Hi Karen,
On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 10:18 PM Karen Lewellen via Freedos-user
<freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
As many may recall I run msdos 7.1 instead of freedos for several personal
reasons.
Do the volunteers (engineers?) who help you set up your systems
forcibly demand MS-DOS 7.1 exactly?
We've discussed this before, so I'm not really trying to change your
mind on it, just curious. (Why specifically MS-DOS? Why not DR-DOS? Or
Datalight ROM-DOS?)
I recently had a new machine built, just before Christmas, which also
included my installing an external dectalk card, I have an ISA slot, the
ling kind on this board.
While the synthesizer works well, using it to support my writing this
message, I have an odd problem.
The dectalk software has a conflict that seems to impact cdrom drives, or
the driver provided by Microsoft.
Can't you just edit a CONFIG.SYS menu option to let you optionally
boot without DecTalk when needing to access a physical CD-ROM?
(BTW, dual boot with another OS is another possibility.)
It is more than addresses, dectalk provides a way to locate a free one,
user guides for both dectalk 4.1, what I am running, and 4.2 reference the
driver issue.
The suggested solution did not work..however I need a cd rom drive for
scores of reasons.
I assume you mean a modern DVD drive (20x speed or whatever) or
possibly DVD-RW or such.
leading to my question.
Often on list I have read that freedos is in many ways better than MS DOS,
with programs able to run under freedos.
FreeDOS is strongly compatible and "Free" (libre), but not necessarily
"better" in all ways, no.
I now have a chance to test that theory, swapping in the cd rom driver
freedos provides as a test?
my driver again is not specific to my cd rom..never has been.
Instead I use the basic driver supplied with ms dos 7.1, never having a
problem until now.
MS-DOS 7.1 was never a standalone product (unlike MS-DOS 6.22). It was
bundled as part of Win95 or Win98 or whatever variant. So I don't know
what came with it: OAKCDROM.SYS?
What does Freedos provide with that kind of universal flexibility?
I can only point you to the FreeDOS mirror on iBiblio:
* https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/
But it's been years since I've bothered with physical CDs. (My 2022
Linux laptop has no optical drive, for instance.)
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