Hi Jerome, > I thought you knew [that V8 means V8 Power Tools] Anyhow...
Me maybe, but some who are interested in floppy distros not yet ;-) > They are a set of command line utilities written in assembly that > can provide a Text based User Interface (TUI) and other... I guess you could save some disk space by merging some of the tools into fewer, more versatile tools, due to cluster sizes? > several text features it can do that require an EGA or better card. > Then there are some that are just easier without needing to support > sub-EGA cards. I could list the exact features it uses that require EGA That actually would be quite interesting :-) And I wonder whether the installer could degrade gracefully when EGA is not available, for example skip some fancy decorations but keep interacting :-) > Thats an easy one. It doesn’t boot. Which version exactly does not boot on 8086 and which version and options of SYS have you used? Which messages are shown? > "it hangs after printing C: HD1, Pri stuff" While the person testing made sure to use a 8086 compiled binary? > Why does Zip support 286, but Unzip needs a 386? A very good question! In general, I think unzip is also likely to need sufficient RAM. I believe some of our installers use zip libraries instead of the info-zip command line tool, but I do not remember which CPU and RAM requirements the installers had. > Why keyb need a 286, it’s a keyboard mapper? For a small distro, I would rather suggest MKEYB. But I have not checked whether that works on 8086? > Why does ctmouse need a 286? Let me check... Those actually were planned as compile time options: You can select whether 286/386 with pusha, popa and shift by constant number of bits are available or not, but at closer inspection, count2x.mac fails to omit one shr ah,4 for the 8086 case :-p If you like, I could send you a suggested set of 8086 compatible sources you could compile and try out :-) > It was required for most CGA and up games on our old 8086 clone. How is that possible when it has not worked on 8086 yet? > Why does FDAPM have no support at all for < 286. I have tried to avoid non-8086 instructions outside functions which only a 386 would have anyway, so my intention was that FDAPM just has no effect on older PC because neither BIOS nor hardware support APM on those, but it should not crash. Did it crash for you? > Why does dosfsck need a 386? Now THAT is easy to answer: For FAT12 and FAT16, you should use CHKDSK. Porting DOSFSCK to 32-bit DOS is mainly for FAT32 audience and proper checking of such partitions can need several megabytes of RAM. There is no support for checking FAT32 partitions on older computers, sorry. Actually I expect DOSFSCK to run out of RAM for larger partitions even on common 386 RAM sizes. I remember even booting Windows 95 on a 386 took roughly 10 minutes when I put the harddisk of a 486 into a 386 PC and started in safe mode :-p About Format: Regarding FORMAT for 360k: I believe that some people with actual 360k drives have tried it, so maybe this is just an issue with QEMU or PCem behaving in ways not expected by FORMAT? Of course it would be nice to improve the ability of FORMAT to work even there, so feel free to send FORMAT /F:360 /4 /D logs. You could also try /1 one-sided and /8 8-sector formats for fun. Use /4 for 360k in 1.2M drives, no /4 for 360k drives. See the FORMAT /z:longhelp descriptions :-) Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
