1.3 FullUSB You probably mean IDLEHALT=1 without space. How can I know if IDLE HALT=1 is working on my laptop? because the fan starts up very frequently at full power. You could try IDLEHALT=-1 for a stronger effect, but you probably want to load FDAPM instead, using for example, in your autoexec: FDAPM APMDOS That will use less than 1 kilobyte of DOS memory and allows more energy saving than the built-in IDLEHALT. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] HIMEMX zip file dates
Hi Mercury and Jerome, I typically do modify the times to reflect the version number. Of course that's not necessary by any means, but it's a habit I started doing as a quick and easy contingency to help me in the event of files becoming crossed, e.g. if I were to accidentally drop files into the wrong version folder or some such errantry. Is the preferred behavior to not touch the times? If so, I can certainly refrain from doing so in future packages. :) Please preserve the timestamps of the original ZIP content. Good to know that Jerome has a tool for that, bad enough that GIT defaults to break timestamps without that tool? When handling files outside GIT, timestamps stay as-is. As you already add the LSM file, the handling date is preserved as timestamp of the LSM in the ZIP. You can even use ZIP -o to make the timestamp of the ZIP itself match the timestamp of the newest file inside the ZIP. In addition, I would still love the "release-cli" of our GITLAB repository to create actual release notes. At the moment, I only see WHICH packages got updated when, but need manual "research" to find out WHY. Regards, Eric PS: I think DJGPP should stay available as separate download. Most OTHER compilers are small enough to stay on the main CD. (https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HimemX/releases) was released Nov 21, 2022 and has file contents like this: $ unzip -l HimemX338.zip Archive: HimemX338.zip Length Date Time Name - -- - 6056 11-21-2022 13:01 HimemX.exe 6056 11-21-2022 13:01 HimemX2.exe 1954 04-16-2020 06:38 Readme.txt 4871 11-21-2022 13:01 History.txt 81855 11-21-2022 13:01 HimemX.asm 296 03-24-2020 01:56 Make.bat 529 03-24-2020 01:58 Makefile - --- 101617 7 files It looks like you modify the zip files when you mirror them. Your version looks like this: $ unzip -l 3.38/himemx338.zip Archive: 3.38/himemx338.zip Length Date Time Name - -- - 0 09-23-2023 03:38 APPINFO/ 568 09-23-2023 03:38 APPINFO/HIMEMX.LSM 0 09-23-2023 03:38 BIN/ 6056 09-23-2023 03:38 BIN/HIMEMX.EXE ... ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] languages
Hi! FreeDos need's update in the keyboard and languages, there is support for that in open-source environments, but I don't know how to implement them. For example I'm using a portuguese keyboard and it doesn't support it, so Iam in trouble's Actually FreeDOS has no problems with Portuguese keyboards. Even the tiny MKEYB driver supports them. If you run MKEYB /? you will see that MKEYB /L shows a list of supported keyboards, which does include Portuguese. So you could run MKEYB PO to activate keyboard support in Portuguese style, or you could add a line saying MKEYB PO to your autoexec.bat or fdauto.bat, depending on which of the two you are using. Our other keyboard drivers also support your layout, you just have to read the documentation to find out how to activate it, as they are a bit more complicated to set up :-) Best regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CD driver
Hi! I just installed Freedos 1.3 via USB. It works OK, but will not load the UDVD2 driver (it gets a #255 error). Will UIDE work instead? Or is the problem a bad HDD sector? The problem probably is not a bad sector in your harddisk. If you want to access a CD/DVD after booting from that same boot CD/DVD, then you could also use the ELTORITO driver. For most other cases, you can use drivers like UDVD2. It might also make a difference whether you boot from USB or from harddisk (or SSD) as well. UIDE is newer than UDVD2. The newest versions of the drivers available with source are probably here: http://mercurycoding.com/downloads.html http://mercurycoding.com/downloads/DOS/drivers/2021-10-30/2021-10-30.zip This contains a 2015 rdisk (with rdiskon) and UDVD2, 2020 UIDE and xmgr (himem alternative), 2021 UHDD and a 2022 readme text file. UIDE supports both optical and non-optical drives as well as a cache. UHDD only does non-optical disks. UHDD contains a cache, too. UDVD2 only supports optical drives. UDVD2 can share the cache of UHDD if you load UDVD2 after UHDD. Note the readme regarding which drivers are best in which situation. Also note that depending on where you got that 255 error, it may mean XMS memory error! If that is what happened for you, then you may want to try different combinations of memory drivers such as JEMMEX, JEMM386, HIMEMX, XMGR etc. By default, your FreeDOS installation will already offer a few combinations in your boot menu. Try those :-) If your mainboard supports AHCI, it may belp to disable AHCI mode in your BIOS / CMOS settings. Alternatively, you can use AHCICD by the late R. Loew: https://rloewelectronics.com/distribute/AHCICD/1.1/ You can ignore the warning about the expired HTTPS. Japheth has created an unreal mode variant of it, too: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/AHCICDU You can also find updates for JEMM and HIMEMX on Japheth's GitHub "Baron von Riedesel", even his HIMEMSX to use more than 4 GB RAM :-) Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Candyman?
Hi! Does anybody here know the user nicknamed Candyman? There is a strange thread on BTTR started by that account, maybe somebody could contact Candyman via another channel and ask what has happened. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] How do I change screen resolution?
Hi! Assuming that you just want to have MORE text on your screen, without actually wanting to use graphics mode, you can select quite a few modes with MODE CON or with various VESA tools. For example in dosemu2, the following works just fine: MODE con cols=132 lines=60 This will search for 132x60 character VESA mode and use it. In dosemu2, VESA text modes 80x60, 132x25, 132x43 and 132x60 are available, but others can be available on other graphics cards or in other emulators or virtual computers, dosbox, bochs, qemu, vmware, and so on. For non-VESA modes, you can for example use: MODE con co80,50 That will select a VGA compatible 80x50 text mode. Sometimes MODE will get modes wrong depending on from which mode to which you transition. For example it may end up in 80 column modes when asking for 132 columns, depending on how many lines you want and had before. It helps to experiment: Often, you can help mode to get into the desired mode by first selecting a similar, easier mode, so it can find out how more easily to go further. For modes with more than 132 columns, you need VESA tools which make fewer assumpions about things than MODE does. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] A Couple of USB Device Issues
Hi Damon! I have an old Dell Optiplex 745 I'm trying to "FreeDos" and am having a couple of issues. I have yet to get the USB Laser mouse to work properly. Try enabling USB legacy support in your BIOS. The mouse should then be visible to drivers like CUTEMOUSE as if it would be a PS/2 mouse. The other issue is PCI sound cards. I have an Aureal Vortex2 and also a Soundblaster Audigy 4. Vortex 2 = AU8830, Alsa for Linux would use AU88X0 drivers which do not seem to be AC97 or HDA. No SoundBlaster compatibility either? Audigy 4 with CA10300 DSP, also sounds sounds quite far away from DOS, but the original Audigy with EMU10K chipset was closer to SB PCI and SB PCI which came with DOS drivers. Those drivers were quite unusual because they provided a simulation of a DOS compatible ISA SoundBlaster for those non-ISA devices. If you just want to listen to media files such as OGG or MP3, then you can get a more or less generic HDA or AC97 compatible soundcard for PCI, maybe even PCIe, or mainboard with sound, and use those with MPXPLAY for DOS: https://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/ IF you want old DOS games to work with sound, then you will have to find a soundcard specifically designed for that, including the examples mentioned above. As the Optiplex 745 with Core2Duo CPU is probably too modern (!) to still support ISA features on PCI, soundcards from early PCI days with some HARDWARE compatibility ISA SoundBlaster will only work in very limited ways, for example without DMA or interrupts. Some games might be able to deal with that, or at least provide AdLib sound, but I have tried a whole collection of those on a dual core AMD board with little success. Games rarely support installing modern sound drivers later and DOS is not designed to help games with sound either, so FreeDOS will not be asked by the games. In theory, VESA/AI drivers might exist. Another option is to use drivers which create simulations of DOS compatible soundcard. Check out the recent SBEMU progress: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=20131=0=time=0 The goal here is to support modern hardware, such as generic HDA or AC97 cards on the hardware side and create the illusion of classic SoundBlaster hardware on the software side visible to your old games :-) A classic way to do this can be running your games in a virtual DOS system inside another operating system, such as DOSBOX in Windows or Linux or DOSEMU2 in Linux (later MacOS and Android?) For DOSEMU2, you have to first add their PPA to your config: If you have for example Ubuntu 20.04, then you would add a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dosemu2-ubuntu-ppa-focal.list with the line deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dosemu2/ppa/ubuntu focal main to add DOSEMU2 and their repository to your software sources. You can then simply use Synaptic to install components of it and you will automatically get regular updates, too. If you have different versions of Ubuntu, you do roughly the same, but replace the word FOCAL by the name of your Ubuntu version. Of course you can also use Synaptic or other tools to enter the location of the PPA repository using a graphical menu. The mouse driver(s) (I've tried many) load without error. But the mouse moves only to the right. No up, left, or down. I assume it does work okay with other operating systems? Have you tried enabling or disabling wheel support? For CuteMouse, you can compare driver 1.9.x, 2.0.x and 2.1.x which all have different advantages and disadavantages. The aureal card claims to initialize but there is no sound from any of the midi player apps (e.g. Cubic player). Maybe a mixer problem? Or you need some specific init tool? Or the sound ends up coming from the wrong connector? MIDI music can mean two things: It could be rendering of the music using canned instruments to create a stream of PCM samples. It could also mean that the sequence of tone commands gets sent to a MIDI port or synthesizer chip you may have to connect to or init and support separately. Given that OpenCP also is a MOD Tracker player, I expect it to use the first style (MOD files are bundles of tone sequences and canned instrument data, so OpenCP already has the engine for that and will probably include canned generic instrument data for MIDI playing - MIDI files do not include instrument data themselves. Originally, OpenCP supported ISA SounBlaster, ESS688 and 1688, GUS and similar, in Windows also WSS and DirectX drivers. The current version uses TIMIDITY to "render" MIDI files: https://github.com/mywave82/opencubicplayer You could try whether it works better with MP3 or OGG, in case you have a problem with the rendering module. It can also play AdLib files and SID files and more :-) However, I do not see information about DOS ports there? Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] USB serial & DOSBox
Hi! Have you tried using dosemu2? They have active development and support, so even if it does not work out of the box, they should still be able to give you advice on how to make it work :-) Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] the freedos 1.3 floppy install edition.
Hi! The CPU detection utility used by the installer has compatibility issues with some processors. For example, there are some 486 systems that are detected as a 186. This has been a known issue for a while. Unfortunately, I just have not had the time to resolve that. As a stop gap, if the installer is told the system is less than a 386, it assumes it is incorrect and installs the 386 package set. So, there should be no need to override the detected CPU on 386+ systems. That will just break the complete install on pre-386 systems. If you insist on not trusting your tools, at least ASK the user whether they want to override the detection. Or better: If the tool detects a pre-386, make sure that you install an 8086 compatible kernel. You can still let the config/autoexec keep a boot menu item a la "if you are sure that your CPU can actually do it, select this item to try to load EMM386 and HIMEM at your own risk." For systems with less than a 386, you will want to override it to ensure the 8086 compatible kernel is installed. This should be the other way round. If you know what you are doing, you MAY override the detection result that you have no 386. If you do NOT know for sure, then the installer should NOT give you an install which would require 386. Of course if the INSTALLER is sure that the CPU is 386 or newer, the whole problem does not occur. So my proposal only annoys a small number of people with exotic 386+ CPU, but rescues all the users with actual 286 or older CPU or emulators from getting an un-usable install due to overly optimistic automated overrides. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Can FreeDOS Be Installed On A Logical Slice? The Answer Remains Unknown
Hi Jay! I tried to do the same thing with a logical slice of disk but FreeDOS failed to see it. If it is possible to install FreeDOS onto a logical slice of disk, inside of the extended slice, the technique for doing so is unknown, or, at least, unknown by me. DOS can not be installed on a logical partition, it has to be a primary partition. The problem is that the boot sector of a logical partition contains, as far as I remember, relative instead of absolute position information. So the boot sector code / program will fail to find the DOS kernel if booting from a logical partition. You will either have to use a primary partition, manually mess around with the boot sector without breaking other aspects of it, or use some type of boot manager which can load the kernel in some other way. You could even use a virtual floppy image with the help of GRUB or LILO and MEMDISK, I guess. FreeDOS in general has no problems with C: being a non-primay partition as far as I know, and it supports fdconfig.sys or config.sys pointing to the bulk of the DOS system on other drives than C: However: If you cannot load the kernel, DOS will be a lot less useful and at least your fdconfig.sys and some type of driver which makes it able to access other drives also have to be on a FAT formatted C: drive. In theory, you could load a virtual boot floppy with NTFS drivers, kernel and config sys and then install the rest of FreeDOS even on a NTFS drive, but that would involve significant manual trickery. Long story short, you could try the virtual boot floppy method and I recommend that your DOS drive is FAT, but I think a LOGICAL FAT partition could be good enough AFTER you boot from virtual floppy. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] gitlab change notifications lack commit messages
Hi! Today I have gotten more than 60 notifications about packet updates, NONE of which mentioned why the affected package got updated. I would REALLY like those notifications to include more details and metadata. This would also allow looking up update details in the archives later. In this context I remember that this is a bug in some sort of an automated package update script: It lacks the feature to pass ANY information about the update reason, so there is none. But this would be valuable information, so please improve that process :-) Thank you! Regards, Eric PS: Below is an example of an update notification, current style. A new Release v6.00a for unzip was published. Visit the Releases page to read more about it: https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/archiver/unzip/-/releases Assets: - unzip - v6.00a for FreeDOS: https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/archiver/unzip/-/jobs/4679018030/artifacts/file/package/unzip.zip - Download zip: https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/archiver/unzip/-/archive/v6.00a/unzip-v6.00a.zip - Download tar.gz: https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/archiver/unzip/-/archive/v6.00a/unzip-v6.00a.tar.gz - Download tar.bz2: https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/archiver/unzip/-/archive/v6.00a/unzip-v6.00a.tar.bz2 - Download tar: https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/archiver/unzip/-/archive/v6.00a/unzip-v6.00a.tar Release notes: Created using the release-cli (the linked release website does not provide ANY details either) ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Confusing details about SET and redirection in FreeCOM
Hi! To bump this thread and wish FreeDOS a happy birthday, I would like to point out that this: >set "KEY=value|dir >echo %"KEY% ... will run the DIR command! may be an instance of the 5th most dangerous software weakness: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2023/2023_top25_list.html Regards and happy anniversary, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
