Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 4:23 PM, Don Flowers  wrote:
> I am running vDOS on Linux Mint 18 through WINE, haven't noticed any
> problems yet, but since it is no longer open source ...

Hmmm.

I haven't tried running vDOS or anything else under Wine.  I have no
need to.  I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux off an SSD, and
switching environments takes under a minute.  If I need to do
something specific to an OS, I boot into it.

I'm not enough of an open source purist that the current status of
vDOS will affect whether I run it, and I believe the vDOS fork with
LFN support I use *is* still open source.  But I'm not dead set
opposed to proprietary code under Linux if I need the functionality.
I currently use proprietary Intel microcode to better support the Xeon
CPU in the desktop box, and I'm evaluating installing the proprietary
AMD-ATI Linux graphics driver in place of the open source version
currently installed.  It's a complex exercise, so the question is
whether the performance gain justifies the effort required.

But it's good to know vDOS runs under Wine, if you are someone who
might need to.
__
Dennis
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Don Flowers]

I am running vDOS on Linux Mint 18 through WINE, haven't noticed any
problems yet, but since it is no longer open source ...

On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 12:42 PM, dmccunney 
wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 2:45 PM, Don Flowers  wrote:
> > That would be awesome!
> >
> > It seems that this would be an alternative to vDOS?
> > https://www.vdos.info/
> > https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdos/
>
> Why would you need it?
>
> vDOS is a fork of DOSBox specifically intended to run DOS character
> mode business apps.  It drops the graphics and sound emulation DOSBox
> provides because they aren't needed by the stuff vDOS is designed to
> run.  (vDOS is also not cross-platform, and only works under Windows.)
>
> I run vDOS here under Win10 and it works fine and runs what I've tried
> it with.  (The folks on the WordStar list, joined at the hip to
> WordStar 7, have clutched vDOS to their chests with happy little
> cries.)
>
> It takes a couple of minutes at most to get a DOS app working in vDOS.
> Install vDOS.  Install the DOS app in a directory.  Create a shortcut
> to vDOS that starts it in that directory.  Edit the sample
> AUTOEXEC.TXT and CONFIG.TXT files to do the right things for the app
> you want to run.  Run the shortcut.
>
> It won't work with DOS games (and is not intended to), but that's what
> DOSBox is for.
> __
> Dennis
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 2:45 PM, Don Flowers  wrote:
> That would be awesome!
>
> It seems that this would be an alternative to vDOS?
> https://www.vdos.info/
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdos/

Why would you need it?

vDOS is a fork of DOSBox specifically intended to run DOS character
mode business apps.  It drops the graphics and sound emulation DOSBox
provides because they aren't needed by the stuff vDOS is designed to
run.  (vDOS is also not cross-platform, and only works under Windows.)

I run vDOS here under Win10 and it works fine and runs what I've tried
it with.  (The folks on the WordStar list, joined at the hip to
WordStar 7, have clutched vDOS to their chests with happy little
cries.)

It takes a couple of minutes at most to get a DOS app working in vDOS.
Install vDOS.  Install the DOS app in a directory.  Create a shortcut
to vDOS that starts it in that directory.  Edit the sample
AUTOEXEC.TXT and CONFIG.TXT files to do the right things for the app
you want to run.  Run the shortcut.

It won't work with DOS games (and is not intended to), but that's what
DOSBox is for.
__
Dennis

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 12:37 PM,   wrote:

> I don't think DOSBox requires a virtual hard disk image at all.

You can in fact load one, but it won't help with FreeDOS.  There's an
option in DOSBox to mount a CDROM as a drive.  But DOSBox still
provides the DOS kernel.  You could get the rest of FreeDOS on such a
mounted drive, but the kernel would not be loaded.

I use the vDOS fork of DOSBox here under Win10 to run DOS apps, and a
port of full DOSBox under Android to run DOS apps.  Works fine, save
that DOSBox provides no equivalent of CONFIG.SYS, and there is no way
lo load drivers that expect to be loaded there.  This means I can't
use HMA, because there is no way to load HIMEM.SYS or equivalent.
(I've looked at a program or two that try to load drivers from the
command line, but they don't work in DOSBox.)

I have some of the FreeDOS components on my Android tablet.  DOSBox
COMMAND.COM provides just enough functionality to let you load and run
games from the C:\> prompt, and lacks things like pipes, but FreeDOS
COMMAND runs fine, as does 4DOS, and repairs that lack.  (DOSBox does
implement EMS And XMS, and TSRs can be loaded high.)
__
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[Corbin Davenport]

Yeah, I don't think anyone in the FreeDOS project has ever aimed for it to
be a replacement to Windows/Mac/Linux. That's like comparing a wheelbarrow
to an SUV.

FreeDOS is a niche OS for a niche market, but it's a very good one at that.

Corbin 

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 8:36 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:

> Dennis, we've already had this pointless conversation several times
> over. I'm not sure why you keep rehashing it.
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 3:06 PM, dmccunney 
> wrote:
> > On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
> >
> > The number of people who still have actual need to run DOS is a
> vanishingly small fraction of the PC market.
>
> This is a FreeDOS mailing list. The fact that anybody here uses
> Windows is off-topic, irrelevant, and (mostly) accidental.
>
> We don't need constant reminders about how small our marketshare is.
> We frankly don't care because there is nothing you can add to DOS that
> will "fix" it. Some people will never be happy no matter what we do.
> Some people, like you, can't see the forest for the trees.
>
> > MS doesn't care about DOS, and *shouldn't*.
>
> MS doesn't participate in this mailing list, nor do they have anything
> to do with running it. They are not involved. We are not here asking
> them to do anything.
>
> You don't have to tell us (over and over) how insignificant we are.
> It's not productive. We are not a billion-dollar company and never
> will be. Get over it. If that makes you think so much less of us, I
> suggest you find a suitable Windows forum to coddle you.
>
> > The folks they consider their customers stopped running DOS and DOS apps
> decades back.
>
> MS has more than enough money to do whatever they want. Even if there
> were billions in potential DOS revenue, they still wouldn't care. They
> definitely don't need any more money. They're still a business, but
> they are beyond worry. Actually, they make tons more from the "cloud"
> and Office 365 than Windows these days. They have diversified a lot.
> (Heck, they squandered $26 billion on LinkedIn! How does that
> technically "improve" Windows NT at all or gain further customers for
> Windows??)
>
> But MS' potential business strategies are off-topic here.
>
> > There are a variety of reasons why Windows (*and* Linux) *are* better
> than DOS.
>
> Irrelevant to DOS users, especially on this mailing list. You should
> not be trying to convert anyone here to the Windows religion. There
> are plenty of other forums for that.
>
> > The folks who *do* care about DOS are mostly hobbyists who like playing
> with retro tech.
>
> And apparently contrarians who like beating a dead horse.
>
> > Most of what I do on computers these days can't be done under DOS.
>
> Like complaining about how much DOS "sux0rz!!!1". Get with it, FreeDOS
> devs, Dennis needs to whine, and he needs it NOW!
>
> > Ultimately, it comes down to money.  The sort of support you would
> > like is stuff the people who could *do* it expect to be *paid* for.
>
> I've never seen anyone pretend to be willing to work writing DOS
> drivers for money. Those people don't exist. I think you're
> overestimating the potential developers for such tasks.
>
> > It's what they do for a living.  They aren't going to do it free for
> > fun.  There's next to no money in DOS these days, so it won't happen.
>
> I agree that bounties do exist in other OSes, and a lot of development
> is sponsored by corporations. Still, that is a small fraction of all
> work done. That talent base is extremely small and not to be taken for
> granted. We expect miracles, but we're lucky when we can still do the
> basics.
>
> Again, these so-called DOS-savvy developers don't exist. They just
> don't. They aren't willing to work for money because they don't have
> the appropriate skills. I've never heard of anyone, appropriately
> inclined, whine about lack of money. Developers are very few and far
> in between. It's not nearly as common as you think.
>
> > The world changes, and we must change with it.  Sitting still isn't
> normally an option.
>
> Patches welcome. Otherwise, shut up and get out. Sorry (not sorry!) to
> be crass, but it's not conducive to further development to just
> constantly berate people, saying, "Change! You suck! You're old!
> Improve!"
>
> None of us are that naive. We're all well aware of Windows, Linux,
> macOS [sic], and various others. You didn't tell us anything we didn't
> already know. We don't need you to constantly remind us how crappy we
> are. It just doesn't solve anything. It's frankly annoying.
>
>
> --
> Attend Shape: An AT&T Tech Expo July 15-16. Meet us at AT&T Park in San
> Francisco, CA to explore cutting-edge tech and listen to tech luminaries
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 5:47 PM,   wrote:
>
> BTW, I fear that VirtualBox does not have guest additions,

AFAIK, you're correct, it does not support DOS.

The FD wiki suggests to use FTPSRV instead:

http://freedos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/VirtualBox_-_Chapter_6

> and VMware Tools are also not available for DOS.

As mentioned, several years ago, one dude (Eduardo Casino) around here
wrote his own:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsmount/

This is already listed under the Software List ("UTIL"):

http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=vmsmount

P.S. I don't think QEMU needs additions, just use "fat:/":

http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-doc.html#disk_005fimages_005ffat_005fimages

(Or, like I previously mentioned, use external tools to insert/extract
from file system image.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mtools

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

[Rugxulo]

Dennis, we've already had this pointless conversation several times
over. I'm not sure why you keep rehashing it.


On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 3:06 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
>
> The number of people who still have actual need to run DOS is a vanishingly 
> small fraction of the PC market.

This is a FreeDOS mailing list. The fact that anybody here uses
Windows is off-topic, irrelevant, and (mostly) accidental.

We don't need constant reminders about how small our marketshare is.
We frankly don't care because there is nothing you can add to DOS that
will "fix" it. Some people will never be happy no matter what we do.
Some people, like you, can't see the forest for the trees.

> MS doesn't care about DOS, and *shouldn't*.

MS doesn't participate in this mailing list, nor do they have anything
to do with running it. They are not involved. We are not here asking
them to do anything.

You don't have to tell us (over and over) how insignificant we are.
It's not productive. We are not a billion-dollar company and never
will be. Get over it. If that makes you think so much less of us, I
suggest you find a suitable Windows forum to coddle you.

> The folks they consider their customers stopped running DOS and DOS apps 
> decades back.

MS has more than enough money to do whatever they want. Even if there
were billions in potential DOS revenue, they still wouldn't care. They
definitely don't need any more money. They're still a business, but
they are beyond worry. Actually, they make tons more from the "cloud"
and Office 365 than Windows these days. They have diversified a lot.
(Heck, they squandered $26 billion on LinkedIn! How does that
technically "improve" Windows NT at all or gain further customers for
Windows??)

But MS' potential business strategies are off-topic here.

> There are a variety of reasons why Windows (*and* Linux) *are* better than 
> DOS.

Irrelevant to DOS users, especially on this mailing list. You should
not be trying to convert anyone here to the Windows religion. There
are plenty of other forums for that.

> The folks who *do* care about DOS are mostly hobbyists who like playing with 
> retro tech.

And apparently contrarians who like beating a dead horse.

> Most of what I do on computers these days can't be done under DOS.

Like complaining about how much DOS "sux0rz!!!1". Get with it, FreeDOS
devs, Dennis needs to whine, and he needs it NOW!

> Ultimately, it comes down to money.  The sort of support you would
> like is stuff the people who could *do* it expect to be *paid* for.

I've never seen anyone pretend to be willing to work writing DOS
drivers for money. Those people don't exist. I think you're
overestimating the potential developers for such tasks.

> It's what they do for a living.  They aren't going to do it free for
> fun.  There's next to no money in DOS these days, so it won't happen.

I agree that bounties do exist in other OSes, and a lot of development
is sponsored by corporations. Still, that is a small fraction of all
work done. That talent base is extremely small and not to be taken for
granted. We expect miracles, but we're lucky when we can still do the
basics.

Again, these so-called DOS-savvy developers don't exist. They just
don't. They aren't willing to work for money because they don't have
the appropriate skills. I've never heard of anyone, appropriately
inclined, whine about lack of money. Developers are very few and far
in between. It's not nearly as common as you think.

> The world changes, and we must change with it.  Sitting still isn't normally 
> an option.

Patches welcome. Otherwise, shut up and get out. Sorry (not sorry!) to
be crass, but it's not conducive to further development to just
constantly berate people, saying, "Change! You suck! You're old!
Improve!"

None of us are that naive. We're all well aware of Windows, Linux,
macOS [sic], and various others. You didn't tell us anything we didn't
already know. We don't need you to constantly remind us how crappy we
are. It just doesn't solve anything. It's frankly annoying.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[userbeitrag]

Original message from Corbin Davenport, 2016-06-21 00:38:
> Oh wow, that's some memories. I remember firing up Virtual PC for Mac on my 
> old
> iMac G4 to run some Windows software. The DOS additions were great for running
> DOS games too.

Yes, I also use(d) Virtual PC on the Mac. The Windows versions 2004 and 
2007 are the only ones that are free thou, as VPC 6 and 7 (for the Mac) 
could only be purchased. Only version 2004 includes the guest additions 
for DOS and OS/2. In VPC 2007 and Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 the 
original DOS Additions may be used anyhow.


BTW, I fear that VirtualBox does not have guest additions, and VMware 
Tools are also not available for DOS.


Cheers,
userbeitrag

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Corbin Davenport]

Oh wow, that's some memories. I remember firing up Virtual PC for Mac on my
old iMac G4 to run some Windows software. The DOS additions were great for
running DOS games too.

Corbin 

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 6:33 PM,  wrote:

> I just want to point out, that the DOS Additions for Virtual PC 2004 SP1
> can be downloaded free of charge:
> http://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=3243
>
> This will let you download
> "
> https://download.microsoft.com/download/2/5/3/253e22d9-b8a4-4219-9596-ee30c83699bf/Virtual
> PC 2004 SP1.zip" which needs to be unzipped. Then unpack "Microsoft
> Virtual PC 2004 MSDN.msi" which includes "product.cab", which again
> needs to be unpacked. Finally, the DOS Additions are in the file
> "DOSAdditions", which is a standard 1.44 MB floppy image.
>
> The .zip also includes a file called "VPC 2004 EULA.rtf", the Virtual PC
> 2004 End Users License Agreement. It also states that Re-distribution is
> allowed. Only, the package must be included as a whole and the EULA must
> be presented to the user.
>
>
> [X] Virtual PC
> [ ] VirtualBox
> [ ] VMware
> [ ] QEMU
>
>
> One checked, three remaining...
>
>
> Cheers,
> userbeitrag
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[userbeitrag]

I just want to point out, that the DOS Additions for Virtual PC 2004 SP1 
can be downloaded free of charge:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=3243

This will let you download 
"https://download.microsoft.com/download/2/5/3/253e22d9-b8a4-4219-9596-ee30c83699bf/Virtual
 
PC 2004 SP1.zip" which needs to be unzipped. Then unpack "Microsoft 
Virtual PC 2004 MSDN.msi" which includes "product.cab", which again 
needs to be unpacked. Finally, the DOS Additions are in the file 
"DOSAdditions", which is a standard 1.44 MB floppy image.

The .zip also includes a file called "VPC 2004 EULA.rtf", the Virtual PC 
2004 End Users License Agreement. It also states that Re-distribution is 
allowed. Only, the package must be included as a whole and the EULA must 
be presented to the user.


[X] Virtual PC
[ ] VirtualBox
[ ] VMware
[ ] QEMU


One checked, three remaining...


Cheers,
userbeitrag

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Bret Johnson]

> I believe CTMOUSE does have support for a wheel and maybe some extra
> buttons, but of course there are no apps in DOS which would use
> them.

CTMOUSE does indeed support a (single) wheel, and there are a few programs that 
can use it.

>> 5. Is there a DOS driver for USB joysticks? I know that analog
>> joysticks on the MIDI port (gameport) will likely work, but do
>> digital protocols work as well?

> The problem is that the analog joystick is "horribly" easy to read
> in DOS game software, so nobody ever used the BIOS interface to
> read it.

Actually, no.  Analog joysticks are relatively simple, but they are far from 
"horribly easy" to read.  In fact there were a lot of broken BIOSes in the past 
that didn't work correctly with joysticks, largely because the CPU speeds kept 
increasing and the BIOS writers didn't adjust for it (reading game port devices 
is very timing-dependent).  There were even hardware manufacturers that made 
after-market game ports that supposedly fixed the problems with the broken 
BIOSes.  There are actually multiple reasons for game writers to not use the 
joystick BIOS, but it being "just as easy" or even "easier" to do it directly 
is not one of them.

> Because of that, a DOS driver for USB joysticks COULD give access to
> the joystick situation in the BIOS interface, but no game would
> care!

A few games do use the joystick BIOS, but you are correct that most of them 
don't.

> In other words, a DOS driver for USB joysticks will have the same
> evil problem as a DOS "driver" for modern sound chips: It will have
> to use protected mode to create the illusion of analog joystick
> hardware, to force old games to actually process the USB joystick
> signals...

That is correct, but it is possible to do even in "real" DOS given the right 
combination of software.  Unfortunately, FreeDOS doesn't include what is 
needed.  What is needed is a way to virtualize low-level I/O ports, which as 
Eric noted must be done via protected mode.  Later versions of Microsoft EMM386 
included an interface that allows I/O virtualization, and so did 386MAX.  None 
of the FreeDOS equivalents to EMM386 support that interface.

My USB joystick driver does leverage the I/O virtualization interface if it 
exists (if EMM386 or 3896MAX are installed), which can allow you to use a USB 
joystick with almost any DOS program (not just games).  My programs are far 
from flawless, but do allow you to use USB devices in DOS in some cases without 
actually needing to resort to a Virtual Machine.  But, Virtual Machines are 
almost always the easier road to take with modern hardware.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Jerome Shidel]

> On Jun 20, 2016, at 3:04 PM, userbeit...@abwesend.de wrote:
> 
> Why?
> Every emulator or VM I know about will quickly install any operating 
> system from a virtual CD-ROM. So if you just assign the FreeDOS-ISO as 
> the virtual ATAPI-CDROM you will very easily install it to the virtual 
> Hard Disk Drive, which will be either .VHD, .VHDX (Virtual PC and 
> Hyper-V), .VMDK (VMware), .QCOW (QEMU) or .VDI (VirtualBox). Or any 
> other format.
> 
> A prepared installation will not help alot, aside from you not being 
> completely aware, which installation was used (full installation, 
> partial installation, which packages).

Well, yes and no.

Using FDI (the new FreeDOS Installer) to install the v1.2 preview versions 
takes under most 60 seconds in most VMs.

There are odd compatibility issues from VM to VM. The installer compensates for 
most of these by tweaking the installed config files.

But, for some users getting a pre setup VM that booted to a menu of Games and 
other cool freebies.  

> 
> Also, for each emulator or VM you will require different hardware 
> drivers (for the virtual hardware) and integration drivers (for guest 
> integration).
> 
> Therefor I would suggest to better add an installation package for 
> FreeDOS as a guest operating system under various emulators and VMs. A 
> user could then just install FreeDOS and select "guest drivers and 
> tools" as an additional package, which would then ask "a) Virtual PC, b) 
> Hyper-V, c) VMware, d) VirtualBox, e) QEMU" and install+setup the 
> required stuff for you.
> 

V8Power Tools (used by FDI for a lot of its magic) already detects several 
different virtual machine platforms. This was needed to prevent problems with 
several drivers used by FDI and to aid in configuring the installed system on 
specific VMs. It also can detect some other and unknown VMs. But, for the 
installer, that is not useful. 

If there are drivers for a QEMU, VirtualBox or VMWare that can be included with 
FreeDOS without violating and licensing restrictions, it is possible to just 
have them installed normally. Or, throw up a prompt when one of those VMs  are 
detected.

> 
> I write this because this is my experience. Installing an OS on a 
> virtual PC is easy, getting the drivers set up sometimes is hard work, 
> because you have to find those drivers first. Including them as an 
> installation package would be sufficiently easy for uses IMHO. Just my 2¢.
> 
> Cheers,
> userbeitrag

Yes, finding, installing and configuring DOS drivers is not for the faint of 
heart.

Jerome

Sent from my iPhone, ignore bad sentence structures, grammatical errors and 
incorrect spell-corrected words. 

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[userbeitrag]

Why?
Every emulator or VM I know about will quickly install any operating 
system from a virtual CD-ROM. So if you just assign the FreeDOS-ISO as 
the virtual ATAPI-CDROM you will very easily install it to the virtual 
Hard Disk Drive, which will be either .VHD, .VHDX (Virtual PC and 
Hyper-V), .VMDK (VMware), .QCOW (QEMU) or .VDI (VirtualBox). Or any 
other format.

A prepared installation will not help alot, aside from you not being 
completely aware, which installation was used (full installation, 
partial installation, which packages).

Also, for each emulator or VM you will require different hardware 
drivers (for the virtual hardware) and integration drivers (for guest 
integration).

Therefor I would suggest to better add an installation package for 
FreeDOS as a guest operating system under various emulators and VMs. A 
user could then just install FreeDOS and select "guest drivers and 
tools" as an additional package, which would then ask "a) Virtual PC, b) 
Hyper-V, c) VMware, d) VirtualBox, e) QEMU" and install+setup the 
required stuff for you.


I write this because this is my experience. Installing an OS on a 
virtual PC is easy, getting the drivers set up sometimes is hard work, 
because you have to find those drivers first. Including them as an 
installation package would be sufficiently easy for uses IMHO. Just my 2¢.

Cheers,
userbeitrag


Original message from Don Flowers, 2016-06-20 20:45:
> That would be awesome!
>
> It seems that this would be an alternative to vDOS?
> https://www.vdos.info/
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdos/
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 2:37 PM, Jim Hall  > wrote:
>
>  Jim Hall wrote:
>  >>> I'm building the new website. I'll update the notice to encourage new
>  >>> users to install FreeDOS in a virtual machine.
>
>  Tom Ehlert wrote:
>  >> any reason why we don't provide ready to run virtual machines as .VHD
>  >> images?
>
>  Jim Hall wrote:
>  >> Hmm... I don't know why we haven't. I don't know anything about VHD
>  >> though. Is that a standard virtual disk image that any PC
>  >> emulator/virtual machine can read? Can free/open source software
>  >> virtual machines read these (or create them)?
>
>  On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Tom Ehlert   > wrote:
>  >
>  > .VHD is a fairly generic virtual *disk* format, and most virtual
>  > machines providers should be able to read them.
>  >
>  > a tiny bit more specialized are the virtual machine configuration
>  > files, but we should be able to provide multiple formats, for Virtual
>  > Box, DosBox, HyperV, ...
>  >
>  > still no rocket science, and no risk to damage user data.
>
>
>  Thanks for the pointer. I'll see if I can output a VHD from QEMU. If I
>  can, I'll post a default install of FreeDOS 1.1 to our ibiblio archive
>  and link to it. I'll do the same when 1.2 is out.
>
>  Reference:
>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHD_(file_format)
>  "VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) is a file format which represents a virtual
>  hard disk drive (HDD). It may contain what is found on a physical HDD,
>  such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain
>  files and folders. It is typically used as the hard disk of a virtual
>  machine. The format was created by Connectix for their Virtual PC
>  product, known as Microsoft Virtual PC since Microsoft acquired
>  Connectix in 2003. Since June 2005, Microsoft has made the VHD Image
>  Format Specification available to third parties under the Microsoft
>  Open Specification Promise."


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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Jim Hall]

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

>> Tom Ehlert wrote:
>> >> any reason why we don't provide ready to run virtual machines as .VHD
>> >> images?
>>
[..]

> On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 2:37 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>> Thanks for the pointer. I'll see if I can output a VHD from QEMU. If I
>> can, I'll post a default install of FreeDOS 1.1 to our ibiblio archive
>> and link to it. I'll do the same when 1.2 is out.
>>

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 1:45 PM, Don Flowers  wrote:
>
> That would be awesome!
>

Thanks.

I'll add that if anyone out there has already generated a VHD for a
generic/defaults/vanilla FreeDOS 1.1 install, I'd be happy to use that
instead. You can contact me off-list.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[userbeitrag]

Original message from Eric Auer, 2016-06-20 19:47:
> Hi Herr or Frau Beitrag!
>
>> I wonder if it was possible to include the guest integration drivers for
>> Virtual PC, VirtualBox, QEMU (are there any?), Hyper-V in a provided VHD
> Eduardo Casino has written VMSMOUNT in 2011 :-) It lets you
> mount VMWare shared directories as a FreeDOS drive letter :-)

This would be very useful to include.

> I guess it would also be possible to do something fancy for
> mouse support. DOS does not have a built-in clipboard, so a
> guest driver for that would have to do something else, such
> as Linux style "mark to put into clipboard, use middle mouse
> button to paste clipboard contents into keyboard buffer" but
> I am not aware of such guest drivers for DOS yet. Same for
> the possibility of guest graphics drivers, where DOS has to
> rely on the BIOS and hardware VGA / VESA emulation instead.

I was not only thinking about VGA/VESA drivers, but mostly about the 
correct mouse setup and maybe some addition drivers like the correct 
(SCSI or ATAPI) CD-ROM drivers and sound drivers.

If I remember correctly, Virtual PC emulates a standard ATAPI CD-ROM 
drive. The sound emulation is a SoundBlaster 16. So it would be wise to 
include drivers for the Sound Blaster.

But again: what about the license of those DOS drivers?

> Are there any Virtual PC, Virtual Box or QEMU specific guest
> drivers for FreeDOS?

I just assume that the DOS drivers will also work on FreeDOS. (They were 
developed for IBM DOS/PC DOS and MS-DOS.)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/824967

>> I don't think DOSBox requires a virtual hard disk image at all.
> Yes and no. You can put your DOS games in a directory to let
> DOSBox open them, but if you want to use FreeDOS kernel and
> drivers, you probably have to use a disk image? The "normal"
> style of DOSBox is that the whole DOS is a built-in illusion.
>
> If you do not need fancy drivers and want to work mainly with
> the DOSBox built-in stuff, a similar strategy as for DOSEMU
> is probably easier: Ship FreeDOS as a directory ready to be
> dropped in a shared directory C: "drive" for DOSBox?

This is the first time I hear about running actual DOS (the kernel) or 
its tools inside DOSBox. Most of this stuff isn't required and why would 
someone try to start a DOS kernel if DOS is already running?


Cheers,
userbeitrag



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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Don Flowers]

That would be awesome!

It seems that this would be an alternative to vDOS?
https://www.vdos.info/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdos/


On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 2:37 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:

> Jim Hall wrote:
> >>> I'm building the new website. I'll update the notice to encourage new
> >>> users to install FreeDOS in a virtual machine.
>
> Tom Ehlert wrote:
> >> any reason why we don't provide ready to run virtual machines as .VHD
> >> images?
>
> Jim Hall wrote:
> >> Hmm... I don't know why we haven't. I don't know anything about VHD
> >> though. Is that a standard virtual disk image that any PC
> >> emulator/virtual machine can read? Can free/open source software
> >> virtual machines read these (or create them)?
>
> On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Tom Ehlert  wrote:
> >
> > .VHD is a fairly generic virtual *disk* format, and most virtual
> > machines providers should be able to read them.
> >
> > a tiny bit more specialized are the virtual machine configuration
> > files, but we should be able to provide multiple formats, for Virtual
> > Box, DosBox, HyperV, ...
> >
> > still no rocket science, and no risk to damage user data.
>
>
> Thanks for the pointer. I'll see if I can output a VHD from QEMU. If I
> can, I'll post a default install of FreeDOS 1.1 to our ibiblio archive
> and link to it. I'll do the same when 1.2 is out.
>
> Reference:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHD_(file_format)
> "VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) is a file format which represents a virtual
> hard disk drive (HDD). It may contain what is found on a physical HDD,
> such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain
> files and folders. It is typically used as the hard disk of a virtual
> machine. The format was created by Connectix for their Virtual PC
> product, known as Microsoft Virtual PC since Microsoft acquired
> Connectix in 2003. Since June 2005, Microsoft has made the VHD Image
> Format Specification available to third parties under the Microsoft
> Open Specification Promise."
>
>
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> are
> consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow,
> J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity
> planning
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Jim Hall]

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

Tom Ehlert wrote:
>> any reason why we don't provide ready to run virtual machines as .VHD
>> images?

Jim Hall wrote:
>> Hmm... I don't know why we haven't. I don't know anything about VHD
>> though. Is that a standard virtual disk image that any PC
>> emulator/virtual machine can read? Can free/open source software
>> virtual machines read these (or create them)?

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Tom Ehlert  wrote:
>
> .VHD is a fairly generic virtual *disk* format, and most virtual
> machines providers should be able to read them.
>
> a tiny bit more specialized are the virtual machine configuration
> files, but we should be able to provide multiple formats, for Virtual
> Box, DosBox, HyperV, ...
>
> still no rocket science, and no risk to damage user data.


Thanks for the pointer. I'll see if I can output a VHD from QEMU. If I
can, I'll post a default install of FreeDOS 1.1 to our ibiblio archive
and link to it. I'll do the same when 1.2 is out.

Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHD_(file_format)
"VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) is a file format which represents a virtual
hard disk drive (HDD). It may contain what is found on a physical HDD,
such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain
files and folders. It is typically used as the hard disk of a virtual
machine. The format was created by Connectix for their Virtual PC
product, known as Microsoft Virtual PC since Microsoft acquired
Connectix in 2003. Since June 2005, Microsoft has made the VHD Image
Format Specification available to third parties under the Microsoft
Open Specification Promise."

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Tom Ehlert  wrote:
>
>>> I'm building the new website. I'll update the notice to encourage new
>>> users to install FreeDOS in a virtual machine.
>>
>> any reason why we don't provide ready to run virtual machines as .VHD
>> images?
>
>> Hmm... I don't know why we haven't. I don't know anything about VHD
>> though. Is that a standard virtual disk image that any PC
>> emulator/virtual machine can read? Can free/open source software
>> virtual machines read these (or create them)?
>
> .VHD is a fairly generic virtual *disk* format, and most virtual
> machines providers should be able to read them.
>
> a tiny bit more specialized are the virtual machine configuration
> files, but we should be able to provide multiple formats, for Virtual
> Box, DosBox, HyperV, ...
>
> still no rocket science, and no risk to damage user data.

There's nothing wrong with providing a public .VMDK (etc.), but it's
probably a lot of work to maintain one (make sure it has all useful
tools and compilers in recent versions, make sure it satisfies all
licenses, make sure it's not overly large).

I just assume we didn't have enough people interested in making one.
The end user can always install manually (from .iso) to whatever
format / emulator they want. Do they really need us to hold their
hand? (Probably yes, but it's a ton more effort on our part.)

Anyways, according to FreeBSD (
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/VM-IMAGES/README.txt ),
these are some disk image formats:

vhd: VirtualPC, Hyper-V, Xen, VirtualBox
vmdk: VMWare
qcow2: Qemu, KVM, VirtualBox
raw: bhyve, other hypervisors that support unformatted raw disk image

Actually, I think .VMDK (at least older version) is supported via
"qemu-img" and thus QEMU itself nowadays. They also support
VirtualBox's .VDI (somewhat). Besides, there's also the existence of
.VHDX and .OVA.

I dunno, it's a mess, it's a crapshoot, some things may or may not be
"well-supported" under all emulators / hypervisors. Honestly, I
recommend .VMDK, but I've only had limited interaction with it, so I
don't know if that's truly the best format. (Obviously some demand
"raw" format, but "qemu-img" can "convert" between several formats,
IIRC.)

Just for comparison, FreeBSD 10.3 (i386) distributes in several
formats ( 
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/VM-IMAGES/10.3-RELEASE/i386/Latest/
):

.qcow2.xz, raw.xz, vhd.xz, vmdk.xz

(Although I personally think that's a duplication of effort unless you
are absolutely sure that all targeted emulators can't reliably handle
a single format. But I'm not aware of various advantages or
disadvantages either, so who knows.)

P.S. No, I've never used bhyve, and I have no idea if it (now?) has
BIOS + DOS support. AFAIK, no. (See https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve .)

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
>> I wonder if it was possible to include the guest integration drivers for
>> Virtual PC, VirtualBox, QEMU (are there any?), Hyper-V in a provided VHD
>
> Eduardo Casino has written VMSMOUNT in 2011 :-) It lets you
> mount VMWare shared directories as a FreeDOS drive letter :-)

I haven't really used VMware, but one person warned me that it
required VT-X nowadays. Also, I'm not even sure if there is still a
32-bit version either. I've heard some good things, but it might be
safer to use something else.

(Yes, I know, most others lack tools like VMSMOUNT. But at least QEMU
has partial "fat:" read/write support. VirtualBox can use FTPSRV or
whatever.)

Actually, it's probably easier to use other tools for inserting and
extracting files from disk images, e.g. Gilles V.'s Extract, 7-Zip 7z
[sic], or GNU Mtools.

> I guess it would also be possible to do something fancy for
> mouse support.

Most programs don't forcibly insist on using one, thankfully.

> DOS does not have a built-in clipboard, so a
> guest driver for that would have to do something else, such
> as Linux style "mark to put into clipboard, use middle mouse
> button to paste clipboard contents into keyboard buffer" but
> I am not aware of such guest drivers for DOS yet.

The only clipboard util (of that kind) TSR that I can think of would
be DOSCLIP.ARJ by Veit Kannegieser. Although I can't remember ever
using it, and I can't find it on his homepage anymore. But it has
sources, yet I don't know the license offhand either (don't see any
obvious mentions, might have to email him for definitive answer). Take
a look if curious:

1). https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/dosclip.arj?attredirects=0
1b). EDIT: also needs LHTSR: http://kannegieser.net/veit/quelle/lhtsr.arj

2). http://kannegieser.net/veit/programm/index_e.htm  (not here? even
WayBack doesn't show it, dunno!)

N.B. This may not be exactly what you wanted, but I think?? it tries
to be Win16 API compatible, so it's basically a global clipboard for
apps that are Win16 aware.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Eric Auer]

Hi Herr or Frau Beitrag!

> I wonder if it was possible to include the guest integration drivers for 
> Virtual PC, VirtualBox, QEMU (are there any?), Hyper-V in a provided VHD

Eduardo Casino has written VMSMOUNT in 2011 :-) It lets you
mount VMWare shared directories as a FreeDOS drive letter :-)

I guess it would also be possible to do something fancy for
mouse support. DOS does not have a built-in clipboard, so a
guest driver for that would have to do something else, such
as Linux style "mark to put into clipboard, use middle mouse
button to paste clipboard contents into keyboard buffer" but
I am not aware of such guest drivers for DOS yet. Same for
the possibility of guest graphics drivers, where DOS has to
rely on the BIOS and hardware VGA / VESA emulation instead.

Are there any Virtual PC, Virtual Box or QEMU specific guest
drivers for FreeDOS?

DOSEMU for example ships with magic XMS, EMS, CDROM and shared
drive and directory hooks, some of the features work without
even loading any drivers. You would want to include EMS.SYS,
CDROM.SYS, UNIX, EXITEMU, LREDIR and a few other binaries from
the DOSEMU utilities if you would boot FreeDOS from a virtual
disk image there BUT it is a lot easier to boot FreeDOS from
a shared DIRECTORY in DOSEMU instead. In that case, it might
be better to just symlink the utility directory to C:\DOSEMU\
as part of the "installation" process of FreeDOS to shared C.

> I don't think DOSBox requires a virtual hard disk image at all.

Yes and no. You can put your DOS games in a directory to let
DOSBox open them, but if you want to use FreeDOS kernel and
drivers, you probably have to use a disk image? The "normal"
style of DOSBox is that the whole DOS is a built-in illusion.

If you do not need fancy drivers and want to work mainly with
the DOSBox built-in stuff, a similar strategy as for DOSEMU
is probably easier: Ship FreeDOS as a directory ready to be
dropped in a shared directory C: "drive" for DOSBox?

Cheers, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[userbeitrag]

original message from Tom Ehlert, 2016-06-20 17:42:
> .VHD is a fairly generic virtual *disk* format, and most virtual
> machines providers should be able to read them.
>
> a tiny bit more specialized are the virtual machine configuration
> files, but we should be able to provide multiple formats, for Virtual
> Box, DosBox, HyperV, ...
>
> still no rocket science, and no risk to damage user data.

I wonder if it was possible to include the guest integration drivers for 
Virtual PC, VirtualBox, QEMU (are there any?), Hyper-V in a provided VHD 
image... it's a license thing: it must be checked if the guest 
integration drivers are redistributable or not.

I don't think DOSBox requires a virtual hard disk image at all.

Cheers,
userbeitrag

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Tom Ehlert]

>> I'm building the new website. I'll update the notice to encourage new
>> users to install FreeDOS in a virtual machine.
>  
> any reason why we don't provide ready to run virtual machines as .VHD
> images?
>  
> Tom

> Hmm... I don't know why we haven't. I don't know anything about VHD
> though. Is that a standard virtual disk image that any PC
> emulator/virtual machine can read? Can free/open source software
> virtual machines read these (or create them)? 

.VHD is a fairly generic virtual *disk* format, and most virtual
machines providers should be able to read them.

a tiny bit more specialized are the virtual machine configuration
files, but we should be able to provide multiple formats, for Virtual
Box, DosBox, HyperV, ...

still no rocket science, and no risk to damage user data.

Tom


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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Jim Hall]

On Monday, June 20, 2016, Tom Ehlert  wrote:

>
> > I'm building the new website. I'll update the notice to encourage new
> > users to install FreeDOS in a virtual machine.
>
> any reason why we don't provide ready to run virtual machines as .VHD
> images?
>
> Tom
>
>
Hmm... I don't know why we haven't. I don't know anything about VHD though.
Is that a standard virtual disk image that any PC emulator/virtual machine
can read? Can free/open source software virtual machines read these (or
create them)?
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[Don Flowers]

There are by its very nature limitations to FreeDOS. Even I (one who
imagines a parallel universe where DOS still matters) have been forced to
reexamine why I should "care"  about this system at all and why I continue
to store floppy disks all over our apartment ; ^0

It is (as Eric said "a complete operating system") Perhaps it is a
"hobbyists" operating system to be tinkered with - I don't know. For some
(depending on the machine on which it is installed) it is buggy,
frustrating and not worth the effort.

For myself, for whatever reason I use FreeDOS in some form or fashion every
day. Long Live FreeDOS

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 11:56 PM, TJ Edmister 
wrote:

> 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

[Tom Ehlert]

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

any reason why we don't provide ready to run virtual machines as .VHD
images?

Tom


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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Thomas Mueller]

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.

Jim Hall responded:

> 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.

Even better might be to install FreeDOS onto a USB stick.  User must still be 
sure to know where the installer is installing to, to avoid trashing something 
on the hard drive like a Windows installation.

I have no hard drive to install FreeDOS to, or for that matter ReactOS or even 
eComStation, because I use GPT on hard drives.

On the matter of FreeDOS suffering from hardware incompatibility with modern 
computers, that applies also to (open-source) ReactOS and (commercial 
closed-source and very outdated) eComStation. 

Tom


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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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patterns at an interface-level. Reveals which users, apps, and protocols are 
consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow, 
J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity planning
reports. http://sdm.link/zohomanageengine
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
> 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.

It may shock you to realize I'm aware of that.

But TJ was talking about installing *Win2K/XP* on FAT32.  Those
*aren't* DOS, and aren't intended to be.  What I wondered was why he
would choose to install them on the FAT32 file system in the first
place.

> 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.

Tell me why you care?  I don't.  I've never had a need to read NTFS from DOS.

FreeDOS was installed here on an ancient notebook quad booting Win2K
Pro on NTFS, Ubuntu Linux and Puppy Linux on ext4, and FreeDOS on
FAT32.  Win2K could see, read, and write the NTFS and FAT32 slices
native, and an open source driver let it see/read/write the ext4
slices.  Ubuntu and Puppy mounted each other's file systems when run,
and could see/read/write the NTFS and FAT32 slices using ntfs3G.
FreeDOS could only see the FAT32 slice it was on, but I didn't care. I
*never* had a reason to *need* to see/read/write NTFS or ext4 from it.
It was its own self-contained little world.

(The machine came to me with WinXP SP2, and was frozen snail slow.
That tends to happen when you try to run XP, which wants 512MB RAM
*minimum*), on a machine with 256MB, 16MB of which are grabbed off the
top by the Transmeta CPU for code morphing.  Win2K actually ran on
that hardware, which is why it got the nod.)

> (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.)

There were two I'm aware of, both from Mark Russinovitch at
SysInternals.  One was freeware and read only.  A commercial payware
version from Sysinternals sister site Winternals added NTFS write
access.  The specific use case was a system administrator who needed
to boot from a floppy to try to repair a badly damaged NTFS file
system on a hard drive.  It's been a while since I looked at them, but
I recall the DOS NTFS driver being huge.  You could boot a DOS floppy
and load the driver from it to poke at NTFS, but there wasn't much
else you could do once it was loaded.  You could *not* load it as a
driver to also read NTFS file systems from a normal DOS session.
(Russinovich is a very sharp programmer who writes efficient, well
crafted code.  The driver was huge because it had to be to do the job.
NTFS is a highly complex file system.)

Sysinternals was bought by Microsoft, and Russinovich and his partner
Bryce Cogswell became part of the Core Architecture group at MS.  You
can still get Russinovich's freeware offerings from MSDN, but the
payware stuff is no longer available.  If you run Windows, you really
want Mark's stuff.

> 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.)

The nice thing about Vista on up is that you can do that from within a
running Windows installation

My current desktop dual boots Windows and Ubuntu Linux.  It came with
4GB RAM, Intel graphics, and a 240GB SATA HD, with Win7 Pro
pre-installed.

I added 4GB more RAM, an ATI video card, and a 240GB SSD.  I cloned
Win7 to SDD from the HD, and set it as the boot drive.  Once it was
booted from SSD, I could resize the NTFS partition and carve out a
30GB raw slice for Ubuntu to live on.  The Ubuntu installer was on a
bootable USB drive.  I booted from it and ran the installer.  The
installer saw the 30GB raw partition, formatted it ext4, and installed
Ubuntu to it.

The end result was a system multi-booting under grub2, with a choice
of Ubuntu, Win7 on the SSD, or Win7 on the HD.  I subsequently
upgraded to Win10 on the SSD, and now have multi-boot with Ubuntu,
Win10 on SSD, and Win7 on HD.  And like the system described above, I
can see/read/write the Ubuntu slice from Windows using the same open
source driver, and Ubuntu can see/read/write the NTFS slice using
ntfs3g.

>> 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

I don't see how it could be otherwise, given what drivers do.  But I
*was* annoyed by how long it took a

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 hardcoded to 32 MB on l

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.
__
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

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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
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

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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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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Eric Auer]

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. So if you run
programs compiled to use it, but are in DR-DOS, you may still
need CWSDPMI, but that could rely on DR-EMM386 for the DPMI
part of the work. The same thing happens when you run such a
program inside Windows or a DOS window of Windows, which also
provide DPMI already :-)

> 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...

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?

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

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. 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.
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.

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.

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.

If you have 4 GB of physical RAM, you will probably see much less, as
big address space areas are reserved for mapped graphics card memory.

You have to use above-4 GB-aware mainboard, VGA and OS for full 4 GB.
In theory, you could have XMS drivers or DPMI hosts for DOS which let
your software use up to 4 GB per task from a total of more than 4 GB?
I think there is some experimental CWSDPMI which tries to do that...?

> https://www.youtube.com/user/ScorpionsVEVO/videos

Hehe... I have Scorpions' "You and I" on some "snuggle rock" sampler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFmv9bAC2pE

> 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 hope that my list of memory size limits above is roughly correct!

Cheers, Eric

PS: Cool that you have a 10 in 1 multi-tasker repair shampoo.



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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 3:10 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> Yes, FreeDOS clones DOS and that forces it to support old interfaces...
>
>> DR DOS had a multitasker.

DR-DOS 7.03 is the last "full" version (circa 1998), and it's even
still sold online, if you're morbidly curious.

It had both task switcher (for 286+) and true multitasker (386+). The
former basically pauses the app while you start another one. The
latter requires V86 mode to do its dirty work.

> Would be interesting to know which multitasker is how strong, in particular 
> the DR DOS one.

Since DR-DOS hasn't been updated since 1998, I think it's not good to
pin many hopes to it. The whole 7.x series was based upon Novell DOS.
I can't remember, but I think 7.02 or such improved the built-in DPMI
server (bugfixes, now 32-bit), which is important because it wouldn't
multitask without it.

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).

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. As you probably know, a lot of things (e.g. GCC) can
easily use that much RAM. (I think it falsely reported XMSv3, dunno
why, that is very untrue!)

The irony is that DR-DOS could run Win 3.x flawlessly, allegedly "30%
faster". (I guess this was Novell's way of having a competing
product.) And that could multitask, too, of course. Unfortunately,
DR-DOS was never publicly compatible with Win95 (due to undocumented
APIs or whatnot), so even when they won the lawsuit, no further
developments of DR-DOS (AFAIK, at least no major new editions) were
ever produced.

So "it's dead, Jim". While some of the alternatives (e.g. DOSEMU) may
not be perfect, it's far better than nothing.

(BTW, DR-DOS 7.03 doesn't support FAT32, LBA, or LFNs out-of-the-box.)

> (By the way: If we both are in Germany, you can try some of my cards...)

Wie Sie diese in DOS hören? Mplayer??? (danke https://translate.google.com)

https://www.youtube.com/user/ScorpionsVEVO/videos

>> IMHO, for games lack of sound and mouse/joystick support really is the 
>> fun-killer.

In fairness, we're just lucky anything works. Games are not high
priority, by any stretch, since they do no useful work. I think we
have bigger priorities, honestly. I'm not opposed, of course, but it's
unlikely to gain any traction these days.

P.S. I just have to mention this one bit of trivia. I am not a trendy
person, but I just noticed that my new shampoo says it's "10 in 1
multi-tasker repairs"! That is the weirdest thing I've ever heard.
(C'mon, DOS, get with the times, even shampoo can out-multitask you!
j/k lol)   ;-)

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

[Jerome E. Shidel Jr.]

> On Jun 18, 2016, at 1:29 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi guys,
> 
> (sorry about the long mail...)
> 
>> During the discussion of version 1.2, this was my interpretation of 
>> how this should be handled and what was implemented when the 
>> user installed FreeDOS in normal mode. Having a failed install (by 
>> not booting into FreeDOS) was unacceptable behavior. Therefore, 
>> the installer would normally backup and then over-write the boot...
> 
> Well, as mentioned several times in the 1.2 discussion, losing all
> your data is even more unacceptable, so there should be a choice ;-)

No data is lost unless the user intentional destroys it themselves. 
The boot sector and boot code is backed up prior to being over-written.
This occurs in either normal or advanced mode.

> 
> On dedicated harddisks or virtual computer images, which optionally
> could be auto-detected by the installer, it is of course nice to do
> automatic "rude" installs which makes sure that DOS boots afterwards.
> 
> But the user should have the choice between "rude" install, "no"
> install at all (simply use "live" DOS as booted from USB stick)
> and as 3rd choice "manual" install, where the user has to do the
> partitioning and formatting by hand before running the installer
> which limits itself to install DOS to any user-chosen directory,
> even asking whether SYS should be run and whether config/autoexec
> should be overwritten or just prepared under another name :-)

If the user has already prepared a drive C: prior to using the installer,
the installer will see this and will not auto-partition the hard drive. It will
also not even prompt to partition the drive. If the user has also formatted
the drive, the installer will skip this as well. 

Other things, like not installing the SYS files, not installing boot code,
not installing new autoexec & config files are all optional in advanced 
mode. 

Personally, I think anyone who is running the installer on a system
that is to be multi-boot or some other situation, should run the installer
in advanced mode to fully control its behavior.

> 
>> code during installation. This action can be overridden if advanced 
>> mode is used during the install. There were many pros and cons 
>> to this being the default action.
>> 
>> The installer will not destroy partitions...
> 
> As long as the installer makes it clear that you have a CHOICE,
> as long as that choice is not what happens by default when you
> just press Y or enter, this is already quite reasonable :-) As
> you see, people ARE scared that the install can delete data.
> 
>> * The installer checks if there is a drive C: visible to FreeDOS. 
> 
>> If does not find one, and that drive is blank it will use fdisk to 
>> automatically partition the drive in "smart" mode. Otherwise, if
>> there are partitions existing on the drive, or it cannot figure 
>> out what should be partitioned, or if it is in “dumb" mode. It
>> will launch fdisk and let the user deal with it.
> 
> How does it decide about the "blank" aspect?

It uses multiple tools and parses results from queries to fdisk.

If there are any partitions present, the drive will not be 
auto-partitioned. If there is a drive that fdisk lists as hard drive C:,
it will be used. 

> 
>> * Installer checks if drive C: can be read by FreeDOS. If not, 
>> it will format it.
> 
> It should NOT do that by default if you ask me. It should rather
> say something like "There is a C: but it does not work for DOS.
> If you just made the partition for DOS, you can press F now to
> let me format C: Otherwise, please leave the installer and take
> care to make C: accessible for DOS, in any way that seems good.”

As I said, I left out all question prompts the installer asks in the 
logic summary I posted. The installer does not just format a drive.
It asks first. 

It doesn’t even partition without asking. The partitioning behavior is
slightly different in advanced and normal modes.

When drive needs to be partitioned:

Normal mode:

Does all that detection stuff.

Asks if user wants to partition or quit?

If so, and can auto-partition, it does so. If it cannot auto-partition
it launches fdisk.

After partition. Asks to reboot or exit.

Advanced mode.

Does some detection stuff to determine bios drive.

Asks if user wants to partition or quit?

Launches fdisk set for the bios drive.

After partition. Asks to reboot or exit.

> 
> (the above example deliberately uses "F" instead of "Y" to make
> sure that people have to think before they just press "agree”)

Advanced mode.

> 
>> * The installer transfers the system files and overwrites the
>> boot code. 
> 
> That, too, might want to ask the user first…

Advanced mode.

> 
>> Advanced mode, provides these capabilities:
>> * never auto-partition 
>> * option of long-slow formatting.
>> * installing to drives other than C: (configured as C: for booting)
>

Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Eric Auer]

Hi :-)

Yes, FreeDOS clones DOS and that forces it to support old interfaces...

> DR DOS had a multitasker.

And MS DOS had limited task swapping in DOSSHELL, yes. If you ask me,
it is easier to run multiple virtual DOS windows (DOSEMU, DOSBOX or
even complete virtual PC) on modern PC: Those are not limited by the
ability of the multitasker to handle various hardware, because they
handle ALL hardware visible to the DOS in the respective virtual box.

You could try Tri-DOS, but stability is rather limited. I think most
programs with graphics, sound, network or even with non-trivial DOS
extenders or memory usage (EMS, XMS, VCPI, DPMI) will have troubles
even in a good multitasker like Windows 3 (supports multiple virtual
DOS windows in parallel) or the DR DOS one. Would be interesting to
know which multitasker is how strong, in particular the DR DOS one.

> Note that the SoundBlaster DOS drivers (.SYS) did the exact same thing 
> on DOS: since modern SB cards were hardware-wise completely different 
> cards, namely Ensoniq, they had to provide "drivers" that would enable 
> you to continue to play games (and programs) written for the original 
> SoundBlaster (1.x or 2.0, Pro and 16). The SoundBlaster 16 PCI cards...

That is unfortunately only a part of the problem: The DOS "drivers" for
sound cards usually only do initial hardware setup. They do not tell a
DOS game how to use the sound card, so the game still onky knows how to
use SoundBlaster. The SoundBlaster PCI cards came with a protected mode
"driver" which actually created a complete simulation of a SoundBlaster
in a similar way to what DOSBOX and DOSEMU and virtual PC do when they
simulate a complete set of DOS game friendly hardware for the game. The
problem is that SoundBlaster Live PCI drivers only work with games with
no or well-behaved DOS extenders, because of the protected mode usage
as requirement for being able to simulate any hardware.

Some (even PCI) sound cards also had chips which could simulate part of
a SoundBlaster in hardware. Drivers for those could for example react
to interrupts generated by the chips and use software to assist in the
simulation of SoundBlaster compatibility. Unfortunately, those tend to
only work well on mainboards which still are designed with a minimum of
ISA infrastructure awareness. I have a few DOS friendly PCI sound cards
and none of them has reasonable DOS game support on modern mainboards.

(By the way: If we both are in Germany, you can try some of my cards...)

> 1. The network hardware is one example. For every ISA network card you 
> had a DOS driver, and sometimes even a proprietary protocol (NetWare).

Most of the time things work okay with PCI RTL8139 chipset for DOS, but
to be honest, networking is not very nice in a single tasking OS anyway.
Quite a few already PCI network chipsets do have DOS drivers on CRYNWR.

> 2. I don't know if there is one, but a CPU throttling driver...

You can use ACPI throttling with FDAPM and some experiments exist for
"change clock and voltage and save power" features of AMD and Intel.

Plus of course you can use POWER and FDAPM for the classic HLT method
of reducing power consumption.

If your PC only runs DOS all the time, you can probably simply use
the BIOS setup to underclock and undervolt your CPU "statically"
without drivers. DOS games run better at low CPU speed anyway :-)

> 3. USB devices like USB sound cards, USB video cards (enabling you to 
> use a second/third/... montior) will not work. USB video capturing

USB sound would make sense, but USB video-out and USB video-in do
not, if you ask me. You would first need to have any DOS software
which does anything with a second monitor at all! Or a DOS video
editing software. Fun fact: I have written and used a DOS software
which used two PCI video cards at the same time, one in text mode
and one in graphics mode. Very few ancient DOS programs did support
the parallel use of VGA compatible cards and black and white HGC.

> devices (WebCams, analog TV, DVB, ...)

To make use of that, you would need a DOS version of Skype and some
sort of DOS living room hub software for watching TV. I think it is
a lot easier to use your TV or a multi tasking OS to watch TV today.

> 4. Some input devices like keyboards and mice don't work correctly,
> or additional functions are not accessible (additional mouse buttons
> / wheels). Again, there is no DOS driver to program these functions.

I believe CTMOUSE does have support for a wheel and maybe some extra
buttons, but of course there are no apps in DOS which would use them.

Keyboards and mice are generally supported by the BIOS - even the USB
style ones - so they should always work in DOS! Note that you could
define your own key mapping for extra keys such as media player keys
by simply reconfiguring your DOS keyboard layout. However, while your
Linux or Windows could start a media player if you press "play", the
single tasking DOS will not! You could configure your DOS 

Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 3:35 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 1:47 PM,   wrote:

> There's just not a lot of sympathy for old hardware anymore. Forced
> obsoletion is more fierce than ever, so people are routinely asked to
> upgrade (or even re-buy) everything on a fairly constant basis. They
> don't want stability, legacy, compatibility, they want "shiny! new!"
> features.
>> DR DOS had a multitasker.
>
> So did OS/2. Also Win16 and Win9x. Not to mention Desqview. And even
> DOSEMU. And WinXP's NTVDM.

OS/2 was a full OS, built from the ground up to be multi-tasking.  It
required at least a 286 CPU to run at all.  It was capable of
reading/writing a DOS FAT filesystem, and running DOS applications,
but was *not* DOS.  It was originally intended to *replace* DOS.

DV and Win3.X were a multi-tasking shells on top of DOS.  Win95 was
moving away from that.  Win98 completed the move.  It used DOS as a
real-mode loader for a protected mode OS.  Once Win98 was loaded and
active, it took over, and DOS was out of the loop.

NTVDM (which existed on Win2K as well as WinXP) was a limited virtual
machine, implementing enough of DOS to allow old 16 bit applications
to run on a 32 bit OS. Multi-tasking was actually provided by the host
OS, and NTVDM was simply another task running under the host OS.

> And nobody cares anymore.  :-(   Well, maybe ReactOS, but even their
> NTVDM still needs lots of work.

Why *should* anyone care?  Hardware is *cheap*.  My generic 7" Android
tablet, which cost me a whopping $30, has far more power than my old
XT clone (which cost over $1,000 back when), with a quad-core 1.3ghz
processor, 512MB RAM, 8GB flash, an 800x480 color screen, and a 32GB
microSD card.  I have an assortment of DOS apps running on it via an
Android port of DOSBox.

Support for ancient hardware simply isn't worth the time and trouble
for those capable of doing it.  People who *can* do that sort of thing
do it for money, and there's no money in DOS these days.
__
Dennis

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

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:

How did it discourage anybody? By giving them total freedom??

> “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.”

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.

> It seems, in making FreeDOS, the developers have decided to stay true to
the original nature
> of the earliest days of DOS. 640KB was all the memory anyone ever needed,
DOS liked to be
> the ONLY operating system on any given PC, and multi-booting wasn't even
heard of.

Sure, multi-booting is still somewhat rare, mostly because it's dangerous
and nobody "needs" DOS as much as they used to (or nowadays even frown upon
it).

But there's an entire category just for multi-booting ("BOOT"):

http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=boot

But, as Eric already mentioned, 640 kb is only for IBM PCs running
8088/8086. Anything like 286 (max 16 MB ftw!) can run XMSv2 or DPMI 0.9 and
386 can run XMSv3 and DPMI 1.0. (Although almost all DPMI stuff is 386+.)
While you may not get full "4 GB" of RAM on 386+, you can usually get up to
2 GB, comfortably. That is well supported by many tools (e.g. OpenWatcom,
DJGPP, FreeBASIC, Free Pascal).

> Anyway, Dennis, although plugging a different SourceForge project, is
essentially correct.
> DOSBox always played my games without problems, and, as the old adage
goes,
> “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

DOSBox is "only" for games, nothing else. That was their entire goal. It's
not a "real" DOS and was never meant to boot on native hardware. Heck, to
stay portable, they refused to add any x86 extensions, so it's slow as
molasses! (A "fast 486" isn't very fast, IMHO.)

> So anyway, thus ends my brief and unsuccessful foray into FreeDOS.

DOS is not for the faint-hearted! If you don't already know it and like it,
it's not going to do what you want. Honestly, it's an uphill battle (maybe
impossible task) to keep supporting it in such a hostile tech world that
doesn't care one whit about legacy anymore.

I hate to be cynical, but it just goes to show you that nothing stays
popular forever. Even if you get "better", nobody cares, it's "too old" or
"doesn't burn DVDs" or whatnot. You can't win for trying.

Why try at all? Nobody will care in a few years, and it'll all be obsolete
in lieu of newer trendy stuff. Ungrateful world.  :-(

> Sent from my Windows 10 phone

Ah, the true problem presents itself.   ;-)
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 2:47 PM,   wrote:
> Original message from Eric Auer, 2016-06-18 19:14:
>> Hi anonymous Abwesend forum member who is pessimistic about DOS ;-)
>>
>>> Running FreeDOS on real hardware can be challenging.
>> FreeDOS no, old DOS games yes.
>
> No offence, FreeDOS is of course a modern project. But DOS is an old
> conpect for an operating system.
>
>>> FreeDOS on the other hand is a very old operating system concept.
>> Old concept yes, old operating system no. This means: DOS
>> has no multi tasking and no 64 bit address space, so your
>> modern computer will be bored: Only a single CPU core and
>> at most 3 to 4 GB of RAM can be used inside DOS. Which is
>> of course a lot more than old DOS games ever could imagine.
>
> DR DOS had a multitasker.

MSDOS could do a limited form of multi-tasking.  The PRINT command
installed a resident portion that did time-slicing, and could allocate
clock ticks to spool print jobs in the background while the user
continued to work in the foreground. This was a boon to early word
processor users, who didn't have to twiddle their thumbs while the
document they just sent to the printer finished printing before they
went on to the next one.  IIRC, analysis of what the PRINT command did
spawned the whole notion of terminate and stay resident programs, that
also installed themselves as resident extensions to DOS.

Development of that approach resulted in Desqview, which was
essentially a multi-tasking shell on top of DOS.  So, for that matter,
was Windows through 3.X, that was booted from DOS.

I never ran DR-DOS, but I believe its multi-tasker used the same
approach.  Digital Research also had a variant called Concurrent DOS,
originally based on their Concurrent CP/M-86 product.  Wikipedia has a
writeup on the various approaches:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS

> 2. I don't know if there is one, but a CPU throttling driver would be a
> good thing. One that supports Intel (Enhanced) SpeedStep and AMD
> PowerNow!/Cool'n'Quiet. Reading the ACPI tables would be required.
> Turning off the remaining (unused) CPU cores would reduce power
> consumption and enhance the thermal situation.

There is a long established application called TameDOS that does that,
and is still sold and supported.

The problem it addresses is that early DOS programs assumed they were
the only thing running on the PC and had exclusive access to the
hardware.  They were not written to gracefully surrender unused time
slices.  One thing later DOS applications used to mention was being
"DesqView aware", and able to cooperate with DV's time slicing, and
this was the sort of issue TameDOS addressed.  See
http://www.tamedos.com/

There's a fork of DOSBox called vDOS, specifically intended for
running old DOS character mode business applications under Windows.  I
have an assortment of old DOS apps up under vDOS on a 64 bit Win10
machine.  TameDOS is useful for folks doing that so the DOS app they
are running doesn't max the CPU core the DOS session is running in.
__
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 1:47 PM,   wrote:
>>
>>> Running FreeDOS on real hardware can be challenging.
>> FreeDOS no, old DOS games yes.
>
> No offence, FreeDOS is of course a modern project. But DOS is an old
> conpect for an operating system.

But you have to be "old" to run on old cpus (e.g. 8086, 286). Sure, in
theory you could have a binary OS release that runs on multiple cpu
families (dispatching via CPUID), but that's a lot more testing and
work. DOS already offloads almost everything outside of the kernel,
which is probably a bit too minimal.

There's just not a lot of sympathy for old hardware anymore. Forced
obsoletion is more fierce than ever, so people are routinely asked to
upgrade (or even re-buy) everything on a fairly constant basis. They
don't want stability, legacy, compatibility, they want "shiny! new!"
features.

>>> FreeDOS on the other hand is a very old operating system concept.
>> Old concept yes, old operating system no. This means: DOS
>> has no multi tasking and no 64 bit address space, so your
>> modern computer will be bored: Only a single CPU core and
>> at most 3 to 4 GB of RAM can be used inside DOS. Which is
>> of course a lot more than old DOS games ever could imagine.
>
> DR DOS had a multitasker.

So did OS/2. Also Win16 and Win9x. Not to mention Desqview. And even
DOSEMU. And WinXP's NTVDM.

And nobody cares anymore.  :-(   Well, maybe ReactOS, but even their
NTVDM still needs lots of work.

>> This leads to the next problem:
>>> Running it on modern hardware will very often result in some features
>>> not working correctly. DOS games often required an AdLib or SoundBlaster
>>> audio card. For AC'97 and Intel HD-Audio sound, there are no DOS drivers
>> Old DOS games do not use "DOS drivers" for sound. They could
>> not imagine that games would have any more fancy sound card
>> available than a stereo SoundBlaster. So the games THEMSELVES
>> contain drivers for SoundBlaster.

More or less true (but not absolutely). Blame the tooling, but even
then there has been "some" support for dynamic loading of libs, etc.
It's just not popular (or bug-free or easy enough, I suppose). E.g.
(DJGPP-built) "h2dos -sndpci" (as .dxe). (Bad example, that's a fairly
recent backport. But I know many DOS games had separate drivers for
various hardware.)

There were other games that used similar methods for drivers, but
those never caught on as much (and weren't well-supported).

So it's not that nobody did it, they just didn't keep it up, it didn't
widely catch on, it wasn't obvious enough, etc.

> Yes, but bit number of original DOS programs cannot use modern sound
> hardware.
>> Is there anything else than sound which has problems in DOS on
>> modern hardware, when playing old games written in the 1990s?

Cpu timing?

>> Which other "dozens" of drivers do you miss? Interesting topic!
>
> 2. I don't know if there is one, but a CPU throttling driver would be a
> good thing. One that supports Intel (Enhanced) SpeedStep and AMD
> PowerNow!/Cool'n'Quiet. Reading the ACPI tables would be required.
> Turning off the remaining (unused) CPU cores would reduce power
> consumption and enhance the thermal situation.

There are at least two simple prototypes for that for DOS in recent
years, but they weren't widely tested and thus don't work on all
models.

Power management, as designed by hardware manufacturers, doesn't
concern itself very much with DOS. By far, most people only use
Windows or (less common) Linux.

> 3. USB devices like USB sound cards, USB video cards (enabling you to
> use a second/third/... montior) will not work. USB video capturing
> devices (WebCams, analog TV, DVB, ...) will also lack drivers and a
> usable protocol.

Already lamented as "too complicated" by local experts.

> 6. How is the support for graphics cards? Are there tools to add
> additional VESA modes if they happen to be missing in the BIOS?

VESA is way too simplistic for modern users anyways. And one hobbyist
told me that his professor said hardware acceleration was basically
impossible for DOS anyways. So DOS is stuck in minimal support, at
best, and it's not going to get better. You're going to have to do
without, dual boot, and/or use DOSEMU.

> 8. But the worst incompatibility of them all is the lack of CSM
> (Compatiblity Support Module) on modern UEFI machines. Or does FreeDOS
> run on EFI/UEFI?

Lacking CSM is because they aren't intended to be used for legacy
OSes. That's their prerogative. How can you convince them that DOS is
still important in 2016? AFAIK, you can't.

> I know, this may not be a dozen, but a lot. Depending on the actual
> hardware and on the requirement of the to-be-used (legacy) software.
>
> IMHO, for games lack of sound and mouse/joystick support really is the
> fun-killer.

Unavoidable, esp. sound. Maybe I could have minimal hope for the
others (doubt it!), but overall nobody is writing drivers for DOS
anymore.

I hate to be pessimistic, but I think we're out of luck.

Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[userbeitrag]

Hello Eric Auer!


Original message from Eric Auer, 2016-06-18 19:14:
> Hi anonymous Abwesend forum member who is pessimistic about DOS ;-)
>
>> Running FreeDOS on real hardware can be challenging.
> FreeDOS no, old DOS games yes.

No offence, FreeDOS is of course a modern project. But DOS is an old 
conpect for an operating system.

>> FreeDOS on the other hand is a very old operating system concept.
> Old concept yes, old operating system no. This means: DOS
> has no multi tasking and no 64 bit address space, so your
> modern computer will be bored: Only a single CPU core and
> at most 3 to 4 GB of RAM can be used inside DOS. Which is
> of course a lot more than old DOS games ever could imagine.

DR DOS had a multitasker.

> This leads to the next problem:
>> Running it on modern hardware will very often result in some features
>> not working correctly. DOS games often required an AdLib or SoundBlaster
>> audio card. For AC'97 and Intel HD-Audio sound, there are no DOS drivers
> Old DOS games do not use "DOS drivers" for sound. They could
> not imagine that games would have any more fancy sound card
> available than a stereo SoundBlaster. So the games THEMSELVES
> contain drivers for SoundBlaster. DOS kernel is unable to tell
> a game that it must use your computer has 7.1 channel surround.
> This is where DOSBOX and similar special tools comes into play:
>
> DOSBOX can show your game a SIMULATION of a SoundBlaster card
> and capture all sound from that simulation. It can then send
> the sound to your REAL sound card so you can hear the sound
> from the front speakers of your surround system :-)

Note that the SoundBlaster DOS drivers (.SYS) did the exact same thing 
on DOS: since modern SB cards were hardware-wise completely different 
cards, namely Ensoniq, they had to provide "drivers" that would enable 
you to continue to play games (and programs) written for the original 
SoundBlaster (1.x or 2.0, Pro and 16). The SoundBlaster 16 PCI cards 
already used Ensoniq chips and were incompatible with the ISA 
SoundBlaster - the DOS driver worked as an emulator for the original SB.
> Note that you CAN run a modern media player for DOS, which is
> aware of surround sound cards, to enjoy MP3 & OGG on modern PC.

Yes, but bit number of original DOS programs cannot use modern sound 
hardware.
> Is there anything else than sound which has problems in DOS on
> modern hardware, when playing old games written in the 1990s?
>
> Note that DOS also does not involve networking in the operating
> system itself: You may have a DOS web browser which supports a
> common packet driver interface. The DOS kernel does not care if
> you have packet drivers or web browsers. So because you will not
> find a packet driver for your wireless network, the DOS kernel
> can not help your DOS web browser to use a wireless network.
>
> Which other "dozens" of drivers do you miss? Interesting topic!

1. The network hardware is one example. For every ISA network card you 
had a DOS driver, and sometimes even a proprietary protocol (NetWare).

2. I don't know if there is one, but a CPU throttling driver would be a 
good thing. One that supports Intel (Enhanced) SpeedStep and AMD 
PowerNow!/Cool'n'Quiet. Reading the ACPI tables would be required. 
Turning off the remaining (unused) CPU cores would reduce power 
consumption and enhance the thermal situation.

3. USB devices like USB sound cards, USB video cards (enabling you to 
use a second/third/... montior) will not work. USB video capturing 
devices (WebCams, analog TV, DVB, ...) will also lack drivers and a 
usable protocol.

4. Some input devices like keyboards and mice don't work correctly, or 
additional functions are not accessible (additional mouse 
buttons/wheels). Again, there is no DOS driver to program these functions.

5. Is there a DOS driver for USB joysticks? I know that analog joysticks 
on the MIDI port (gameport) will likely work, but do digital protocols 
work as well?

6. How is the support for graphics cards? Are there tools to add 
additional VESA modes if they happen to be missing in the BIOS?

7. I recently re-installed a IDE/ATAPI Zip Drive (250MB). I guess there 
will be a DOS driver available for this one. How about other exotic 
storage devices? And will USB Zip Drives also work in DOS? (I know that 
parallel port versions and IDE versions do, but USB?)

8. But the worst incompatibility of them all is the lack of CSM 
(Compatiblity Support Module) on modern UEFI machines. Or does FreeDOS 
run on EFI/UEFI?


I know, this may not be a dozen, but a lot. Depending on the actual 
hardware and on the requirement of the to-be-used (legacy) software.

IMHO, for games lack of sound and mouse/joystick support really is the 
fun-killer.

> Cheers, Eric

Cheers as well, the anonymous userbeitrag.

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

[Eric Auer]

Hi guys,

(sorry about the long mail...)

> During the discussion of version 1.2, this was my interpretation of 
> how this should be handled and what was implemented when the 
> user installed FreeDOS in normal mode. Having a failed install (by 
> not booting into FreeDOS) was unacceptable behavior. Therefore, 
> the installer would normally backup and then over-write the boot...

Well, as mentioned several times in the 1.2 discussion, losing all
your data is even more unacceptable, so there should be a choice ;-)

On dedicated harddisks or virtual computer images, which optionally
could be auto-detected by the installer, it is of course nice to do
automatic "rude" installs which makes sure that DOS boots afterwards.

But the user should have the choice between "rude" install, "no"
install at all (simply use "live" DOS as booted from USB stick)
and as 3rd choice "manual" install, where the user has to do the
partitioning and formatting by hand before running the installer
which limits itself to install DOS to any user-chosen directory,
even asking whether SYS should be run and whether config/autoexec
should be overwritten or just prepared under another name :-)

> code during installation. This action can be overridden if advanced 
> mode is used during the install. There were many pros and cons 
> to this being the default action.
> 
> The installer will not destroy partitions...

As long as the installer makes it clear that you have a CHOICE,
as long as that choice is not what happens by default when you
just press Y or enter, this is already quite reasonable :-) As
you see, people ARE scared that the install can delete data.

> * The installer checks if there is a drive C: visible to FreeDOS. 

> If does not find one, and that drive is blank it will use fdisk to 
> automatically partition the drive in "smart" mode. Otherwise, if
> there are partitions existing on the drive, or it cannot figure 
> out what should be partitioned, or if it is in “dumb" mode. It
> will launch fdisk and let the user deal with it.

How does it decide about the "blank" aspect?

> * Installer checks if drive C: can be read by FreeDOS. If not, 
> it will format it.

It should NOT do that by default if you ask me. It should rather
say something like "There is a C: but it does not work for DOS.
If you just made the partition for DOS, you can press F now to
let me format C: Otherwise, please leave the installer and take
care to make C: accessible for DOS, in any way that seems good."

(the above example deliberately uses "F" instead of "Y" to make
sure that people have to think before they just press "agree")

> * The installer transfers the system files and overwrites the
> boot code. 

That, too, might want to ask the user first...

> Advanced mode, provides these capabilities:
> * never auto-partition 
> * option of long-slow formatting.
> * installing to drives other than C: (configured as C: for booting)
> * not transferring the system boot files
> * not over-writting the boot code.
> * lots of other stuff.

That is nice but I wonder if it is necessary in that style:
Advanced mode could also let the user do the partition and
format step and offer the easier-to-implement second half
of the install only: Install to user-selectable directory,
then invite user to optionally add SYS files / boot sector.

I am aware that this is a rather controversial topic :-)

For easy improvement, maybe the installer could initially
say something like "if this is a dedicated DOS PC, maybe
virtual, select easy install now. If you have other data
on the PC, please select advanced manual installation..."

The rest of the installer can probably stay as it is :-)

> The FreeDOS 1.2 Preview releases contain several boot images.

> sudo dd if=FILENAME.IMG of=/dev/USBDEVICE

That is okay for Linux users, but those probably would use
GPARTED for the partition and format step anyway ;-) Many
Windows users might prefer something simpler, like DOSBOX.
Also because of the nice "old sound card" simulations :-)

Or of course some tool or howto for making it REALLY easy
to make a bootable USB stick which can be used without the
need to install DOS to any harddisk?

Cheers, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Eric Auer]

Hi anonymous Abwesend forum member who is pessimistic about DOS ;-)

> Running FreeDOS on real hardware can be challenging.

FreeDOS no, old DOS games yes.

> FreeDOS on the other hand is a very old operating system concept.

Old concept yes, old operating system no. This means: DOS
has no multi tasking and no 64 bit address space, so your
modern computer will be bored: Only a single CPU core and
at most 3 to 4 GB of RAM can be used inside DOS. Which is
of course a lot more than old DOS games ever could imagine.

This leads to the next problem:

> Running it on modern hardware will very often result in some features 
> not working correctly. DOS games often required an AdLib or SoundBlaster 
> audio card. For AC'97 and Intel HD-Audio sound, there are no DOS drivers

Old DOS games do not use "DOS drivers" for sound. They could
not imagine that games would have any more fancy sound card
available than a stereo SoundBlaster. So the games THEMSELVES
contain drivers for SoundBlaster. DOS kernel is unable to tell
a game that it must use your computer has 7.1 channel surround.
This is where DOSBOX and similar special tools comes into play:

DOSBOX can show your game a SIMULATION of a SoundBlaster card
and capture all sound from that simulation. It can then send
the sound to your REAL sound card so you can hear the sound
from the front speakers of your surround system :-)

Note that you CAN run a modern media player for DOS, which is
aware of surround sound cards, to enjoy MP3 & OGG on modern PC.

Is there anything else than sound which has problems in DOS on
modern hardware, when playing old games written in the 1990s?

Note that DOS also does not involve networking in the operating
system itself: You may have a DOS web browser which supports a
common packet driver interface. The DOS kernel does not care if
you have packet drivers or web browsers. So because you will not
find a packet driver for your wireless network, the DOS kernel
can not help your DOS web browser to use a wireless network.

Which other "dozens" of drivers do you miss? Interesting topic!

Cheers, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Dale E Sterner]

I'm curious; do you have a removable hard drive?
If you do you might do it the way I do. I replace the
hard drive with CF flash chips. Each chip has a
different OS. I can run anything from dos to win 7
by just replacing the chip. Your computer is probably
too new for this to work. Works well on old machines.
There would be no chance of FREEDOS damaging
your main OS this way. Just a thought.


cheers
DS


On Sat, 18 Jun 2016 04:00:57 -0500 Brandon Taylor
 writes:
> 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.”
> 
> It seems, in making FreeDOS, the developers have decided to stay 
> true to the original nature of the earliest days of DOS. 640KB was 
> all the memory anyone ever needed, DOS liked to be the ONLY 
> operating system on any given PC, and multi-booting wasn't even 
> heard of.
> 
> Anyway, Dennis, although plugging a different SourceForge project, 
> is essentially correct. DOSBox always played my games without 
> problems, and, as the old adage goes, “If it ain't broke, don't 
> fix it.”
> 
> So anyway, thus ends my brief and unsuccessful foray into FreeDOS.
> 
> Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Temptress to kill. 😉
> 
> Cheerio!
> 
> Brandon Taylor
> 
> Sent from my Windows 10 phone
> 


**
>From Dale Sterner - MS organic chemistry
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00975a052
***



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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[userbeitrag]

Running FreeDOS on real hardware can be challenging.

If you only want to play Lure of the Temptress, on a mordern computer 
you have two options:
* DOSBox
* ScummVM

I would recommend to use ScummVM for playing old (and by ScummVM 
supported) click-and-point adventures. It integrates very well into 
modern operating systems (Windows, OS X, Linux) and doesn't have to 
emulate a DOS environment and x86 hardware.

DOSBox will run almost all DOS games on various hardware and also runs 
on modern operating systems, even on other platforms (ARM, MIPS, PowerPC 
and more, additional to x86).

FreeDOS on the other hand is a very old operating system concept. 
Running it on modern hardware will very often result in some features 
not working correctly. DOS games often required an AdLib or SoundBlaster 
audio card. For AC'97 and Intel HD-Audio sound, there are no DOS drivers 
that can emulate an AdLib or SoundBlaster card. The result is that on 
lots of hardware setups you will end up with a bootable FreeDOS with 
dozen of missing drivers, simply because of the comprehensible fact that 
those drivers would have to be programmed by the developers, which would 
cost a lot of money, and for an operating system that is almost no 
longer used by anyone, except some enthusiats. DOS driver development on 
modern hardware is just not viable.


Good luck!



Original message by Brandon Taylor, 2016-06-17 23:12:
> I just acquired FreeDOS via Rufus, a program that lets me create bootable USB
> drives. I’m trying to play some DOS games, such as “Lure Of The Temptress,” 
> but
> the game won’t run – it says “Not enough memory to run the game.” As I have 
> not
> had a lot of experience with the DOS family of operating systems (I was raised
> on Windows), I don’t know what to do, if there’s anything I /can/ do, to get
> this game to work. It sounds like a typical problem with DOS’s 640KB 
> limitation,
> but I don’t know how to get around it. Can anyone help me out here?
>
> Brandon Taylor


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

[Jerome E. Shidel Jr.]

> On Jun 18, 2016, at 7:20 AM, Eric Auer  wrote:
> […]
> I think this was part of the FreeDOS 1.2 discussion before, but
> how about detection whether a harddisk is "totally" empty before
> showing the question how to install? I agree that for people who
> made a totally empty virtual PC image a minute before installing
> FreeDOS, it would be easiest to just let the installer throw one
> standard DOS partition on that "disk" without asking the user to
> make many decisions on partitioning and formatting. But for the
> users who do NOT have a dedicated harddisk for DOS, it is scary.
> 
> Cheers, Eric

During the discussion of version 1.2, this was my interpretation of 
how this should be handled and what was implemented when the 
user installed FreeDOS in normal mode. Having a failed install (by 
not booting into FreeDOS) was unacceptable behavior. Therefore, 
the installer would normally backup and then over-write the boot
code during installation. This action can be overridden if advanced 
mode is used during the install. There were many pros and cons 
to this being the default action.

The installer will not destroy partitions. Basically, this is what 
happens in basic normal mode (excluding question prompts
and lots of other stuff):

* Installer Boots.
* Installer tries to create a RAM drive for temporary data storage.
If that fails, the installer falls back to “dumb” mode.
* The installer checks if there is a drive C: visible to FreeDOS. 
If does not find one, and that drive is blank it will use fdisk to 
automatically partition the drive in "smart" mode. Otherwise, if
there are partitions existing on the drive, or it cannot figure 
out what should be partitioned, or if it is in “dumb" mode. It
will launch fdisk and let the user deal with it.
* If fdisk was run, reboot.
* Installer reloads.
* Installer performs all of the above checks again, this time
it finds a drive C:.
* Installer checks if drive C: can be read by FreeDOS. If not, 
it will format it.
* …….. Much later.
* The installer transfers the system files and overwrites the
boot code. 

Advanced mode, provides these capabilities:
* never auto-partition 
* option of long-slow formatting.
* installing to drives other than C: (configured as C: for booting)
* not transferring the system boot files
* not over-writting the boot code.
* lots of other stuff.

The FreeDOS 1.2 Preview releases contain several boot images.
ISO, Small USB and Big USB. There is lots of software for 
burning the ISO to a disc. Using a Mac or Linux machine, it
is also very easy to put either USB image on a flash drive.
This can be done by just using:

sudo dd if=FILENAME.IMG of=/dev/MEDIA

There are additional dd options. Some, that can be used to 
greatly speed up the process. But, that is all that is really needed.

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

[Eric Auer]

Hi guys,

> “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.”

That leads to the IMPORTANT questions:

* 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?

* In particular, is there some sort of how-to for doing that? The
  installer may want to install DOS to RAMDISK for performance :-)

* Is it easy enough to make the decision whether or NOT you want
  to install to harddisk and whether or not you want to DESTROY
  your existing Windows / Linux install in the install process?

As much as it is "classic and straightforward" for installers to
just replace everything on a computer by DOS, as dangerous and
frightening it is for those who want no dedicated DOS-only PC.

I think this was part of the FreeDOS 1.2 discussion before, but
how about detection whether a harddisk is "totally" empty before
showing the question how to install? I agree that for people who
made a totally empty virtual PC image a minute before installing
FreeDOS, it would be easiest to just let the installer throw one
standard DOS partition on that "disk" without asking the user to
make many decisions on partitioning and formatting. But for the
users who do NOT have a dedicated harddisk for DOS, it is scary.

Cheers, Eric


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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Don Flowers]

Brandon,


>“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.
Notice the word "may" .

That FreeDOS *may* overwrite the current installed operating system does
not mean that it must exist soley on a given machine. I have 6 currenly
running machines of and not one is currently setup to run FreeDOS
exclusively. Three are running Windows (2xW7 & W10). The W10 system will be
adding a Linux Distro today. Another machine is running FreeDOS & Puppy;
yet another has FreeDOS and Ubuntu 8.04.




On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 5:00 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.”
>
>
>
> It seems, in making FreeDOS, the developers have decided to stay true to
> the original nature of the earliest days of DOS. 640KB was all the memory
> anyone ever needed, DOS liked to be the ONLY operating system on any given
> PC, and multi-booting wasn't even heard of.
>
>
>
> Anyway, Dennis, although plugging a different SourceForge project, is
> essentially correct. DOSBox always played my games without problems, and,
> as the old adage goes, “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”
>
>
>
> So anyway, thus ends my brief and unsuccessful foray into FreeDOS.
>
>
>
> Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Temptress to kill. 😉
>
>
>
> Cheerio!
>
>
>
> Brandon Taylor
>
>
>
> Sent from my Windows 10 phone
>
>
>
>
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>
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Brandon Taylor]

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.”

It seems, in making FreeDOS, the developers have decided to stay true to the 
original nature of the earliest days of DOS. 640KB was all the memory anyone 
ever needed, DOS liked to be the ONLY operating system on any given PC, and 
multi-booting wasn't even heard of.

Anyway, Dennis, although plugging a different SourceForge project, is 
essentially correct. DOSBox always played my games without problems, and, as 
the old adage goes, “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

So anyway, thus ends my brief and unsuccessful foray into FreeDOS.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Temptress to kill. 😉

Cheerio!

Brandon Taylor

Sent from my Windows 10 phone

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Brandon Taylor]

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.”

It seems, in making FreeDOS, the developers have decided to stay true to the 
original nature of the earliest days of DOS. 640KB was all the memory anyone 
ever needed, DOS liked to be the ONLY operating system on any given PC, and 
multi-booting wasn't even heard of.

Anyway, Dennis, although plugging a different SourceForge project, is 
essentially correct. DOSBox always played my games without problems, and, as 
the old adage goes, “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

So anyway, thus ends my brief and unsuccessful foray into FreeDOS.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Temptress to kill. 😉

Cheerio!

Brandon Taylor

Sent from my Windows 10 phone

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 8:48 PM, Brandon Taylor
 wrote:
>
> And Eric -- I'm sorry for sounding like a total newbie, but how am I
> supposed to create a bootable USB drive with a "full" version of
> FreeDOS? I'm looking at the files from SourceForge and I can't make head
> or tail of the installation instructions.

IIRC, there is an option in RUFUS to use the fd11src.iso file for
installation. Otherwise it just uses what is bundled with RUFUS
itself, which is extremely minimal bare bones.

You can find the .iso on iBiblio mirror, or you can just grab
individual .ZIP packages from iBiblio as well, so you don't need to
have it all (e.g. full "BASE").

7-Zip's (cmdline) 7z [sic] will unpack an .iso , if you need that.
(The GUI can also do it, I think that's called 7zFm.exe , if you find
that more convenient.)

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 7:30 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> However, your listing seems to be incomplete -
> no kernel or command.com are shown, but obviously you
> must have them, otherwise you could not have made the listing :-)

Just a hunch, but presumably they are "hidden" (+H). Thus, he probably
did "DIR" instead of "DIR /A", so they didn't (directly) show up in
the dir listing.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 9:48 PM, Brandon Taylor
 wrote:
> Dennis --
>
> As much as I hate to disillusion your apparent preference for DOSBox,
> such promotion is not really the purpose of this mailing list or of our
> current discussion. I am certainly aware of DOSBox and have played Lure
> Of The Temptress without any problems in DOSBox, but my goal in this
> conversation is to see whether it will run as well in FreeDOS.

Your message did not indicate you were familiar with DOSBox and had
played the game in question under it.  Since what you appeared to want
to do was play a DOS game, DOSBox was the simplest solution.
Confusion would have been avoided had you mentioned that you already
knew of and had played the game under DOSBox, and wanted to try
getting it running under FreeDOS.

> Brandon Taylor
__
Dennis

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Brandon Taylor]

Dennis --

As much as I hate to disillusion your apparent preference for DOSBox, 
such promotion is not really the purpose of this mailing list or of our 
current discussion. I am certainly aware of DOSBox and have played Lure 
Of The Temptress without any problems in DOSBox, but my goal in this 
conversation is to see whether it will run as well in FreeDOS.

And Eric -- I'm sorry for sounding like a total newbie, but how am I 
supposed to create a bootable USB drive with a "full" version of 
FreeDOS? I'm looking at the files from SourceForge and I can't make head 
or tail of the installation instructions.

Brandon Taylor

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Eric Auer]

Hi! As Rufus only gives you the minimal files to boot DOS at all,
you should probably download some additional drivers to play your
game. In particular, try HIMEM. However, your listing seems to be
incomplete - no kernel or command.com are shown, but obviously you
must have them, otherwise you could not have made the listing :-)

Eric

> http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=himemx





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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 7:36 PM, Brandon Taylor
 wrote:
> Here is the directory listing of the FreeDOS environment created by Rufus,
> as well as the contents of the AUTOEXEC.BAT file it generates. There is no
> CONFIG.SYS file.

Just enough to boot DOS, and configure display and keyboard locale.
Not enough to do what you want.

Once again, look at DOSBox.

> Brandon Taylor
__
Dennis

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Brandon Taylor]

Here is the directory listing of the FreeDOS environment created by Rufus, as 
well as the contents of the AUTOEXEC.BAT file it generates. There is no 
CONFIG.SYS file.

Brandon Taylor

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

--Directory Listing--
 Volume in drive H is FREEDOS
 Volume Serial Number is 848E-F2C8

 Directory of H:\

06/17/2016  06:25 PM  LOCALE
06/17/2016  06:25 PM96 AUTOEXEC.BAT
06/17/2016  06:25 PM   206 autorun.inf
06/17/2016  06:25 PM34,494 autorun.ico
   3 File(s) 34,796 bytes

 Directory of H:\LOCALE

06/17/2016  06:25 PM  .
06/17/2016  06:25 PM  ..
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 3,648 DISPLAY.EXE
06/17/2016  06:25 PM11,446 KEYB.EXE
06/17/2016  06:25 PM16,254 MODE.COM
06/17/2016  06:25 PM40,360 KEYBOARD.SYS
06/17/2016  06:25 PM29,750 KEYBRD2.SYS
06/17/2016  06:25 PM32,178 KEYBRD3.SYS
06/17/2016  06:25 PM13,105 KEYBRD4.SYS
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 6,464 ega.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 7,059 ega2.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 5,469 ega3.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 4,431 ega4.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 7,217 ega5.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 7,409 ega6.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 5,387 ega7.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 6,973 ega8.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 5,785 ega9.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 5,543 ega10.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 7,228 ega11.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 8,119 ega12.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 6,281 ega13.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 7,758 ega14.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 6,458 ega15.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 7,793 ega16.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 8,929 ega17.cpx
06/17/2016  06:25 PM 5,158 ega18.cpx
  25 File(s)266,202 bytes

 Directory of H:\System Volume Information

06/17/2016  06:25 PM  .
06/17/2016  06:25 PM  ..
06/17/2016  06:25 PM76 IndexerVolumeGuid
   1 File(s) 76 bytes

 Total Files Listed:
  29 File(s)301,074 bytes
   5 Dir(s)   2,032,508,928 bytes free
   
AUTOEXEC.BAT-
@echo off
set PATH=.;\;\LOCALE
echo Using US-English keyboard with US-English codepage [437]
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 6:17 PM, Brandon Taylor
 wrote:
> Well, now, this is very odd indeed. The copy of FreeDOS that I got with
> Rufus apparently does not come with a MEM command. Possibly it’s an old
> version, or a stripped-down version, or just broken? Anyway, I’ll try
> downloading FreeDOS from SourceForge and see what happens next.

See my earlier comments about looking at DOSBox.

But the Rufus version may not include MEM.  MEM is part of a full DOS
distribution, and I suspect what Rufus installed was just enough to
boot DOS.

PCs running DOS had a 640K limit on conventional memory.  This was an
architectural limitation originally imposed by IBM.  The 8088 CPU
early DOS PCs used had a 1MB address space, but IBM chose to reserve
memory above 640K for system functions.

When you booted a PC, DOS itself got loaded into that 640 K, in the
form of two system files, and then COMMAND.COM was loaded, and served
as the shell you interacted with.  It would relocate itself to the top
of available memory, and was in two parts - a resident portion, and a
transient portion that contained the interpreter you talked to.  Load
a program from the command line, and the program was loaded into space
occupied by the transient portion.  Exit the program, and the resident
portion reloaded the transient part from disk.  You probably had about
600K free memory after DOS was loaded for use by programs.

DOS looked for the files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT when it booted.
CONFIG.SYS was where you specified drivers you wanted to load on boot.
AUTOEXEC.BAT was processed by COMMAND.COM, and where you did things
like set your PATH and load any Terminate and Stay Resident programs
you used.

It was possible to install more than 640K of RAM, and various tricks
were used to make use of it.  You could configure the additional
memory as Expanded (EMS) or Extended (XMS) memory, and programs
written to make use of them could get access.

The technique involved creating a 64K window in the address space
above 640 K, and making EMS or XMS available in 64K chunks in that
window.  You could also implement a "High" memory area in that address
space, and load drivers and TSRs there to get them out of the
convention memory your programs wanted to use.  The MEM command was
designed to let you examine memory and see how you could configure
things.

To use EMS or XMS memory, or activate the HMA and load things there,
you needed drivers loaded in CONFIG.SYS.  Look at whether there is a
CONFIG.SYS file or AUTOEXEC.BAT file created by the Rufus install, and
post what's currently in them.  (They are plain text files, view-able
and modifiable in an editor.)  The first step is to see what
environment Rufus creates by default.

> Brandon Taylor
__
Dennis

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Brandon Taylor]

Well, now, this is very odd indeed. The copy of FreeDOS that I got with Rufus 
apparently does not come with a MEM command. Possibly it’s an old version, or a 
stripped-down version, or just broken? Anyway, I’ll try downloading FreeDOS 
from SourceForge and see what happens next.

Brandon Taylor

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 5:12 PM, Brandon Taylor
 wrote:
> I just acquired FreeDOS via Rufus, a program that lets me create bootable
> USB drives. I’m trying to play some DOS games, such as “Lure Of The
> Temptress,” but the game won’t run – it says “Not enough memory to run the
> game.” As I have not had a lot of experience with the DOS family of
> operating systems (I was raised on Windows), I don’t know what to do, if
> there’s anything I can do, to get this game to work. It sounds like a
> typical problem with DOS’s 640KB limitation, but I don’t know how to get
> around it. Can anyone help me out here?

You might start by looking at DOSBox.  DOSBox is a specialized
emulator intended to let people play old DOS games with graphics and
sound support on things that aren't DOS PCs.  DOSBox is available for
Windows, Linux, and OS/X.  It implements an Intel x86 architecture
CPU, graphics and sound support, and enough of DOS to run games.  (I
have an Android port of DOSBox and run some non-game DOS stuff on my
7" Android tablet using it.  The tablet has an ARM Cortex 7 CPU, but
DOSBox provides a virtual x86 processor and things work as expected.)

See https://www.dosbox.com/

Lure of the Temptress is listed as supported:
https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=164&letter=L

You may not need full  FreeDOS if what you want is to play old DOS games.

> Brandon Taylor
__
Dennis

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[John Hupp]

On 6/17/2016 5:12 PM, Brandon Taylor wrote:


I just acquired FreeDOS via Rufus, a program that lets me create 
bootable USB drives. I’m trying to play some DOS games, such as “Lure 
Of The Temptress,” but the game won’t run – it says “Not enough memory 
to run the game.” As I have not had a lot of experience with the DOS 
family of operating systems (I was raised on Windows), I don’t know 
what to do, if there’s anything I /can/ do, to get this game to work. 
It sounds like a typical problem with DOS’s 640KB limitation, but I 
don’t know how to get around it. Can anyone help me out here?


Brandon Taylor



I don't know anything about Rufus, this game is only supposed to require 
640KB minimum RAM.


Try running MEM /C /N to get a look at memory usage.
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[Freedos-user] Games

[Brandon Taylor]

I just acquired FreeDOS via Rufus, a program that lets me create bootable USB 
drives. I’m trying to play some DOS games, such as “Lure Of The Temptress,” but 
the game won’t run – it says “Not enough memory to run the game.” As I have not 
had a lot of experience with the DOS family of operating systems (I was raised 
on Windows), I don’t know what to do, if there’s anything I can do, to get this 
game to work. It sounds like a typical problem with DOS’s 640KB limitation, but 
I don’t know how to get around it. Can anyone help me out here?

Brandon Taylor

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games report...

[Travis Siegel]

On Sep 21, 2008, at 3:11 AM, Der kleine Beitrag eines  
Computeranwenders (Users) wrote:

> Am Sonntag, 7. September 2008 schrieb Travis Siegel:
>> since there's caldera's opendos,
>> pts dos 2000, and others that are already opensource
>
> PTS DOS 2000 is open-source? Where?
> I can only find http://www.paragon-software.com/dos/index.htm and
> http://www.phystechsoft.com/ptsdos/products.php?page=3 where you can  
> still
> BUY it. The downloads are trials only.
>
Ahh, you are correct.  However, if you purchase a license for the dos,  
you get the source as well.
I purchased mine some time ago, so it is possible this is no longer  
the case, but it was as of some time in 2000 or 2001, not exactly sure  
when I purchased my copy.
Sorry, since I had source, I'd (incorrectly) assumed it was  
opensource, but checking files again, it doesn't appear to be so.

If you want the source though, simply buy a license, and source should  
come along with it.
Sorry for the confusion, and hope this helps.


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Re: [Freedos-user] Games report...

[Der kleine Beitrag eines Computeranwenders (Users)]

Am Sonntag, 7. September 2008 schrieb Travis Siegel:
> since there's caldera's opendos,  
> pts dos 2000, and others that are already opensource

PTS DOS 2000 is open-source? Where?
I can only find http://www.paragon-software.com/dos/index.htm and 
http://www.phystechsoft.com/ptsdos/products.php?page=3 where you can still 
BUY it. The downloads are trials only.

Greetings,
Andreas.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games report...

[Der kleine Beitrag eines Computeranwenders (Users)]

Am Sonntag, 7. September 2008 schrieb Travis Siegel:
> I'm
> personally of the opinion that if the company no longer sells,
> supports, or in the case of most companies, actively discourages the
> use of said program, then that program should fall into public domain,
> and no longer be liable for copyright infringement. Thus, all those
> commercial dos games such as the kings quest, colonel's bequest,
> civilization, and so on should have no penalty whatsoever for copying
> them.
True, but keep in mind that what is old by PC standards can be re-used on 
modern hardware such as mobile phones, PDAs etc. The displays of such devices 
is most of the time very small, like VGA was, and the CPU isn't very fast, 
like the 386-25 or something like this.

Thus, these old games open a sales market for such games, even though they are 
no longer available on the PC platform.

This makes the copyright a little bit more complicated, don't you think?

Greetings,
Andreas.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games report...

[Michael Reichenbach]

Travis Siegel schrieb:
> I agree that abandon programs such as win 3.x and msdos should be  
> opensourced, but I'd settle for uninforcable copyrights.  I'm  
> personally of the opinion that if the company no longer sells,  
> supports, or in the case of most companies, actively discourages the  
> use of said program, then that program should fall into public domain,  
> and no longer be liable for copyright infringement. Thus, all those  
> commercial dos games such as the kings quest, colonel's bequest,  
> civilization, and so on should have no penalty whatsoever for copying  
> them.
> I realize most older dos software is available somewhere online if you  
> search hard enough, but it shouldn't be necessary to hide such  
> things.  The companies (in some cases are just plain gone) the  
> software is no longer sold, it certainly isn't supported, and even if  
> you wanted to buy a copy of said program, it's just plain not  
> possible, because the companies no longer have copies to sell, even if  
> you could reach someone who was willing to sell a copy.
> So, why should we have to fear law suits when there's clearly no  
> financial loss to the companies in question.
> Last time the copyright laws came up for discussion, some folks tried  
> to get an excemption for older software, but the copyright office  
> turned down the amendment.  It's up for renewal this year (or next,  
> not sure which) perhaps we should try again.  Then we'd have all kinds  
> of software for freedos.
> But regardless, open sourcing some of the old dos programs would be an  
> excellent idea, and provide loads of educational and historical  
> importants knowledge to new computer users, or those just trying to  
> get into computer programming, it could act as a roadmap so to speak  
> of what the computer industry has gone through in it's various  
> incarnations as relates to mainstream software.
> Just my thoughts, use them as you like (or disregard them entirely,  
> that's ok too)

I agree in most points. On my harddisk I started to prepare something
like a petition to push forward in the complex of themes "legalize
abandonware, backuup your source code and release it"... If you are
seriously interested in contributing you may contact me.

-mr

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games report...

[Travis Siegel]

On Sep 7, 2008, at 3:32 AM, Michael Reichenbach wrote:

> Mateusz Viste schrieb:
>>> Frankly, I'd like to see Microsoft forced to open source it's
>>> abandoned operating systems.  If Microsoft can do something totally
>>> different like Vista, there's no excuse for keeping something  
>>> ancient
>>> like MS-DOS 7.0 closed.
>>
Ms dos 6.22 source has escaped into the wild, but as mentioned,  
there's little need to refer to it, since there's caldera's opendos,  
pts dos 2000, and others that are already opensource, and can easily  
be checked against for compatibility.
(though I'd really love to get my hands on source code for pc dos 2K.)


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Re: [Freedos-user] Games report...

[Travis Siegel]

I agree that abandon programs such as win 3.x and msdos should be  
opensourced, but I'd settle for uninforcable copyrights.  I'm  
personally of the opinion that if the company no longer sells,  
supports, or in the case of most companies, actively discourages the  
use of said program, then that program should fall into public domain,  
and no longer be liable for copyright infringement. Thus, all those  
commercial dos games such as the kings quest, colonel's bequest,  
civilization, and so on should have no penalty whatsoever for copying  
them.
I realize most older dos software is available somewhere online if you  
search hard enough, but it shouldn't be necessary to hide such  
things.  The companies (in some cases are just plain gone) the  
software is no longer sold, it certainly isn't supported, and even if  
you wanted to buy a copy of said program, it's just plain not  
possible, because the companies no longer have copies to sell, even if  
you could reach someone who was willing to sell a copy.
So, why should we have to fear law suits when there's clearly no  
financial loss to the companies in question.
Last time the copyright laws came up for discussion, some folks tried  
to get an excemption for older software, but the copyright office  
turned down the amendment.  It's up for renewal this year (or next,  
not sure which) perhaps we should try again.  Then we'd have all kinds  
of software for freedos.
But regardless, open sourcing some of the old dos programs would be an  
excellent idea, and provide loads of educational and historical  
importants knowledge to new computer users, or those just trying to  
get into computer programming, it could act as a roadmap so to speak  
of what the computer industry has gone through in it's various  
incarnations as relates to mainstream software.
Just my thoughts, use them as you like (or disregard them entirely,  
that's ok too)


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Re: [Freedos-user] Games report...

[Michael Reichenbach]

Mateusz Viste schrieb:
>> Frankly, I'd like to see Microsoft forced to open source it's
>> abandoned operating systems.  If Microsoft can do something totally
>> different like Vista, there's no excuse for keeping something ancient
>> like MS-DOS 7.0 closed.
> 
> Well... I'm not sure we would really need such open MSDOS 7.x anymore

It would be a cool option if anyone could legally look into it for
reference. But I think now the FreeDOS project has to less manpower to
review and cannibalize MS-DOS anyway.

-mr

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games report...

[Mateusz Viste]

On Sunday 07 September 2008, robinson-west user wrote:
> Wolfenstein 3D will install, but it's not playable.

Then you have something broken...
I am using FreeDOS from several years, and Wolfenstein 3D is a game which 
always worked fine for me.
What exactly do you mean by "not playable"? Maybe you have not enough low 
memory (I remember it run slow then)?

> (...) the shareware versions of Commander Keen I and IV work and
> install.

What about other Keen's episodes (II-III)? For me, they works, too.

> My 486 DX2-66 has a copy of 98SE on it now, albeit that is very slow.

Wow, a Win 98SE on a 486DX2-66?? Centuries ago I had the same CPU, and I 
remember that Win 3.x was okay, but the first version of windows 95 was a hell 
to use... But I had only 16MB of FPM-RAM, maybe you have more.

> Frankly, I'd like to see Microsoft forced to open source it's
> abandoned operating systems.  If Microsoft can do something totally
> different like Vista, there's no excuse for keeping something ancient
> like MS-DOS 7.0 closed.

Well... I'm not sure we would really need such open MSDOS 7.x anymore. FreeDOS 
is already *very* powerfull. The kernel is stable, the memory management is far 
better than the microsoft's one, it has similar tools (even more)...
I'm not sure the problems you are reporting are really FreeDOS troubles. Are 
you using the latest version of everything (kernel, HIMEM/EMM386, FreeComm...)? 
Do you tried to free up the maximum of memory? Maybe could you post your 
start-up files (autoexec & config, or fdconfig or what else you may use)?

Best regards,
Mateusz Viste
-- 
You'll find my public OpenPGP key at http://mateusz.viste.free.fr/pub_key


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Re: [Freedos-user] Games report...

[Michael Reichenbach]

robinson-west user schrieb:
> ... games not working ...
Interesting report.

You want to say these games are working with MS-DOS but not with FreeDOS?

You may post the configuration (config/autoexec) for MS-DOS and also for
FreeDOS. Maybe it can be improved.

> I wish the ReactOS project hadn't gotten away from
> offering a Windows 9x replacement.  I know there's a hatred of dos,
> but it's the only way to go on an ancient computer.

I think if you wait for this project to finish you waste your live
waiting...

> Frankly, I'd like to see Microsoft forced to open source it's
> abandoned operating systems.  If Microsoft can do something totally
> different like Vista, there's no excuse for keeping something ancient
> like MS-DOS 7.0 closed.

There are reasons for them. I was also interested in this and made a
research.
- some of the code of MS-DOS 8.0 is still inside Vista
- probable Microsoft has not the full copyright over MS-DOS (maybe them
 licensed technologies from third partys for their operating system but
without the right to publish all details as open source) or used a
closed source third party library
- Maybe their is something to hide.
- Microsoft doesn't want to see this operating system alive again when
it's free, so them lose potential costumers or risk that existing
costumers can use lesser time their current services.
- It's maybe like with creative and the past soundblaster de facto
standard... Many people did try to reverse engineer their cards in
software but failed more or less because creative refused to publish
details, also even long time after importance of the sb de facto
standard. A nice article
http://www.crossfire-designs.de/index.php?lang=de&what=articles&name=showarticle.htm&article=soundcards
(german link, but it's worth to try reading it with an online
translator). If you read it it's clear that creative made promises about
compatibility and quality, while them did know it wasn't the truth. Evil
tongue say it was a lie and it wouldn't be wise to admit it.

-mr

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[Freedos-user] Games report...

[robinson-west user]

Populous II won't install under Freedos, but it will run.

Wolfenstein 3D will install, but it's not playable.

Same for blake stone aliens of gold.

Underworld works and installs, except I can't get speech to work.

Chuck Yeager's air combat doesn't work.

Ultima VII doesn't work, don't know why, but there's a patch to play
it in Windows (If you have a legal copy of that lying around).

Battletech I and Battletech II install and work, they are so old does
anyone care about the copyright?

Shareware In search of Dr. Riptide, Shareware Pea Shooting Pete, and of
course the shareware versions of Commander Keen I and IV work and
install.

7cities, seven cities of gold, works and installs.

The original simcity works and installs.

My 486 DX2-66 has a copy of 98SE on it now, albeit that is very slow.
ReactOS is an NT/2000/XP replacement, so it probably won't be
appropriate for my 486.  I only have 20 megs of ram because my second
set of 4 megs simms burned out.  I will use 98SE for DriveWire short 
of a better solution.  I hope Microsoft doesn't care who runs 98SE,
there isn't a better solution at this point.  I have more installations
of 98SE than I do legal copies, but I don't use all of those copies
simultaneously.  I wish the ReactOS project hadn't gotten away from
offering a Windows 9x replacement.  I know there's a hatred of dos,
but it's the only way to go on an ancient computer.

Frankly, I'd like to see Microsoft forced to open source it's
abandoned operating systems.  If Microsoft can do something totally
different like Vista, there's no excuse for keeping something ancient
like MS-DOS 7.0 closed.

 Michael Robinson


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