[Freedos-devel] Time to end with diskette DJ system? (aka famtom drives?)
Maybe is a time to consider whether to break the MS-DOS compatibility about handling the one physical diskette drive as two logical drives - A: and B: It maybe had some reason in 1982 but now? For remembering: You have the physical drive A: only. You write DIR A: Everything goes as expected. But if you write DIR B: you get this message: "Remove diskette in drive A: Insert diskette in drive B:" Systems waits for keypress and then displays content of A: It is extremely annoying because with this behaviour suffer virtually all DOS programs. Even the fullscreen programs. Try it in some fancy text-mode IDE like SetEdit. You are in the fileselector and you write there B:\ Again. The screen is garbaged by idiotic message "Remove diskette in drive A: Insert diskette in drive B:" And even in GUI programs is this "feature" still present. Try f.e. editor FLwrite. >From a programmer 's point of view it is quite difficult to avoid this DJ system. The proper approach is to check whether the specified disk drive is physical drive or fantom drive and to handle it... But why? Even Windows 95 has gone farewell to fantoming A: to B: FreeDOS kernel should do the same. For now I have in my AUTOEXEC.BAT the line "JOIN B: C:\FREEDOS\JOIN_B\" But I don't want to do it. If you from some reason think that DJ system is something good (why?) you can implement a new switch for CONFIG.SYS (FDCONFIG.SYS) like "FANTOMB=YES/ NO" (with default NO) or to use a existing parameter SWITCHES to include some new switch for fantoming B: ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] Time to end with diskette DJ system? (aka famtom drives?)
Hi Laaca! > Maybe is a time to consider whether to break the MS-DOS compatibility about > handling the one physical diskette drive as two logical drives - A: and B: ... > You have the physical drive A: only. You write DIR A: ... > > But if you write DIR B: you get this message: > > "Remove diskette in drive A: Insert diskette in drive B:" > > Systems waits for keypress and then displays content of A: You say that this gets ugly while you are in full screen apps. I have good news for you: All DOS have a mechanism which let apps intercept the DJ mechanism handling, so they can show a graphical dialog in that situation :-) Your apps simply have to support it. Alternatively, simply only use A: then you do not get the question to switch to the "DJ virtual" B: either. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
