Re: [Freedos-user] DOS diagnostic tools?
Hi Karen, the utilities recommended by Rober To sound useful: HDAT2 harddisk repair and diagnostics ATA, ATAPI, SATA, USB, SCSI ASTRA Advanced Sysinfo Tool and Reporting Assistant HWiNFO system information, monitoring and diagnostics Do you recall the items in norton utilities? There is a wikipedia article about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Utilities The first version in 1982 included: unerase - Freedos comes with a simple undelete tool filefix - "repairs damaged files" (?) disklook - apparently a floppy disk cluster map display? secmod - floppy disk sector changer (disk editor, I guess?) filehide - Freedos attrib should be sufficient for that bathide - related to filehide timemark - "displays date, time, elapsed time" scratr - sets colors, you can use ANSI and PROMPT for that reverse - sets colors to black on white clear - you can use cls for that filesort - sorts directories on disk diskopt - tunes floppy access speed beep - just beeps the speaker print - prints files Which free and open tools for directory sorting and disk editors do we have in the distro at this time? I guess diskopt works by creating an interlaced floppy sector format, which tools do we have for this style? According to wikipedia, Norton Utilities 2.0 added filefind and renames print to lprint because MS DOS 2.0 already came with a tool called print itself. In version 3.0, you get additional tools for file size and directory listings, system information, text search, wiping of disks and files etc. Which tools do we recommend for directory listings, file size info and wiping? For size info, I would use the GNU "du" tool, which is available as DJGPP compiled DOS binary. What could we recommend for finding files and text? I guess the GNU tools "find" and "grep" would be useful choices here? Similar for "wipe". Version 3.1 adds unerase and unremove directory tools. New in version 4: Defrag tool (speed disk) and format recover. The defrag tool is the same which MS DOS 6 bundled later on. New in version 4.5: "batch enhander" and a disk editor, the ncache disk cache (faster than smartdrive / smartdrv) and diag. Version 5 improves the disk editor further and bundles 4DOS in a variant called NDOS. By now, 4DOS is sort of free/open. Version 6 adds Win3.1 icons and "diskreet" and improves the system info. The unerase tool now supports the same optional delete tracking driver as MS / central point undelete does. Version 7 adds support for compressed disks (doublespace, stacker and superstor formats) and norton disk doctor. Would be good to know which features the disk doctor had exactly. The final DOS version 8 just adds some Win3.1 related tools. Later versions gradually add Win9x, FAT32, WinNT etc. support and features specific to Windows, like a registry editor. Even a line of products for Apple Macintosh existed. Competitors to Norton Utilities: Central Point PC Tools, various smaller ones. The author of spinrite claims norton disk doctor is a rip of it: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-666.htm Spinrite scans disks for recoverable files and even tries some tricks to reconstruct data from almost unreadable sectors, but only supports 128 GB style CHS, not LBA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite claims FreeDOS bundled with SpinRite to trigger some 16-4-8-bit CHS overflow > 128 GB? Well-known free/open alternatives are photorec and testdisk. The batch enhancer is similar to our v8 power tools, I guess. It can beep and show messages in color and with text boxes etc. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] DOS diagnostic tools?
Hi Karen, please specify the type of diagnostics you would be interested in. For example PCISLEEP can give you a list of PCI devices in your PC, but you seem to be interested in disk or filesystem analysis etc.? Maybe tools which display the SMART health status of your disks? I remember having used tools for that and to configure disk sleep. SMARTUDM (1997-2003-?) from sysinfolab was one I tried. No idea whether there are variants supporting post-IDE/ATA/SATA drives. SMARTDFT / DFT 3.00 also displayed or logged SMART disk status. Regards, Eric PS: Interesting to notice that Veit's tools still exist on https://kannegieser.net/veit/programm/index_e.htm My hope is that there is also dos based software supporting the care and diagnostics of that infrastructure? For example, while I have Norton Utilities for DOS, it cannot see my larger drives and so forth. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] documentation update
itions, one of them as safely to resize D: drive :-) With enough ram, it relocates itself onto a RAM drive... ...which is a bottleneck on old computers, while less old computers can already boot from USB. However, BIOS support for USB "disks" can be very SLOW, so maybe a RAMDISK has advantages even on newer REAL computers? On VIRTUAL ones, however, I would really prefer a virtual PERSISTENT disk. disadvantages are a slightly longer boot time and changes are not persistent. Exactly. But the user could have a virtual HD attached to remedy that. The idea was that SHIPPING FreeDOS pre-installed on virtual harddisk would both remedy that AND completely avoid the very need to perform an installation at all :-) Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] documentation update
Hi! Initially I tried Bochs, but found Bochs either cannot go full screen using SDL2, or I just haven't found the magical incantation... A quick google says "try alt-enter" (to go full screen). In 2011, this had the side-effect of risking to switch to a resolution DOS dislikes, I have not googled further to check whether Bochs in 2024 has issues? More research showed DOSEMU out of date and not available on Void Linux I agree regarding the first part, but have never heard of Void Linux. distribution here, and/or requiring other self compiled libraries, as well as DOSEMU2 requiring additional self compiled libraries, with only DOSBOX (intended for games) available on Void Linux. For Ubuntu, you can simply add the PPA to your software manager, https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2 explains the details. They also have pre-compiled packages for Fedora and OpenSUSE. No manual compilation is needed for either of the 3 distros. After more research, found Jim Hall's book tends to sway towards suggesting Qemu, a virtualizer rather than an Emulator. I have and currently use Virtualbox here, but wanted to remain to the de facto used emulator for DOS environments. Regardless, Qemu readily resizes to full screen, so that I can finally see and read the font/characters. I doubt that there is a "de facto used emulator for DOS". Personally, I prefer dosemu2. Windows users often prefer dosbox. Various users also like to use software which emulates or virtualizes a complete PC on which you then install DOS, but I have no idea why that would be better than dosbox or dosemu2 which spezicalize on supporting DOS and offer nice magic like "any Linux DIRECTORY can become your C: DISK". 1) Jim Hall's FreeDOS qemu incantation likely needs some minimal updating, for those that desire to get-up and running quickly... $ qemu-system-x86_64 -name FreeDOS -machine pc-i440fx-4.2,accel=kvm,usb=off,dump-guest-core=off etc. That is a very long command line indeed! An incantation :-o 2) Book or documentation should probably lead or advise users, the best (as of date) emulator or virtualizer per their intended use. What if the DOS distro installer can be improved, so it no longer matters which emulator or virtualizer people use? ;-) As they say, the more we keep something simple, the easier and more readily we get things done. We could provide a disk image with pre-installed DOS. This would be convenient for users of virtual computers, because they do not need to worry about installing to actual disks when their disks are imaginary anyway :-) Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] odd news
hi! as jim prefers all dos related things to be discussed on-list: why would a https server which is "not in real working condition" and a dos port of gnupg where important features cannot be used because dos has no /dev/random (see bttr thread) be newsworthy? the changes to nasm do not seem to affect the dos version either? i hope it is not necessary to start 3 separate list threads now ;-) https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/ regards, eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
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
per line of the BIOS instead of just multiplying width by bytes per pixel to guess a value :-p 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! 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
power loss interrupts internal bookkeeping. This will depend on brand and model. Software recommendations: Either way, I recommend to update your app to carefully avoid periods where crashes (engine restarts) are likely for database updates. Given that you already took care to shorten periods with files open for writing, I think adding explicit disk reset and flush calls at the end of each write process can also reduce data loss risks. Sort of "write fencing", if you like. An old example from my own apps: I collected measurement data in RAM until a non-time-critical period was reached, then opened the DOS logfiles to write data. The result was that measurement timing was barely disturbed by the unpredictable work of DOS dealing with disk contents. A different motivation, but a similar strategy. Given that FAT is not a journaling file system, it will react badly to metadata writes which get interrupted half way. Interrupted file content writes will instead result in half-updated files - without leaving warning signals. If you have control over that, you could make sure that database file sizes never change (pad to a fixed size?) and that no files are created or deleted. Those are the types of metadata changes which most likely damage the file system. But as said, corrupted file contents can still be a pain even with that metadata "protection". Given that the hardware has a lot of space and speed, you could also add some sort of redundancy, rotating backups, extra sanity checks and so on to the software. You cannot easily give DOS a journaling filesystem, but you could use multiple copies on several partitions and hope only some of them break. Or you could copy the database to a RAMDISK and export it back to rotating copies on internal or USB storage, carefully selecting moments where power outages are unlikely for the copy process. That way, you get well-defined losses when a crash happens, and lower the risk of ending up with "half-working" files on disk. 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
drivers (for USB printers) you will compete with the BIOS USB drivers and lose connection to the USB stick. One workaround is to tell the DOS driver to only take over ANOTHER controller than the one where your USB stick is plugged in. Which ports are connected to which controllers (I assume you do have more than one, as you have 6 ports) is something for trial and error. Also check the documentation of the DOS driver. But again, I recommend to not use USB sticks at all. Is there any way to suppress that whole bunch of startup output, especially that "Press F8 to trace" You can disable that by using SYS CONFIG to patch some boot flags in the kernel, as far as I remember. device = \freedos\jemmEx.exe PGE maxext=4096 noems Why does the XMS get artificially limited to 4 MB? Do you use NOEMS to get more UMB space? Note that it does not actually disable EMS, it just disables EMS 3.2 compatibility. EMS 4.0 stays available. What are the pros and cons of PGE or NOPGE for you? country = 049,850 \freedos\country.sys The syntax seems a bit off? files = 100 That seems to be a relatively high number. buffers = 20 You may want to consider fewer buffers, not sure? http://home.mnet-online.de/willybilly/fdhelp-dos/de/hhstndrd/cnfigsys/buffers.htm set FoxProSWX=+x -t What do those switches mean? Any other switches that might be interesting to use? fdapm apmdos I hope that reduces energy consumption and heat :-) display con=(ega,437,1) mode con codepage prepare=((437) %DosDir%\ega.cpx) mode con codepage select=437 keyb gr,437,%DosDir%\keyboard.sys If you need more free RAM, you may want to give MKEYB a try instead of KEYB. I guess you do want to load those CP437 fonts, though? Regards, 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! 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
[Freedos-user] Unicode and codepages in apps already bundled with FreeDOS?
Hi all, as part of a mail with Vacek, I made a list of apps from https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/report.html which MIGHT have some sort of Unicode and codepage awareness: By that, I mean that those apps can process input and/or output which are encoded using Unicode or some codepage and then show or otherwise process it either in Unicode or using the current codepage (which could get autodetected), or graphically, maybe including a custom non-codepage font. It surprises me that there are more than 30 suspects, but only a fraction of those will ACTUALLY have the features I hope them to have. Maybe you can help me to make the list more exact :-) HTMLHELP shows input (HTML with Unicode and entity support) using awareness of which chars exist in the current codepage. DN2 (DOS Navigator file manager, Ritlabs and Necromancer forks) may be able to handle file names or view files beyond simple "treat as 8-bit, assume it fits codepage". Same for the DOSZIP file manager and PGME (which even comes with fonts, I think). The SQLITE database engine may still contain Unicode support even though it may be of limited use in DOS. Like file managers, some archivers may be aware of filenames supporting encodings beyond the current codepage: 7ZIP just distinguishes DOS, WIN and UTF, whatever that means. 7ZDEC may just assume that Unicode chars 0 to 255 are your codepage? CABEXTRACT seems to rely on ICONV for Unicode? ZIP and UNZIP may or may not support encodings in their Infozip DOS ports? I do not expect any of the other archivers to ponder encodings. Some of the larger programming languages, often ports using 32-bit compilers for DOS, could support Unicode in some way: DOJS (JavaScript), Euphoria, FreeBASIC (FBC), FreePascal (FPC), Lua, Regina Rexx, Perl, OpenWatcom C, OpenWatcom Fortran maybe? I suspect filesystem drivers to have Unicode or codepage awareness, suspects are: DOSLFN, LFNDOS, NTFS, USBDOX :-) Among text editors, MinEd seems to be as Unicode- and codepage- aware as HTMLHELP: http://towo.net/mined/term-dos.png Blocek even comes with a graphical Unicode font. SETEDIT, ELVIS and VIM are powerful enough to possibly support various encodings? The FOXTYPE viewer explicitly supports Unicode. GNUCHCP is a bit of an alternative to the DISPLAY/MODE/CPI font ecosystem. UNRTF converts RTF to other text formats. Likewise, internet apps such as Arachne, Dillo, Lynx, Links, SSHDOS and SSH2DOS could support Unicode and other encodings? Media player MPLAYER probably does, too. Maybe also OPENCP? Last but not least, the OPENGEM GUI distro could contain encoding-aware apps or infrastructure? What are your thoughts? There might be more Unicode in FreeDOS than I had intuitively expected. Even when support is minimal, it would be cool to know that multiple apps grasp the concept of, say, UTF-8 and codepages being able to show a tiny subset of Unicode space and that a few apps even come with fonts with far more than 256 different chars already :-) Thanks for your insights! Regards, Eric PS: For all things NOT mentioned above, I expect no support for Unicode or conversions at all. I expect those to just assume an 8-bit encoding in text (and file names) matching your codepage. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Confusing details about SET and redirection in FreeCOM
Hi fellow users :-) I have been wondering which chars are special in SET in FreeCOM and whether they can be escaped or similar. As with most DOS commands, < | > are normally special. Any other characters which tend to be special in shells seem to be okay in SET. So far for the good news. But: You can do SET KEY=VALUE as expected as long as none of the 3 special chars are in there. You can also use double quotes in surprising ways: SET KEY="VALUE allows you to use any character in the value, but the double quotes will become part of the value. You do not need closing quotes and you can use more quotes anywhere in the value. SET "KEY=VALUE however is sort of evil, check this: >SET "KEY=valuebar|stuff >echo %KEY% ECHO is on >echo "%KEY% ECHO is on >echo %"KEY% Cannot redirect input from file "foo" >SET | tail -1 "KEY=valuebar|stuff >set "KEY=value|dir >echo %"KEY% ... will run the DIR command! I guess you can use this either as a feature or as a nasty security hole. Again, you can safely use >set KEY="value|dir >echo %key% "value|dir but that will always have the " as a part of the value. Are there other ways to deal with < | > in SET commands and then use the values in ECHO and other commands? Regards, Eric PS: Tests done in DOSEMU2, but with classic FreeCOM installed: C:\>ver /r FreeCom version 0.84-pre2 XMS_Swap [Aug 28 2006 00:32:15] DOS Version 6.22 FreeDOS kernel build 2038 [version May 16, 2009 compiled May 16 2009] ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Installation with Grub already installed
Hi! If I understand you correctly, Windows XP is NOT on that FAT partition, so every OS already has a separate partition? In that case the answer for MANUAL install would be: Simply skip the FDISK and FORMAT steps, it is enough to use SYS to make the FAT partition bootable. If your XP also has a FAT partition, make sure to not apply DOS SYS to the XP drive. The problem is that I do not know what the AUTOMATED install will do. Whether there is a risk that it would run FDISK or FORMAT without your consent? That question can be answered by others who are more familiar with the workflow. Regarding GRUB, you can use the Linux update-grub tool or grub-mkconfig to refresh the boot menu configuration after you have done the SYS step. It will detect DOS on the FAT partition and add a boot menu item for that :-) Then you can reboot, select booting DOS, and proceed with the remaining steps of installing DOS, if you have some DOS installation steps left to do after SYS. Regards, Eric Hi there I would like to install FreeDos 1.3 on my hard drive. I have Windows XP and Lubuntu 18.04 installed, both bootable from the Grub boot manager. The first partition is FAT and 2G in size and where I would like to install FreeDos. Is it possible to install FreeDos without destroying Grub and the current installation and how would I do this? Thanks John Ritchie ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Question about xFDisk and a multiboot setup
Hi Gabriele, Hi Eric I have partition magic for dos this can create partition for freedos? I guess it can, given that it is a partition editor :-) I do not know whether the DOS version can create LBA partitions or FAT32 partitions, so if this is an old DOS software, it may be better to use modern tools such as GPARTED for Linux or something similar for Windows or maybe even a tool shipping with FreeDOS? In any case, it should not make much difference for the multiboot question. For that, the trick will be to sort partitions in a way that each OS calls their own partition C: because the partitions of the other OS either are in formats not supported by the OS, for example FAT32 will be invisible to MS DOS 6.22, or are after the own partition of the OS. And you should make sure that installing one OS does not format or otherwise damage the partition of another. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Question about xFDisk and a multiboot setup
Hi! Let me get a bit more verbose in my installation thoughts. If you want to hide FreeDOS and MS DOS from each other, at least a bit, you could use filesystem choice for that: Install Linux on a Linux filesystem. Install XP on some NTFS filesystem. Install FreeDOS on a FAT32 filesystem. Install MS DOS on a FAT16 filesystem. By putting them in an appropriate order, XP can be C: while it sees the other 2 DOS versions as D: and E: and FreeDOS can be C: while seeing MS DOS as D: and last but not least MS DOS can be C: while not using any other partitions. Be aware that MS DOS can only use CHS partitions within the first 8 GB of the drive. Regarding the boot menu question, you can manually edit the GRUB menu.lst file after letting whatever automatic menu.lst generation offered by your Linux distro create entries for Linux, XP and MS DOS. This would let you add a FreeDOS entry when MS DOS and FreeDOS share the same partition. For that, you would manually run the FreeDOS SYS, after booting MS DOS, in the special style SYS C: freedos.bin bootonly this will create a freedos.bin boot sector file. You then copy the menu.lst section about MS DOS, but edit the "chainloader +1" line and make that something like "chainloader (hd0,1)/freedos.bin" if (hd0,1) would be your MS DOS partition. But given that you want 4 separate partitions for your 4 operating systems anyway, you can let the automatic menu.lst generation of GRUB do EVERYTHING, without the need for special SYS commands or manual menu.lst edits if you make sure that the 4 partitions all use different filesystem types :-) I recommend that you start by installing XP, because it is more likely to damage existing installs of other OS. Next, install Linux. Depending on the distro, it will provide a wizard to install a dual-boot which keeps XP working and gives you a boot menu. Add one FAT32 and one FAT16 primary partition either during this step or later, using a graphical Linux partitioning and formatting tool such as GPARTED. Boot MS DOS from a floppy or similar and install it manually to the FAT16 partition, without formatting or partitioning anything. Maybe you just use a boot disk and run SYS and copy some files, instead of running some automated installer at that point. Take similar steps for FreeDOS. I am not sure whether it will automatically skip formatting and partitioning, but do make sure to skip those. Also, make sure that your FAT32 partition is before the FAT16 one. That way the FAT32 partition will be C: and the MS DOS FAT16 partition will be D: for FreeDOS, while MS DOS will only see the FAT16 partition and call it C: :-) Boot Linux and let the GRUB menu.lst generator tool do magic to add menu entries for the two DOS partitions. I expect all DOS systems to require extra tricks if their boot partition is not a primary partition, but you can only have 4 primary partitions in total, or 3 if you also need additional non-primary partitions. In the latter case, I think you can boot at least Linux from non-primary partitions. Not sure about XP. You may have to tell Linux to install GRUB in the MBR, not in the boot sector of your Linux boot partition, for this to work. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Question about xFDisk and a multiboot setup
Hi! You could try metakern: FreeDOS SYS has command line options to write the boot sector to a file instead of to the boot sector. You can use either DEBUG or Linux or simple or fancy DOS tools of your choice to harvest the boot sectors of MS DOS and XP. If FreeDOS finds the file fdconfig.sys, it will use that and ignore config.sys, so you can tell FreeDOS to use a different command.com than MS DOS in the SHELL line, which you can also use to tell our freecom shell to use a different file instead of autoexec.bat :-) In short, you can use metakern as a boot menu to install FreeDOS and MS DOS on the SAME C: drive, both visible to each other. Of course it will take a bit of copying files around and making backups before one installer overwrites files of the other DOS, but as experienced DOS user, you can do it :-) You can also add XP to the equation if you manage to keep config files separate, but it is probably easier to install XP to a NTFS partition which both DOS versions will simply ignore. You can use for example your Linux boot manager to boot either Linux or XP or the DOS partition and then use metakern to boot either FreeDOS or MS DOS. Or even easier: Copy the harvested boot sectors of both MS DOS and FreeDOS to your Linux boot manager directory and manually add boot menu items for the two DOS versions directly to your Linux boot menu without using metakern. Regards, Eric I and trying to get a multiboot setup 1. MSDOS 6.22 + Win 3.11 2. FreeDos 1.3 3. I was going to do XP but annoying so no... 4. And a Older laptop friendly Linux that runs on XFCE... ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Interesting BTTR threads: hwinfo and astra, ranish with lba, fdisk bug fixes, soundcards
Hi! To forward some recent bookmarks for other DOS fans to enjoy, I would like to share some links to the DOS ain't dead BTTR forum: *Diagnostics software for DOS* https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=16853=0=time=0 ASTRA 6.91: http://www.sysinfolab.com/ HWiNFO 6.2.2 by Martin Malik: https://www.hwinfo.com/download/ System Analyser by Hans Niekus https://sysanalyser.com/ (2011) NSSI https://www.navsoft.cz/products.htm (2010) In particular, ASTRA and HWiNFO are actively maintained and received several updates discussed in the BTTR thread :-) *FDISK 1.3.4 off-by-one CHS versus LBA bug and fixes for it* https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=19762=0=time=0 This also links to https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/base/fdisk/ Most recent conclusion is that if LBA is active in BIOS and FDISK and a partition ends on a cylinder boundary < 8 GB, then the end is wrongly rounded to the next cylinder. A similar bug exists for the end of the whole disk. *Ranish partition manager revived* https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=19691=0=time=0 As the source code of Ranish Partition Manager is public domain now, https://codeberg.org/boeckmann/ is working on updated versions made with fresh compilers and with added LBA support. Cool news :-) *Soundcard emulation ponderings* https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=19549=0=time=0 This thread discusses the possibilities for soundcard emulation on modern hardware. The original idea being vdmsound + hx dos. There are no code or working recipes there yet, but the thread could inspire others who want to dive into the possibilites. I suggest to change the subject when replying to one of the good news listed above, so we can discuss it in a separate freedos-user thread for clarity. But I hope it was okay for you that I bundled them all in this single "announcement", or overview email. Regards, Eric PS: Thanks for sharing the news about UPX 4.0.1, Jim! https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2022/12/upx-401-released/ Checking the milestone lists, this fixes FreePascal 3 compresssion (fixed in 3.99) etc., while many other updates are not DOS related. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] UDVD2: Invoking STOP AUDIO twice should first pause, then stop audio, as some games expect
Hi!
There is an interesting new ticket about UDVD2 on github.
It seems that implementing a very specific detail of what MSCDEX expects
CD-ROM drivers to do might improve compatibility with games like Rayman.
See the text of the ticket below. Thanks to PluMGMK for their thoughts.
Regards, Eric
PluMGMK created an issue:
https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/drivers/udvd2/-/issues/5
First of all, let me say that it's great to see a "modern" DOS driver
that still implements audio functionality for CD-ROM drives!
But there is an issue with the way the STOP AUDIO request is handled.
The MSCDEX spec indicates that it should behave as per the following
pseudocode:
```
STOP_AUDIO() {
if (playing) {
last_startloc = present q-channel location
playing = FALSE;
paused = TRUE;
if (stop() == SUCCESSFUL)
return no error;
return error;
}
else {
playing = FALSE;
paused = FALSE;
last_startloc = 0;
last_endloc = 0;
return no error;
}
}
```
But UDVD2 only implements the "`if (playing)`" part and not the `else`.
That is, it only ever pauses the drive, it does not stop it if already
paused.
This does cause an issue with games like Rayman, which (for some reason)
insists on having the drive fully "stopped". That is, it calls "STOP
AUDIO" twice to "pause" then "stop", and then it continuously polls the
driver until the "pause" and "busy" flags are both unset. With UDVD2's
behaviour, the "pause" flag never gets unset, since the second call to
"STOP AUDIO" did not unset it. A workaround is to press the physical
Play/Pause button on the drive (if indeed it has one) and wait for the
track to finish, but that's quite inconvenient!
I'd say fixing it should be straightforward, but would unfortunately add
quite a bit of complexity in that bit of the code, which right now is
elegant in its simplicity. I could have a look at it over the weekend.
Are MRs accepted for this?
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Re: [Freedos-user] System hangs on boot.
Hi! Actually FreeDOS may work with > 504 MB after all. You mentioned that using a FAT16 CHS partition made with MS DOS FDISK boots okay after you install FreeDOS on it, while a FAT32 partition did not. Your FAT32 partition may have been CHS or LBA. If it was LBA, maybe FAT32 works, but LBA does not work for booting from your CF, for some unknown reason. So you could try FAT32 CHS. If it was CHS, maybe FAT32 CHS booting does not work, so you could try FAT32 LBA instead ;-) Of course you do not need to test either of the methods if you are happy with the current working 504 MB FAT16 CHS boot drive. You could still use the rest of the CF card as D: (etc.) drive(s) with any suitable partition type (FAT16 or FAT32, CHS or LBA). Note that FAT16 supports at most 2 GB per drive letter. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] System hangs on boot.
Hi! I reinstalled from floppy onto a 40MB IDE drive and this works. So it must be something to do with the CF card. The card works with MSDos. MS-DOS only sees it as a 504MB drive. I FDISK and format it and it works. Is there anything I can try with FreeDOS to get this working? If it works with MS DOS, I suggest to just install FreeDOS over the MS DOS install and use SYS and SYS CONFIG options to force the FreeDOS boot sector to use CHS and force the FreeDOS kernel to use CHS as well? Both would be related to that "only 504 MB instead of 40 GB (MB?)" observation you made. I assume FreeDOS sees the full 40 GB with LBA, but there is some problem with your LBA or geometry, so it fails to boot in LBA mode until you solve that. You can try CHS first. There are 2 threads on BTTR about FreeDOS FDISK and Ranish and about issues with partitioning in general, so you may want to check those as well: If the cause of your problem was a FDISK bug, that is: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=19762=0=time=0 https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=19691=0=time=0 But as said, if it works with MS DOS, I think the easiest test will be to just install FreeDOS on the already working MS DOS C: drive, even if only 504 MB, without repartitioning or reformatting it. The problem could also be that LBA is reported as working but not actually working. Early LBA age BIOS versions might have flaws in how they implement LBA and DOS relies on the BIOS for LBA at boot. Also, using CF instead of HDD or SSD might affect compatibility? Regards, Eric PS: MS DOS 6 only supports CHS, but "Win9x DOS" 7 could do LBA. This is why there were Ontrack and similar tools to transform CHS/LBA geometries to at least access up to 8 GB in CHS style. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] VIA C7-M processor
Hoi Nik, Hello, I'm new to freedos, I have installed this on a nice small laptop, a HP 2133 with VIA C7-M processor. It works nice, but the 386 memory manager crashes. I do not know how to solve this. Vriendelijke groet, Nik Kuster That depends on WHICH manager in which version you use ;-) Please be more specific about your installation. I think it should be sufficient to load some type of HIMEM, such as HIMEM or XMGR. There also are FDXXMS and exotic HIMEM versions to support > 4 GB RAM with modified apps/drivers. If you are using JEMMEX or JEMM386, you could try to use the other if one of them crashes for you. Also make sure to read the documentation, the EMM drivers have lots of command line options which can help you to work around incompatibilities with specific systems. Actually the 386MAX driver source code (and DPMIONE DPMI host, 386SWAT debugger and QLINK linker) has been made open source by the author a while ago, but I do not know whether binaries are available as well? Because you may use 386MAX instead of JEMM386, if you like to try that: https://github.com/sudleyplace/ One problem can be that your BIOS reports the usable memory areas in some inconsistent way or just fails to report some un-usable area at all. In that case, you can use config options of the JE... drivers to force them to rely on one interface which works, ignoring others. Similarily, you can force them to exclude some areas, use specific methods for A20 manipulation (that is a thing you may also want to check if HIMEM style drivers crash). Likewise, you could tell the driver to treat your VIA C7 as a 486DX instead of as Pentium class CPU, in case some Pentium feature of the C7 needs to be used in a special brand specific way which the driver does not know about? That 9 inch ultra portable HP laptop looks cool :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_2133_Mini-Note_PC Groetjes, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] System hangs on boot.
Hi! I have a physical AMD 386DX 40Mhz system. It runs MS dos ok but hangs when booting freedoms. BIOS post completes, says Loading FreeDOS then hangs. CTRL+ALT+DEL reboots but still hangs. Sounds like it already hangs when loading or booting the kernel, so the problem is not in separate config sys drivers etc.? I'm using a CF card at my hdd. It's a 4g card with a 512mb partition. This is all the BIOS sees. This works under msdos. I've tried imaging the cf card in another pc and installing directly from the free dos floppy install. Both yield the same result. I could imagine that there are problems with LBA and CompactFlash, as the computer is rather old. Maybe you installed FreeDOS to the CF card using a computer which supports LBA, while the 386 does not? You can use various SYS command line options to enforce either style. Actually you can even use SYS as a tool to "patch" a few bytes in the kernel file to force the kernel to use either CHS or LBA etc. Regards, Eric PS: I would not exclude the risk that some of our software intended for 386 use accidentally needs 486dx, but that should only affect individual apps and drivers, hopefully not the kernel. You may try an 8086 compatible version of our kernel for comparison, but this may influence the CHS/LBA or FAT32 support level as a side-effect? I have 17mb RAM, trident vga card with 1mb ram, winbond io controller, 3com 3c509 nic. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] How to unload a driver?
Hi! I load drivers for SoundBlaster AWE64 by means of putting CTMM.SYS, CTSB16.SYS and CTCU.EXE in DEVICE= parameters in FDCONFIG.SYS. However, that leaves me with 570KB free. I know that I can free some of that memory if only I can unload the drivers once the card is configured. I need to have 600KB free in order to start some very strange games, like Wolf. No, not Wolfenstein. Wolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_(video_game) A DOS forum thread discussing this online claims that some of those are only used for software mixing and concludes that you should get things working with only CTCM and AWEUTIL as well, so I guess you could test which of the 3 drivers mentioned in your setup are REALLY needed for your games. Also, you can use a boot menu to decide at boot time whether or not you want to load your AWE64 drivers. Then you can select the no-driver boot style for games such as Wolf which need more free DOS RAM :-) Also, it seems CTCU /S can be run in autoexec instead of config, which may be more convenient. CTCM = CreaTive Config Manager, AWEUTIL = relevant for MIDI emulation for real mode games etc., CTMM and CTSB16 might be components which are less necessary. Best regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] can't see DVD reader - try AHCICD by R Loew
Hi! There's a script that gets called from FDAUTO that tries several drivers -- why wouldn't that work? And why did it work during install? Because only the open source ones actually got installed automatically? There CD also has an ELTORITO.SYS driver it will try to use. El Torito often only works for the CD/DVD from which one has booted. If UDVD2 does not detect the drive, the controller might be AHCI. You could use AHCICD, which got open sourced after the author Rudolph Loew passed away, but unfortunately, he has not been able to update all documentation after his death, so the way in which AHCICD and his other software became open source was not accepted by this distro and you have to download things separately by hand. There is a mirror on archive.org here https://archive.org/download/rloewelectronics.com The HTTPS certificate of the original site has expired, but I think it is an acceptable risk to visit the site nevertheless: https://rloewelectronics.com/distribute/AHCICD/1.1/ As you can see, you can find the binary, documentation and sources there :-) However, the license.txt and readme etc. still are originals, so they still say the software is copyrighted. Only the main start page tells otherwise: https://rloewelectronics.com/ WELCOME To the memorial homepage of R. Loew Electronics Consulting Rudolph Loew (Rudy) passed away on September 11th, 2019. This site is maintained by his family to archive his work and make it available to anyone who is interested in pursuing further endeavors. You can view the original un-modified site here. Please do not try to make any purchases, all of Rudy's projects will be made available (including source code) as time permits. Apart from AHCICD, Rudolph has written CDTOOLS, a DLLHOOK redirector, ENCRYPT for encrypted disks, FILE64 to support large files on Win98, KICKWORK, RAMDISK, REPACKER, RFDISK (a partitioning tool), RFORMAT, PATCHATA / PATCH137 to get Win98/95/ME to support disks > 137 GB, PATCHMEM to let Win9x work on PC with > 0.5 GB RAM, SATA, SHELL32 to add SHGetFolder functions, TBPLUS, TRIM and WDMEX. TBPLUS is a tool to get Win98 and MSDOS7 to support > 512 Byte per Sector and possibly also GPT partitioned drives. So most of his tools are Windows related, but some are for DOS. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] djgpp bash and autoconf for dos, new gcc
Hi! As Paul has asked for a DOS version of BASH, http://www.delorie.com/pub/djgpp/current/v2gnu/ has version 4.2 of that. The zip unfortunately is called BSH... because the website unnecessarily limits itself to 8.3 names. Note that ACNF... in the same directory is autoconf :-) In related news, as Rugxulo mentioned two weeks ago on BTTR, there now is GCC 12.2 for DJGPP: You can find it in the same directory :-) Regards, Eric PS: Japheth mentioned on BTTR that QEMU 6.2.0 has better sound and keyboard for him, with -global i8042.kbd-throttle=on as mentioned on https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1897568 the fix only took 15 years :-p ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Windows 3.11 issues about FreeDOS
Hi Liam, Windows 3.11 cannot be run in 386 enhanced mode on FreeDOS, as it shows ERROR: Unsupported MS-DOS version. Windows 3.11 can be run in standard mode on FreeDOS, but when I launch the MS-DOS Prompt, it shows Invalid Opcode. Is there anyone who can solve this problem? As far as I know, this is a known and documented issue. There are several factors. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (unless in limited safe mode) and the 386enh mode of Windows 3.0 and 3.1 require DOS to be predictable and compatible enough to wrap themselves around DOS to be able to create several independent DOS tasks. The solution for THIS problem should be to use the kernel updates from Jeremy to implement some special API extensions for Windows. Unfortunately, they are not yet part of the distro, but I am sure somebody can mention a good download link here on the list? Another problem is that Windows cannot deal with large amounts of RAM, so you have to configure your EMM386 (yet another compatibility issue! It may be best to use the MS version??) and/or HIMEM (or maybe XMGR?) to only show an "understandable" amount and/or configure Windows to use a smaller swap factor. It cannot work with FAT32 or LBA as far as I know, so you have to tell it to use DOS and BIOS for disk access etc. So, no, for now it cannot be fixed. See above, there could be a chance :-) I hope this thread is seen by Jeremy and other experts :-) Maybe in some future version of DOS. Maybe sooner than we think. If you really need Windows 3.1x on a FAT32-capable DOS, then I would suggest DR-DOS from the DR-DOS Enhancement Project or possibly IBM PC-DOS 7.1. See above - Windows for Workgroups should have a more general problem with FAT32 and LBA, so first try to get it to work at all. Maybe a good (!) virtual PC configured to have "retro" hardware, little RAM, small FAT16 disk etc. is a start? Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSshell replacement
Hi Aitor, the topic reminds me that we have https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/triple-dos/ in our archives - it is 20 years old and rather limited, but it might still provide some inspiration somehow :-) Regards, Eric Under DOS-Shell, there was the DOSSWAP to do the task switching. But quite a different approach from multitasking, specially the preemptive way that appeared with Win386 (the VMM). Unfortunately, for the simplest (and useful) easier uses, I do not know of a free DOSSWAP replacement. I assume that such software would make copies of DOS and BIOS global variables (such as the list of lists) and swap them upon a task switch. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CD drive always gets the letter H: - can't change
Hi! To be a bit more productive than just complaining, how about this? /* Automatically partition the selected hard drive */ void Automatically_Partition_Hard_Drive() could be patched using: --- FDISKIO.C.bak 2022-08-03 02:10:06.914145715 +0200 +++ FDISKIO.C 2022-08-03 02:10:27.141382832 +0200 @@ -110,7 +110,7 @@ (pDrive->total_head+1)* pDrive->total_sect / 2048; */ }while( (pDrive->ext_part_largest_free_space > 0) - && (Determine_Drive_Letters()<'Z') ); + && (Determine_Drive_Letters()<'D') ); } } That would at least somewhat limit the damage done by /AUTO :-) One could also change the following part to NOT use type 6: /* Create a primary partition...if the size or type is incorrect, */ /* int Create_Primary_Partition(...) will adjust it automatically. */ Determine_Free_Space(); Set_Active_Partition(Create_Primary_Partition(6,2048)); By using FAT32, the whole extended/logical partition creation hassles could be dropped, making a FAT32 variant of /AUTO much simpler than the original. Both could co-exist with different command line options in a patched FDISK, e.g. /AUTO32 and /AUTO. Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CD drive always gets the letter H: - can't change
Hi! The Installer has NO way to tell FDISK to auto partition the drive as a single partition. FDISK automatically breaks it into 2GB sections. If there was a way to tell FDISK just use the entire drive, the installer would have it create a single large FAT32 partition. Or, possible ask if the user wanted to use the whole drive or partition it manually. Until someone decides to improve FDISK to support such operations, the current installer is limited in what can be done regarding partitions. Well as that "automatic feature" of FDISK is not up to the task, you already give the alternative: The installer has to let the user chose himself how to partition things interactively with FDISK :-) Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CD drive always gets the letter H: - can't change
Hi! Thank you for your answer Bret, it came in just as I figured out by what was the problem. I installed FreeDOS using the LiveCD, which also partitioned my disk and formatted the C drive... I don't know if the warning is normal, but from what I could check, the FreeDOS LiveCD installer by default doesn't create a single FAT32 partition (10 GB HDD), but instead it creates a single 2048 MB primary partition, formatted FAT32, and four 2 GB logical partitions, and it doesn't format them. Since the partitions aren't formatted, FreeDOS doesn't mount them, but it still assigns them a letter, and that explains why I had this problem. I didn't expect this to be the default behavior, that's why I didn't check the HDD partition table to see what was going on. A word to the install wizard app, if it were a person: That was a great way of shooting yourself in the foot :-D Running out of drive letters by trying to avoid FAT32. In 2022. To solve this, after deleting the partition table, I booted the LiveCD and repartitioned the disk using fdisk. It created a single 10 GB partition which I later formatted to FAT32 with the included format.exe. After that, the installation went flawlessly and the problem was solved. Cool :-) It would make more sense if the installer made a single FAT16 2 GB partition, or used the whole disk to create a FAT32 partition. The crucial bit is not to silently create the four logical partitions and also leave them unformatted. Even if you DO format them, you eventually run out of drive letters as soon as more than N * 2 GB of disk space exist. Even typical USB flash drives already have "dangerously" much space for the installer as long as it behaves at it does now. One single partition, preferably FAT32, will be enough for everybody except those who voluntarily opt to create more. I suggest that there should be an option to let the user decide what to do between these two options or something else. Definitely. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] PGME [was: DOSshell replacement]
Hi! * CTMOUSE driver regularly goes crazy on hardware (maybe because my test machines have both a trackpad and a trackpoint); PGME can't be operated with keyboard alone. That is a deal-breaker for me. Have you tried different versions (1.9, 2.0, 2.1) and settings, including disabling wheel support and/or changing BIOS settings? Regards, Eric PS: You could also try my ancient MAUSMENU. It needs a manusmenu.dat text file with 2 fixed-width columns for button texts followed by a name of an executable with optional "* command line options" suffix. http://ericauer.cosmodata.virtuaserver.com.br/soft/specials/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Questions on Eric Auer's Terminal
Hi! That sounds like great question to discuss with other dosemu2 experts including you, as the serial port emu of dosemu2 has to do a large part of the work in what you want to do, I think? :-) The terminal uses mostly BIOS if i remember correctly, to be slow but compatible? Yet that also means slower and less reliable comm. Regards, Eric PS: The terminal, I think, interprets some basic ANSI itself to be self-contained and faster, but as you say, it lacks features such as translating cursor keypresses to messages to the server. In general, all this has been a very long time ago, though. Next problem: The cursor always stays in the lower left corner of the DOS screen. This is sort of documented in the manual [8], but I don't fully understand it. The idea was to either wrap at the end of line for a dumb terminal experience or try to stick to intended coordinates where possible. A slightly more elegant method would have been to let the terminal show the upper 80x25 chars of a 256x256 char coordinate system :-) [8]: https://hg.pushbx.org/ecm/terminal/file/f9c5454794f3/terminal.txt#l69 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Question about error message / redirecting AUX and PRN?
Thanks for the reply. It turns out the software is trying to write to the com port on exit, which I'm assuming expects to find a modem there. There was a modem connected, but wasn't turned on. With the modem on, I don't get the error. Also if there is nothing connected to the port, the data is just sent out to nowhere, and there is no error. I'm not sure why it is accessing a modem only in certain conditions, but obviously this is not a FreeDOS problem. BTW I did not specifically mention that I'm running this on old hardware (Pentium III based) and not a VM. I will ignore the drive messages and see what happens. Also it is a Gateway system, so it may have finicky stuff going on that a generic system doesn't. Regards, Eric On 7/8/2022 16:29, Eric Auer wrote: Hi ERIC, the AUX device usually was the same as COM1, in the same way that the PRN device usually was the same as LPT1. If your program tried to read/write AUX, it either really wanted to do something with the serial port, or an unrelated bug made it access the wrong file. According to the FreeDOS kernel sources, AUX is the first item in the system file table, similar to file handles 0 to 4 defaulting to CON as stdin, CON as stdout, CON as stderr, "stdaux" (stdin) and PRN, respectively. Note that your luck may vary when it comes to access to real or emulated serial or parallel ports in the PC or DOS emulators you may be using today. At least, you will have to dig into the configuration docs to find out how to link them to the right device of your host operating system to make them useful :-) The message about drives and cylinders probably refers to a mismatch between your CHS geometry and what would be plausible based on where your partitions start and end. The MBR partition table should better agree with the geometry reported by the BIOS, but if you have LBA, then DOS will probably be using LBA instead of CHS anyway, so warnings about geometry become less relevant. Regards, ERIC ;-) PS: You are right that our MODE has LPTn=COMn redirection but not PRN/AUX redirection. The kernel source code says MODE should be able to redirect AUX and PRN, like CTTY redirecting CON? In MS DOS, the first 3 system file table items would be AUX, CON and PRN. I guess redirecting those would involve "just" manipulating the SFT? ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Question about error message
Regarding FreeDOS 1.3 release version: So I get this message when I exit from a certain program: Error reading from device AUX: write fault. Aside from the strangeness of getting a write fault by reading something, does DOS even still have an AUX device? I think this is a generic device name like PRN that can be redirected to something else, but the MODE command doesn't seem to know what it is. Also when I start FreeDOS, I get 4 lines of "Can't read parameters from drive 01" after a message that looks like it is adjusting the number of cylinders detected. But the system seems to work fine. Any insights would be appreciated. Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] New mTCP available
Hi! Forwarding from BTTR: A new mTCP is available (2022-07-01) posted by mbbrutman, Washington, USA, 07.07.2022, 00:00 Download from: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP.html Release notes: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP_2022-07-01_Release_Notes.html And here is the short version of what you can look forward to: - Support for a local HOSTS.TXT file. - Some minor DHCP bug fixes. - TCP/IP library improvements for flow control on bad/slow connections. - HTTP server bug fixes and proper support for default index.html files. - A slightly more accurate SNTP (simple network time protocol) client. - Proper Dynamic DNS support for the FTP server - Other scattered bug fixes and small features. As always, yell if you have problems ... For the future - I'm working on proper Unicode support for IRCjr and Telnet. That will come along in a few months. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FD13 floppy installation attempts
Hi Pierre, Jim and everybody, On my FreeDOS PC, I tried to use PKUNZIP to unpack the floppy boot ZIP to a 1.44 floppy. That's when PKUNZIP told me that the destination had insufficient space. That is not surprising. You must use a tool which can write disk IMAGES to the floppy. Just copying FILES to it will not make it bootable. One such tool is our DISKCOPY, if you want to do it in DOS. For that, you unzip the IMG file, then simply say DISKCOPY your.img A: to copy the your.img diskimage to the floppy in A: - of course you have to replace your.img by the name of the file you want to copy. You can download diskcopy 0.95 by downloading the cryptically named "dskcp095.zip" file from https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/diskcopy/0.9/ and I really think the FD13-FloppyEdition.zip should contain a copy of DISKCOPY, a README with instructions for DOS, Linux, Apple and Windows and, Jim, please add a link to DISKCOPY to http://freedos.org/download/ because it really needs a lot of insider knowledge at the moment to upgrade from another DOS to FreeDOS if our diskcopy tool is so many clicks away from the diskimage download page. Thank you! Regards, Eric PS: Alternatively, you could use the tools here: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/tools/ PPS: The readme linked from the download page does not mention diskcopy, so I assume none of our distro downloads contains a copy of diskcopy in well-visible and advertised place yet? https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.3/official/readme.txt ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Keyboard issue - wondering about typematic rate for keyboard repeats in different VMs and emulators
Hi! Here is the related RBIL part for you: B-1603--- INT 16 - KEYBOARD - SET TYPEMATIC RATE AND DELAY AH = 03h AL = subfunction 00h set default delay and rate (PCjr and some PS/2) 01h increase delay before repeat (PCjr) 02h decrease repeat rate by factor of 2 (PCjr) 03h increase delay and decrease repeat rate (PCjr) 04h turn off typematic repeat (PCjr and some PS/2) 05h set repeat rate and delay (AT,PS) BH = delay value (00h = 250ms to 03h = 1000ms) BL = repeat rate (00h=30/sec to 0Ch=10/sec [def] to 1Fh=2/sec) 06h get current typematic rate and delay (newer PS/2s) Return: BL = repeat rate (above) BH = delay (above) Return: AH destroyed by many BIOSes Note: use INT 16/AH=09h to determine whether some of the subfunctions are supported SeeAlso: INT 16/AH=09h,AH=29h"HUNTER",AH=2Ah"HUNTER" B-1609--- INT 16 - KEYBOARD - GET KEYBOARD FUNCTIONALITY AH = 09h Return: AL = supported keyboard functions (see #00585) AH destroyed by many BIOSes Note: this function is only available if bit 6 of the second feature byte returned by INT 15/AH=C0h is set (see #00509) SeeAlso: AH=03h,AH=0Ah,AH=10h,AH=11h,AH=12h,AH=20h,AH=21h,AH=22h,INT 15/AH=C0h Bitfields for supported keyboard functions: Bit(s) Description (Table 00585) 7 reserved 6 INT 16/AH=20h-22h supported (122-key keyboard support) 5 INT 16/AH=10h-12h supported (enhanced keyboard support) 4 INT 16/AH=0Ah supported 3 INT 16/AX=0306h supported 2 INT 16/AX=0305h supported 1 INT 16/AX=0304h supported 0 INT 16/AX=0300h supported SeeAlso: #00511 And here is what FreeDOS "MODE /?" has to say about it: ... > MODE CON[:] [RATE=...] [DELAY=...] > (default rate 20, default delay 1) > Rate can be 1..32 for 2..30 char/sec, > delay can be 1..4 for 1/4..4/4 sec. Our MODE just calls the BIOS. There is no DOS typematic rate driver, DOS only asks the BIOS to set the rate for it. Regards, Eric Eric proposed: "For this, you start DEBUG, then type: a cs:100 mov ax,0305 mov bx, int 16 int 20 g q " As Ah=3 int 16h is marked as PCJr only: INT 16 - KEYBOARD - SET DELAYS (PCjr ONLY) REG AH = 3 AL = 0: RESET TYPEMATIC AL = 1: INCREASE INITIAL DELAY AL = 2: INCREASE CONTINUING DELAY AL = 3: INCREASE BOTH DELAYS AL = 4: TURN OFF TYPEMATIC in https://groups.google.com/g/net.micro.pc/c/yg4oazZOA7g/m/uwO-gYOTi2gJ I hesitate to go there... but did not get the full RBIL. https://info.wsisiz.edu.pl/~bse26236/batutil/help/MODESTRS.HTM but I am a bit unsure these options are supported by FreeDOS because: http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Mode does not mention them. Last I was thinking many keyboards are now USB rather than PS/2... and I think the 8042 chip handle typematic on DOS... so I was first thinking about BIOS emulation of PS/2 keyboard and mouse in BIOS options... but your keyboard would just not work if these options were causing problem I think. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Keyboard issue - wondering about typematic rate for keyboard repeats in different VMs and emulators
Tom, In DOS I was able to press and hold a key and the key would repeat. Great for arrow and page keys. For some reason this stopped workin wow. one of these Asshole from Hell questions: no information what DOS we are talkink about. no information whatsoever about CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT. I somehow liked Dennis' way of asking for more context and details better :-p However, I also have a technical question about Daniel's technical question :-) Daniel, you could do the following to test whether explicitly setting keyboard repeat (typematic rate, see RBIL = Ralf Browns Interrupt List) to maximum speed and the delay to minimum has any effect on your real or virtual hardware. For this, you start DEBUG, then type: acs:100 mov ax,0305 mov bx, int 16 int 20 g q Note that you have to press return twice between "int 20" and "g". For the lowest possible speed and the longest delay before repeating starts, you write "031f" instead of "" in the "mov bx,..." line. Interestingly, it seems to make no difference in DOSEMU2 which of the two values I use for BX. It probably just uses the keyboard repeat settings from Linux, without letting me a custom different rate just for the DOSEMU2 window. So I would be keen to know which of the other DOS systems people here are using do or do not support changing the typematic rate aka keyboard repeat rate. In particular, I guess that real hardware often supports this, while running DOS on a virtual computer in a window could be less likely to offer support for this setting? Thanks for testing! Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Mixed announcements from BTTR: DOSBOX-X, DOSLFN, DEBUG
Hi! Before I forget my bookmarks, here are some announcements from BTTR for which I am not sure whether they have been mentioned on FreeDOS channels yet :-) https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=18974 DOSBox-X 0.83.24 released! posted by Wengier 2022-04-01 DOSBox-X 0.83.24 has now been released! Designing to be a cross-platform DOS emulator, it is the goal of DOSBox-X to cover different types of DOS software, and also intends to implement accurate emulation, accurate enough to help make new DOS developments possible with confidence the program will run properly on actual DOS systems. DOSBox-X provides official DOS versions in addition to other platforms. You can now download the latest packages for both HX-DOS and LOADLIN builds for DOSBox-X 0.83.24 from the DOSBox-X project homepage: https://dosbox-x.com/ As usual there are many improvements in this latest version, such as support for resizable OpenGL Voodoo window and VMware mouse protocol for Windows 3.x, and you can find the release notes for this version (containing the change history) here: * https://dosbox-x.com/release-0.83.24.html The DOS packages are self-contained so that you can simply unzip the file and type DOSBOX-X to run in DOS. It is confirmed to work in DOS, and read the included README.TXT file for more information. https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=19064 about to fix the "final" doslfn bug posted by jadoxa 2022-04-14 On investigating further, when ever I have doslfnMS enabled and I do doslfnMS u, get the message Another TSR grabbed Int 21 and/or Int 2F ... HOWEVER, when I now doslfn (latest -c variant) (note all these steps in sequence are in 1.bat which is for 1st level sub-directory on USB D:\ Fat 32), the output is... DOSLFN 0.41f ():enabled Last error:94 - inDOS bayra ...kullanimini SIFIRLA Released DOSLFN 0.41f, > http://doslfn.adoxa.vze.com/ which includes a basic version check (doslfn will install, not try and control doslfnms; I should probably have made it say another version was installed, but I didn't). https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=19138 DEBUG v1.29 posted by Japheth 2022-05-08 Hello, recently the DEBUG utility got an upgrade: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/DOS-debug The main reason for the new version is that in v1.28 the "driver" variant was broken. But there are also a few nice bug fixes :-) There exist now also a version that can flip video screens between debugger and debuggee, thus giving a much better look as to what the debugged program is really doing. Verne Brooks has implemented this feature in his debug version as well, but I decided not to follow the - simple - approach that he chose ( using the BIOS page switching mechanisms ). It's because I had to learn that there exist quite a few machines where this BIOS switching has quirks. What's done instead is to save/restore video contents to an XMS memory block. That also has its disadvantages ( won't work on 8086 machines :-D, needs an XMS host, may run out of handles, copying several kB of data to/from slow video memory, ... ), but it works, and it works quite satisfying. :-P You probably have seen the recent announcements from FreeDOS, though :-) https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2022/04/svarcom-version-20224/ https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2022/04/links-web-browser-update/ https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2022/04/new-jemm--himemsx-releases/ Cheers, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] SoundBlaster volume control for the distro
Hi! It seems our distro has no volume control or mixer tool yet, so it would be nice to add one. We can start with the command line tool SBMIX, although something with Text-graphical user interface would of course be even more cool :-) https://www.bttr-software.de/products/sbmix/ Thanks! Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS Partitioning
Hi Daniel! I am tryin to install FD on a Dell PC with an 80 gb partition. I tried as I prefered it spliting into 4 partitions, and as one large partition. When I boot into the live CD all seems fine, but after it does the formating and installing, I get a bunch of errors about the partitins. Looking at the fdisk informations they seem to get changed from 20481 to 20489. Not sure why. Can anyone check to see if this happens to them? Is there a size limit currently for partitions? Please share more details about the issue. If you want to have 4 partitions of 20 GB each, you will have to use FAT32, but it is possible to have much larger FAT32 partitions. The limit in your case will be the 2 TB limit for MBR partitioned disks and sometimes a limit of how large disks are supported by the BIOS, which could be 128 GB for old LBA BIOS versions. FAT32 itself is limited to 2^28 clusters, which means that even for common cluster size 4 kB you already reach 1 TB in a single partition. And clusters can be much larger than that, so your effective limit is the 2 TB disk size limit of 512 byte per sector MBR. That said, I recommend that you use LBA mode for partitioning, so the partition type should be 0c FAT32 LBA, not 0b FAT32 CHS. If you use extended partitions, you would use 0f with LBA instead of 05 with CHS, but as you mention that you planned to use exactly four partitions, you probably do not use extended partitions here. Likewise, if you would use FAT16, type 06 is CHS, type 0e is LBA, but FAT16 partitions can be at most 2 GB (in some cases 4 GB). If you are using an older version of FDISK, it may have some type of rounding error which could explain what you are seeing, but if it just rounds the size to the next whole cylinder in CHS mode, that would just be something common to do and not a real error. However, if you get inconsistencies and the partitions do not boot or otherwise do not work properly, then that could be a real bug. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Ré : Installing freedos to virtualbox them copying dice contents to an actual computer
Hi! I think wordperfect for DOS came on floppies, yes. And you can connect ATAPI CD/DVD drives to typical 486 computers. There also are special boot loaders which you can load from floppy to continue booting from CD/DVD in case your BIOS does not yet support direct booting from CD/DVD :-) Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] how to get dosemu working under ubuntu installed in wsl
Hi! I hope you are all aware of the fact that dosemu is totally outdated, only dosemu2 is fresh at the moment: http://dosemu2.github.io/dosemu2/ It has daily-built packages available for Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuSE :-) Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] From BTTR: FAT32 ramdisk, SvarCOM shell, Doszip commander
Hi! Today is a day full of announcements on BTTR-SOFTWARE.DE :-) https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=18797 RDRVSX32: FAT32 RAM drive for HimemSX (Announce) posted by jadoxa, Queensland, Australia, 13.03.2022, 13:58 I had a request (via email) to create a RAM drive greater than 4GiB. It sort of works (works on his and mine 8GiB AMD, but has issues with his 32GiB Intel) so if anyone has the time and inclination to test, that'd be great. You will need more than 4GiB RAM (in order to access super-extended memory), preferably more than 8GiB (in order to test accessing beyond 4GiB). Our testing has been simple so far: just copy large files (he was able to create a 28GiB RAM drive, copy hundreds of 64MiB files, but it fails copying a 1GiB file). Link: http://shsufdrv.adoxa.vze.com/rdrvsx32.zip https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=18799 Doszip Commander version 2.63 available (Announce) posted by rr, Berlin, Germany, 13.03.2022, 14:20 On 02 March 2022 Hjort Nidudsson released a new version. Home page: https://github.com/nidud/doszip Download: https://github.com/nidud/doszip/releases/tag/v2.63 Changes since version 2.55 are: Changes in 2.63 - 2 Mar 2022 - extended country-specific date format Changes in 2.58 - 15 Feb 2022 - added country-specific date format Changes in 2.57 - 12 Feb 2022 - changed "Jump" to "Skip" in Delete dialog - fixed color issue in Move dialog - fixed issue with pipe command -- unzip -hh | more https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=18798 On 13 March 2022 Mateusz Viste released SvarCOM version 2022.3. What is SvarCOM? Quoting from http://svardos.org/svarcom/: SvarCOM is the SvarDOS command line interpreter, known usually under the name "COMMAND.COM". It is designed and maintained by Mateusz Viste, and distributed under the terms of the MIT license. For the time being, it is a work-in-progress project that - although functional - is not entirely polished yet and might miss a few bits and pieces. SvarCOM version 2022.0 must be considered a "preview" version. See the documentation included in the zip file for details. SvarCOM is minimalist and I'd like to keep it that way. It aims to be functionaly equivalent to COMMAND.COM from MS-DOS 5.x/6.x. No LFN support. As of version 2022.0, SvarCOM's resident footprint is under 2 KiB. What is new in version 2022.3? Here is his 2022.3 announcement to the SvarDOS mailing list: Hello all, SvarCOM 2022.3 has been published right now. It comes with many improvements and bug fixes. Many thanks to Robert Riebisch who dedicated a lot of time to perform extensive tests on SvarCOM and had the strength to annoy me over and over about the various glitches he found. The new SvarCOM package is already available on the SvarDOS packages repository. It can also be downloaded from the SvarCOM sub-project page at http://svardos.org/svarcom As an experiment I did a SvarDOS build that uses SvarCOM instead of FreeCOM. It is the build 20220312, available in the "files" section of the website: http://svardos.org/?p=files If this build proves stable enough, it might become the default download presented on the main page, but for now it needs some testing. There is also still one or two things that needs to be added (like DIR/O support). The main advantage of SvarCOM over the legacy FreeCOM is that the former is much lighter (2K of memory footprint), which is esp. important on pre-386 machines. An interesting side effect of replacing FreeCOM by SvarCOM is that some of the SvarDOS floppy sets decreased: 720K set went from 4 floppies to 3 floppies 1.2M set went from 3 floppies to 2 floppies Other sets remained the same amount of floppies (6x 360K, 2x 1.44M and 1x 2.88M) Note for the future: there are cases where it is possible to decrease the amount of floppies simply by ordering files on the floppies differently. For instance, it is possible to decrease the 360K set to 5 floppies now, just by moving files from disk #6 to other disks. This is something that will be optimized in the future, but I don't want to do it manually, it has to be an automated process, and the installer must be aware of the exact disposition of files on floppies to avoid asking twice for the same floppy. Mateusz Changes since last release (2022.2) are: - fixed stdin redirection handling (was broken since 2022.1) [#44027] - only COM, EXE and BAT files are allowed for execution [#44068] - FOR command: accepts control characters as pattern delimiters [#44058] - FOR command: patterns without wildcards are processed as messages [#44058] - implemented the TRUENAME command [#44051] - DIR command: /a:xxx is supported like an equivalent to /axxx [#44077] - VER command: displays DOS memory location (low, HMA, ROM...) [#44050] - VER command: displays true DOS version and DOS rev (bttr) [#44050] - REN command: allows renaming directory names [#44060] - implemented CTTY and LOADHIGH/LH as no-ops (LH loads programs low) - LN
Re: [Freedos-user] retro gamer review of FreeDOS 1.3
Hi! Runtime error 200 usually is an overflow in timing code of Borland or Turbo Pascal, if you search the web you will find various tools which patch it or work it around :-) The overflow happens because your computer is too fast. So you can also try to slow it down, e.g. using FDAPM SPEEDn where n is a digit (but that might crash, be prepared to hard-reset or power cycle if so) or using various "SLOWDOWN" resident tools for DOS. As runtime error 200 is widespread, as said there also are tools which to either load as TSR (they will patch the affected code in RAM) or can be used to modify affected EXE files on disk (remember to backup the original EXE). Regards, Eric Tyrian tyrian.exe - Runtime error 200 at 0006:374c setup.exe - Runtime error 200 at 0002:24ED Fuzzy fuzzy.exe - Runtime error 200 at 0003:361B main.exe - Runtime error 200 at 0003:361B ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] retro gamer review of FreeDOS 1.3
Hi! DOSEMU2 expert Stas mentions his FDPP patch mentioning Test Drive 2: https://github.com/dosemu2/fdpp/commit/c6efa7a203c8aafe8da952d6405ad5dfb49fd469#diff-e9118389bd658345f94d54c6159dc16b60454e193c33f16184d4fd5526180329 @@ -156,6 +156,8 @@ CommonNdRdExit: ; *** tell if key waiting and return its ASCII if yes add ah,[cs:_kbdType] int 16h ; Get status, if zf=0 al=char jz ConNdRd4; Jump if no char available or ax,ax ; See if call was supported jz ConNdRd4; 0 (sometimes) means unsupported callchecke0 ; check for e0 scancode or ax,ax ; Zero ? jnz ConNdRd1; Jump if not zero However, FreeDOS 1.3 allegedly already has that patch? So other FDPP improvements compared to classic FreeDOS may be necessary to let TD2 run properly. Also, he points out that TD2 will not run from G: to Z:, it must be run from a drive letter in the range (A: ?) to F: Thanks for helping in spite of seeing us as competitors :-) Regards, Eric games that won't run: - Alone in the Dark 1 and 2 (floppy versions only, CD versions run fine) - Alpha Waves - Empire Soccer - Frontier Elite - Grand Prix Circuit - Test Drive 2 - The Cycles - Tetris Classic - Virtual Chess ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] retro gamer review of FreeDOS 1.3
Hi! Please stay relaxed about this topic, it would be great to know WHY certain games do not work well in FreeDOS, so we can improve it :-) Of course you can also run those games in various emulators or using other versions of DOS. This may even provide insights regarding how to configure FreeDOS, another DOS, or some emulator the best way for the game in question. So I would not want to exclude talking about other DOS or emulators, but my goal would still be finding out how to make all games work in FreeDOS - if necessary, by pointing out bugs in FreeDOS. That said, in case you have Linux (not sure about the porting state of DOSEMU2 to Windows or other OS), could you test the games here with DOSEMU2 and FDPP? The FDPP module of DOSEMU2 is a port of the FreeDOS kernel to the Linux side of the emulator, with some glue on the DOS side, so it is a bit hard to compare to classic FreeDOS, but it has lots of patches which may have already solved the game issues so it would be cool to know how well the tricky games run with that. FDPP is the default "DOS" for DOSEMU2, but you can still use DOSEMU2 like a more generic VM or emulator and install classic FreeDOS on it, either in a diskimage drive or in a "Linux directory posing as a DOS drive". The latter requires loading some special DOS drivers to gain write access after boot. In DOSEMU (non-2), some magic was built-in to provide more services without manually loading DOS drivers, so that just had a normal FreeDOS kernel as default guest operating system. Regarding the option of using MS DOS 6.22: That one has not been updated for 30 years and it fails to understand things such as disks beyond 8 GB (or even 0.5 GB) in size, modern amounts of RAM, FAT32 partitions, and so on. Plus of course it is neither free nor open source. So FreeDOS has many nice features which MS DOS 6.22 is missing, but of course games from 30 years ago have only been tested by their developers with DOS from 30 years ago, so there is always a risk that we broke compatibility in how we implement exotic APIs. As you mention, Win9x DOS 7.x is an option for some - but even that is neither free nor open source and there is no ongoing development, so nobody who can help you to improve it if anything is not working well for example on any "too modern" hardware. Alas, FAT-32 MS-DOS introduces issues of its own with other games. Starflight 1 and 2 have problems on these installed, and Tsunami Media games (Man Enough, Return to Ringworld, just to name a few) refuse to run completely. All these games Run flawlessly on FreeDOS. That surprises me, as a default install of FreeDOS has FAT32 enabled. Do those games just refuse to run when the game itself is on a FAT32 drive? Or do they actually care about whether DOS knows about FAT32? So you downloaded some of those games and they ran but had speed issues and exited with error code. Then you tried your Floppy versions and you report black screen with no errors (same as others and me included had reported). And you tested all this between 1.3rc4 and 1.3 live on a VM. That sounds like a lot of effort in testing, but if all tests were on virtual machines, the problem can simply be caused by the VM itself, for example not properly emulating DOS age VGA graphics or SB16 etc.? Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] retro gamer review of FreeDOS 1.3 - DOSBOX-X 0.83.23 released
In related news: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=18754 DOSBox-X 0.83.23 released! posted by Wengier(R) 05.03.2022 03:01 DOSBox-X 0.83.23 has now been released! Designing to be a cross-platform DOS emulator, it is the goal of DOSBox-X to cover different types of DOS software, and also intends to implement accurate emulation, accurate enough to help make new DOS developments possible with confidence the program will run properly on actual DOS systems. DOSBox-X provides official DOS versions in addition to other platforms. You can now download the latest packages for both HX-DOS and LOADLIN builds for DOSBox-X 0.83.23 from the DOSBox-X project homepage: https://dosbox-x.com/ As usual there are many improvements in this latest version, and you can find the release notes for this version (containing the change history) here: * https://dosbox-x.com/release-0.83.23.html The DOS packages are self-contained so that you can simply unzip the file and type DOSBOX-X to run in DOS. It is confirmed to work in DOS, and read the included README.TXT file for more information. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] retro gamer review of FreeDOS 1.3
Hi! - it sounds like a very bad idea to create a zillion FAT16 partitions and format only one of them, while using FreeDOS FDISK etc. by hand made it easy for the reviewer to just create ONE FAT32 drive :-p When the installer verifies there is no drive readable to DOS ... it asks FDISK to please auto-partition the drive. There are no auto-partition options to make only one that uses the entire drive. FDISK is open source, so the auto-partition feature could and should be updated from "100 FAT16 drives" to "1 FAT32 drive" if possible, but So, it comes down to making everyone (including novices with no idea how to use fdisk) partition the drive manually or let fdisk do what it wants. It was a completely normal part of DOS life that when you were planning to install MS DOS you would have to take the time to understand and use FDISK, so I would certainly prefer manual partitioning over autocreated FAT16 C: to ZZZ9: drives of which only C: gets formatted anyway ;-) Without such an update to fdisk, I still think the benefits provided by auto-partitioning out weigh making everyone manually partition their drive. That is the part where I disagree and that youtube reviewer is not the first person to make fun of that FDISK "feature". We already have the same discussion on the list :-) As said, remembering that FDISK had a non-free toolchain and no active maintainers, I would prefer to just let people use FDISK by hand if no C: is found. Regards, Eric PS: Odd that the youtuber has even tried the floppy installer at all, as he spends half of his video talking about CD-ROM game support :-o ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
