Hi, Bernd pointed me to the original DEVLOAD sources... I have kicked the code a bit to compile into a .com file again (not exe) and to compile with Arrowsoft ASM (involved changes: mark a few ... byte ptr ..., immediate value as such, to avoid phase errors caused by the ambiguity of "immediate value could be byte or word", and replace retf by "db 0cbh" because of stupid Arrowsoft ASM 2.0 bugs ... well, at least it is a freeware ASM). The .com compile changes were more complex, of course. After getting that to work and realizing that the program works although it crashes debug, I wrote some really new parts:
- DEVLOAD now passes loadseg:???c as suggested end of driver pointer instead of loadseg:0, to tell the driver about available memory in DOS 5+ style (I used loadseg:???c instead of endseg:0 or loadseg:???f for alledgedly better compat to strange drivers and old DOS versions). The ??? value depends on the size of the available memory block - can be up to 640k of LOW DOS RAM or up to 64k of UMB RAM. - DEVLOAD /H now causes "DEVLOADHIGH" behaviour :-). With this switch, DEVLOAD uses strategy "try UMB, then low, first fit" to allocate either 64k or if that is not available whatever is available. I guess it would be more elegant to use strategy "try only UMB" to find out the size of the biggest UMB... on the other hand, I prefer giving drivers at least 64k, resorting to low memory if UMB cannot offer that much. - I hope that I did not break things and that DEVLOAD actually does what it should do and does so better than 3.11 did. Please test. I only tested with my SYSMEM tool as sample driver (quite useful for that). DEVLOAD /V is the verbose mode and DEVLOAD /? shows help. URLs: http://www.infradead.org/devload/ http://www.infradead.org/devload/source/devload.asm http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~eric/stuff/soft/by-others/ devload-3.12.zip If this turns out to work: Bernd, you said devload is open but no longer maintained. License is GPL but the distro has a bit of a strange structure on the infradead homepage. So could you please 1. tell the original author about the update and 2. pack everything into a nice zip file? My current zip only contains .asm and .com file and is therefore not ready for wide audience. Compile: asm devload.asm, then tlink /t devload.obj (of Turbo C). Happy loading (I still think that DEVICE[HIGH] is much better than any tool that loads devices from the command prompt...!). Eric. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
