Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[TJ Edmister]

On Sun, 19 Jun 2016 13:11:12 -0400, dmccunney   
wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 6:39 AM, TJ Edmister   
> wrote:
>> Since I boot Win2K/XP from FAT32, I also have the ability to put FD  
>> right
>> on the C: partition and add it to my BOOT.INI as an option. This needs a
>> little juggling of boot sectors to accomplish though.
>
> I have to ask: why FAT32?
>

I like FAT32. Anyway, we already had this discussion. Check your email  
archives :)


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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Jim Hall]

>
> On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 4:00 AM, Brandon Taylor 
> wrote:
>>
>> As much as I hate to concede, I must. I have found a critical passage on
>> the FreeDOS website
>> which, in my eyes, discourages further experimentation:
>>
>> “FreeDOS is a complete operating system. If you choose to install this on
>> your computer,
>> you may overwrite the operating system you have now (for example,
>> Windows.) If this is not
>> what you intend, please stop now.”

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 2:53 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
> In case it hasn't already been made obvious, this is a warning for
> inexperienced users who (surprise!) would rather NOT wipe out their existing
> OS and data if all they want to do is play around and experiment with DOS.
>
> Perhaps it needs to mention that VMs (e.g. QEMU) are a much safer
> alternative.
>

Yes, this warning exists because I received about a dozen complaints
from very unhappy people after the 1.1 distribution. These people
downloaded FreeDOS, went through the install process, and were
surprised they had wiped out their Windows partition. So I put a note
on the http://www.freedos.org/download/ page that let people know this
might wipe out their C: drive. The complaints stopped after that, but
it didn't seem to dent our number of downloads each week.

I'm building the new website. I'll update the notice to encourage new
users to install FreeDOS in a virtual machine.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 3:44 AM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> Hi Rugxulo, some CWSDPMI nitpicking and some memory limits coming ;-)
>
>> So DR-DOS 7.03 forcibly needed its own (weird, hybrid, bundled VxD or
>> whatever) EMM386, which had its own built-in XMS (so no separate HIMEM
>> needed) plus built-in DPMI (so no CWSDPMI needed).
>
> CWSDPMI is both a DPMI host and a DOS extender.

No, CWSDPMI is pure DPMI "only", roughly 0.9 with a very few 1.0
extensions. It is not a DOS "extender" at all because it doesn't
support any (non-standard, unofficial) int 21h extensions. So it
doesn't support Watcom apps (e.g. Doom).

> So if you run programs compiled to use it, but are in DR-DOS, you may still
> need CWSDPMI,

OpenDOS 7.01 allegedly had a buggy DPMI server, so you needed to
disable it and use CWSDPMI instead for your DJGPP apps. However, that
was later fixed in 7.02 or such.

With 7.03, you can NOT multitask if you don't enable their own
built-in DPMI host. (I don't think so-called "OpenDOS" ever had a full
release, so it probably didn't even officially have multitasking.)

> but that could rely on DR-EMM386 for the DPMI part of the work.

I think their built-in DPMI did support unofficial int 21h extensions
(same as Windows and a very few others), but it lacked virtual memory.

Sadly, GCC just eats up too much RAM, even in (nowadays considered)
"ancient" versions. So the whole multitasking advantage wasn't as good
as it sounded. Besides, you also probably wanted software cache and/or
RAM drive to speed things up (at least I did), and even those were of
limited use (due to hardcoded memory limits, again).

> The same thing happens when you run such a
> program inside Windows or a DOS window of Windows, which also
> provide DPMI already :-)

Which is why Vista's DPMI bug (memory limits again!) was all the more
painful. You couldn't override it with anything else (at least not
until SP1 via registry). For the company that actually invented DPMI,
they sure dropped the ball there. It's sad that DPMI was considered so
superior to every other scheme but eventually rejected, abandoned,
allowed to bitrot.

>> But it was allegedly limited to 64 MB per task, hardcoded, no matter
>> if you incorrectly tried to switch out the XMSv2 (e.g. trying to use
>> HIMEMX) or not.
>
> Interesting limitation. EMS, XMS2, XMS3, VCPI, DPMI all have limits,
> but if DR-EMM386 claims to support XMS3, it should support > 64MB...

But it didn't. It probably just faked the version number for
compatibility (dunno why) with unknown apps. Bad idea, I think, but I
don't know the details or why.

> EMS 3.2: Up to 8 MB, one 64 kB page frame with 4 pages of 16 kB
> EMS 4: Up to 32 MB? Maps 4 kB and 16 kB pages in your low 1 MB
>
> DPMI: Up to 4 GB, in theory, but see the XMS 3 limitations.
> VCPI: Up to 4 GB, in theory, but only up to 4 MB vm86 shared space?

EMS/VCPI were obsoleted by DPMI. Unlike VCPI, DPMI could run on a 286
and didn't always mandate (unsafe) ring 0.

> XMS 2: Up to 64 MB, in some cases limited to only 16 or 32 MB
> XMS 3: Up to 4 GB, in practice even only 2 or roughly 3 GB

Right, I get about 2.5 GB here locally with XMSv3 (HIMEMX). Not sure
about maximum allowed by CWSDPMI, it has some bugs. I don't push it
(or any extender) too hard, I'm not expert enough (or at all!) to do
everything.

> Background: VCPI helps you to take over protected mode for yourself
> without breaking too much of the current system state. This is why
> Windows does not allow VCPI software to run.

VCPI was basically an extension of EMS, and it was spearheaded (I
think??) by Desqview dudes.

> Windows itself used a special interface called GEMMIS to take over memory
> management for itself. In other words, it replaced HIMEM and EMM386 on the 
> fly to
> have full control in 386 enhanced mode. Which is part of the reason
> why that mode has troubles with FreeDOS and non-commercial EMM386.

EMS and XMS were considered ugly hacks but unavoidable in the old
days. DPMI was considered the future. Too bad nobody kept it updated!

> Windows for Workgroups 3.11 always wants to run in enhanced mode,
> you can only run WfW 3.11 in a limited "safe mode" without that.

At that time you could still boot to pure DOS, but the goal was
(probably) to make that less necessary over time.

> Fun facts: Some games get confused if you have more than 16 or 32 MB
> of RAM reported to them and even Windows 3 has problems above 256 MB,
> although you can edit the config to get it working with at most 1 GB,
> where even the most modest possible swap calculation sign-overflows.

This is part of the reason why DOSBox doesn't support more than 64 MB max RAM.

> Also, DOS software only sees limited amounts of memory when you run it
> inside Windows 3, old 32 bit Windows versions or even in Vista NTVDM.
> Note that this is a per-task limit, so it is not that bad in the end.

I think there should be limits, of course, but it should be
configurable, certainly not 

Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[Rugxulo]

Hi, Dennis,  :-)

I know this may shock you, but this is a DOS mailing list. You know,
people here actively want to use "DOS" binaries on DOS-compatible
OSes.

I'm just saying, keep that in mind below.

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 12:11 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 6:39 AM, TJ Edmister  wrote:
>>
>> Since I boot Win2K/XP from FAT32, I also have the ability to put FD right
>> on the C: partition and add it to my BOOT.INI as an option. This needs a
>> little juggling of boot sectors to accomplish though.
>
> I have to ask: why FAT32?

DOS doesn't read NTFS.

(Yes, I know there were some partial, buggy third-party tools for
that, but mostly "by design", for "security"??, MS never cared enough
to let other OSes "share" data with Windows. They put all their eggs
in one basket.)

Yes, I suppose you can have both FAT32 and NTFS, and just copy files,
if/when needed. In fact, you have to do that nowadays, Vista on up
won't boot from FAT anymore. (At least Vista can finally resize the
NTFS partition instead of more painful alternatives.)

> I stayed at Win98 SE longer than I wanted to, because I was still
> waiting for driver support for all of my peripherals.  When a driver
> for my SCSI scanner finally appeared for Win2K, I jumped

Sigh, isn't it great that drivers are incompatible between OSes?  :-P

> Win98 reached the point of having to be rebooted four or five times a day.
> Win2K just ran.

And was buggier (for DOS apps). Stability is always good, but when you
can't even run the apps you want to run, it's fairly useless. Might as
well use a Mac!

> It was up 24/7, and rebooted only if I was fiddling
> with hardware or installing new software or a Windows update that
> required it.  I was delighted.

2k and XP are dead as doorknobs, totally unsupported. Even most
third-party apps now brag about being incompatible to XP. It's a
shame.

> I was aware you *could* install 2K on FAT32, but couldn't understand
> why you might want to.

Just use both, best of both worlds. No, your boot partition doesn't
have to be the same as your data partition. IIRC, most SSD users put
the OS on ultra-fast SSD and put all their
frequently-read/write-accessed (big) media files elsewhere.

> NTFS supported things I sorely missed.  One
> was a far more robust file system that was far easier to repair if
> there was a problem.  If I had a file system problem, I ran CHKDSK.
> On a FAT file system, this would result in a directory created by it
> to hold orphaned file fragments, and files with names like
> FILE.CHK.  Once in a while, the file fragments it found were
> usable.  Mostly, they just needed to be deleted, and if they were
> pieces of programs, the programs needed to be reinstalled.  On an NTFS
> system, CHKDSK simply put everything back where it was supposed to be
> under its original name.  The only time that didn't happen was when a
> directory entry happened to be on a bad block and it had to create a
> new one.  It was no problem to mark the block bad, then rename the new
> directory to the old name.

Great, but NTFS doesn't work on DOS, which is an 8086-compatible
real-mode OS. FAT is designed by minimalism, out of necessity. Sure,
if you're willing to up the memory requirements a gig or two, you can
have all the features of other OSes.

It's not fair to expect them to do the same things. They target
entirely different systems. Is NTFS better? I hope so, it's all you
get nowadays! DOS is dead (to them), they don't care anymore, not even
about binary compatibility. Buy all new (Win10/Metro) apps! Upgrade
upgrade upgrade!

> If I needed to run old 16bit DOS apps, I could do so in NTVDM, and
> they didn't have to be on a FAT filesystem to use them.

NTVDM has regressed since XP. It's not as good anymore. Even XP wasn't
perfect. It's not a long-term solution. It's going away. MS doesn't
care (and hasn't) anymore.

It's not fair to pretend that "Windows is better than DOS!" because
they don't even barely half-support it anymore. We all know the
(previous) advantages. We'd all still be using Windows full-time if it
worked for us, but sadly it doesn't. They threw DOS away, and they're
already trying to do the same to anything written for Win7 or older.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 6:23 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.  wrote:
> There are rough directions on using the installer with DOSBox
> in the FDI Readme.
>
> https://github.com/shidel/FDI/blob/master/README.md

As it happens, I'm doing something similar.  I have an Android port of
DOSBox, and an assortment of old DOS apps (not games) up and running
on a 7" Android tablet. The version of DOSBox I'm using passes
Ctrl-char combinations through to the running app, which made it
possible to get things like Eric Meyer's VDE editor (a WordStar clone)
up and running.

DOSBox implements enough of the DOS kernel, but the shell is only
sufficient to let you run a DOS game from the command line.  Things
like pipes are unsupported. Fortunately, you aren't stuck with the
minimal COMMAND.COM version DOSBox provides.  Both FreeDOS COMMAND and
4DOS run fine and provide the missing shell functionality.  FreeDOS
MODE does things like enabling 43 line EGA and 50 line VGA mode.  I've
simply copied the appropriate FreeDOS commands over to the DOS
directories on the microSD card where that stuff lives on the tablet.

The main missing piece is no equivalent of CONFIG.SYS, so drivers
loaded from it aren't possible.  I've found TSRs that do most of what
I need, like DPMI support and an ANSI driver.  I *haven't* found a TSR
that implements the functionality of HIMEM.SYS, so no HMA, but EMS and
XMS memory are supported.
__
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 6:39 AM, TJ Edmister  wrote:
> Since I boot Win2K/XP from FAT32, I also have the ability to put FD right
> on the C: partition and add it to my BOOT.INI as an option. This needs a
> little juggling of boot sectors to accomplish though.

I have to ask: why FAT32?

I stayed at Win98 SE longer than I wanted to, because I was still
waiting for driver support for all of my peripherals.  When a driver
for my SCSI scanner finally appeared for Win2K, I jumped  Win98
reached the point of having to be rebooted four or five times a day.
Win2K just ran.  It was up 24/7, and rebooted only if I was fiddling
with hardware or installing new software or a Windows update that
required it.  I was delighted.

I was aware you *could* install 2K on FAT32, but couldn't understand
why you might want to.  NTFS supported things I sorely missed.  One
was a far more robust file system that was far easier to repair if
there was a problem.  If I had a file system problem, I ran CHKDSK.
On a FAT file system, this would result in a directory created by it
to hold orphaned file fragments, and files with names like
FILE.CHK.  Once in a while, the file fragments it found were
usable.  Mostly, they just needed to be deleted, and if they were
pieces of programs, the programs needed to be reinstalled.  On an NTFS
system, CHKDSK simply put everything back where it was supposed to be
under its original name.  The only time that didn't happen was when a
directory entry happened to be on a bad block and it had to create a
new one.  It was no problem to mark the block bad, then rename the new
directory to the old name.

Another was the notion that there was more than one user on a system
that would have different rights and permissions about what it was
allowed to do.  FAT32 has no place to store that metadata.  I came to
DOS and Windows from Unix, which was explicitly a multi-user system
where more than one user might be on the system simultaneously, and
worked in corporate environments where PCs were often shared resources
and the notion that the user at the keyboard was administrator with
all power to do everything was untrue and dangerous.

If I needed to run old 16bit DOS apps, I could do so in NTVDM, and
they didn't have to be on a FAT filesystem to use them.
__
Dennis
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Eric Auer]

Hi Mister or Miss Beitrag ;-)

> What about Enhanced DR-DOS by Udo Kuhnt?
> http://www.drdosprojects.de/

It adds some filesystem features to the kernel, yes. Most
extra software which came with DR DOS is not enhanced in
that distro, often not even included, as far as I know...

In general, it is a very good question: Which components
from which other DOS would you add, because they give you
features which are better than the FreeDOS counterparts?

> I honestly think that DOSBox, ScummVM and maybe a VM like VirtualBox
> is the way to go here. FreeDOS, or any other DOS, is not /ready/...

I would not call that a problem of being "ready". Modern
hardware can do stuff that nothing for DOS ever needed:

Multi core CPU, huge amounts of memory, very high screen
resolution with hardware accelerated 3d and video edit,
fast wireless network, solid state disks with support for
fast concurrent writes and so on. For me, this "implies"
that you should not "bore" your hardware by only running
DOS on it. Instead, you can do many things in parallel,
while having one or several DOS windows open inside your
non-DOS host operating system. Nothing in DOS is made to
run multiple programs in parallel on multiple areas of a
graphical user interface. Even if you would add features
to DOS to support that, none of your old DOS applications
would know how to gain from any of those features anyway.

So this is not a question of DOS being READY for modern
hardware. In the same way, you could ask the question if
a hammock is ready for a modern 500 passenger airplane.

Of course you CAN put a hammock in the plane, but it will
never use the full feature set of your plane ;-) And if
you make a 500 passenger hammock, it will just be weird.

Cheers, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[TJ Edmister]

On Sat, 18 Jun 2016 07:20:32 -0400, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> * Is it easy enough to make a bootable USB stick with FreeDOS with
>   plenty of software included which does NOT need to install to
>   harddisk but can be used as "live" operating system boot disk?

Isn't there a bootable disk image like this available? It's not that hard  
to make one although the process could certainly be simplified.

It would be nice if we had a utility to distribute along side the disk  
image, which would take care of a couple things. 1) writing the image to  
the disk/flash device and 2) resizing the FAT partition to fit the  
available space (so that only one disk image would need to be distributed  
rather than various differently sized ones)

I never ran the installer for FD myself. I just formatted a 2GB CF card,  
manually copied the FD files to it, and then ran some utility which  
created an FD boot sector (I'm not sure what environment I had to be in to  
run this utility... it may have been Win98) and of course edited the  
fdconfig.sys (or whatever it's called... this happened years ago.)

Since I boot Win2K/XP from FAT32, I also have the ability to put FD right  
on the C: partition and add it to my BOOT.INI as an option. This needs a  
little juggling of boot sectors to accomplish though.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[userbeitrag]

Hello!


What about Enhanced DR-DOS by Udo Kuhnt?
http://www.drdosprojects.de/

And why not use a mixture of Kernel and Userland? I could imagine using 
either the DR-DOS kernel (which is only free for private use) or the 
FreeDOS kernel, and a userland made of both or even proprietary parts 
from DOS versions I own. Provided these old tools still work on the more 
modern kernels.


Original message from Eric Auer, 2016-06-19 10:44:
>> we're just lucky anything works. Games are not high priority
> I think they are. I mean people still love their retro games,
> while they hopefully use software for multi tasking OS with
> network, multiple cores, GUI and 47 TB of RAM at work now ;-)

I honestly think that DOSBox, ScummVM and maybe a VM like VirtualBox is 
the way to go here. FreeDOS, or any other DOS, is not /ready/ for it on 
modern hardware, and I doupt it ever will be. It's not viable to invest 
in compatibility anyway, given the great alternatives.


Cheers, userbeitrag

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