Hi Eric, > On May 25, 2020, at 10:12 AM, Eric Auer <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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?
Sure, I “could do that”. But, I’m not going to. For two main reasons. FIrst, loading and unloading everything for each and every call will really slow things down even more. Especially, on things like QEMU on the PI where disk speed is horrible to begin with. Second, they are designed to cooperate with each other. But, be completely independent from each other. So, lets say you have a boot floppy and all you need is to test if it a 286 or 386. All you need is to stick the 2.8k vinfo program on there and not drag the rest of the stuff along for the ride. > >> 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 :-) Not an issue, The main USB/CD installer requires a 386 (do to the use of some external utilities, like grep). Find me a consumer 386 that did not ship with EGA compatibility. Requiring a 386 is not really a problem either. USB was not around and our CD drivers require a 386 as well. > >> 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? Latest 2042 Kernl86.sys and accompanying SYS. More like what options didn’t I try. IDK, may have missed one. When I say did not boot, I mean it did not boot. I don’t mean it crashed. All it did was sit there, no output. If you are interested, you can try to get it work in there. But, I spent almost two full days playing around with PCem. I’m done with that. I’ve got other things needing done. > >> 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. Maybe zip has a reason to want a 286. But, IDK. As for unzip. I can’t see a good reason for requiring a 386. Mateusz’s FDINST unzip’s packages just fine and is supposed to be 8086 compatible. > >> 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? But, may need options only available in keyb. I personally use neither and only vaguely familiar with them, > >> 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? My old man had used a Logitech Serial mouse on his Laser XT Turbo (4/8mhz 8086, PC XT Clone) It’s been a long time, maybe the CGA games were keyboard only. But, I don’t honestly recall if stuff like Wheel of Fortune and the like used a mouse. But, you pretty much needed it to play any of those 320x200 VGA games (Police Quest, Kings Quest, Leisure Suite Larry, etc) So, there should be mouse support for 8086 & 80286. > >> 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? No. It just complained and quit. But, there a lots of things (like reboot), that it could do on an 8086 that are sometimes useful. Just because it couldn’t do everything it does on a 386, doesn’t mean what could be done on a 286 or 8086 wouldn't be appreciated. > >> 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 I don’t feel RAM size is a legitimate reason. RAM was always constrained on old hardware. There are so many ways around that limitation. > > 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 :-) Could be just a problem in the emulators. Spent a LOT of time on trying to do it. No luck. You are more than welcome to try. I’d be interested to here your results and how it can be done. > Regards, Eric :-) Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
