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DOS operating systems for modern computers

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Terence

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May 14, 2008, 8:23:32 PM5/14/08
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I would appreciate being pointed to sites, similar to this in
accessability, dedicated to discussions and sources for good-old-
trustable DOS. MS has been leaching away facilities a bit at a time.
NT took away port accesses; XP crippled some services; I hear Vista
does not view DOS with respect any more.

Terence

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May 15, 2008, 12:12:04 AM5/15/08
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I Found the 4DOS site with goodinformation, but some of the pointers
end up in foreign language sites.
Oh well! See if I can remember back to the forties and the languages
lessons....
But there's SO MANY new words...

Rod Pemberton

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May 15, 2008, 3:00:58 AM5/15/08
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"Terence" <tbwr...@cantv.net> wrote in message
news:fee90552-a5ab-4367...@v26g2000prm.googlegroups.com...

> dedicated to discussions

?

> dedicated to ... sources

Very broad... like what?

File archives: Simtel or Garbo?
DOS or DOS emulation: Freedos or DR-DOS or DOSBOX or DOSEMU?
DOS C Compilers: DJGPP or OpenWatcom or DJELF or TurboC ?
Assemblers: A86, NASM, GAS (etc. YASM, FASM, TASM, MASM, WASM, NBASM...)

Garbo http://garbo.uwasa.fi/
Simtel mirror http://www.digsys.bg/simtel.net/msdos/info-pre.html
DOS SNIPPETS http://dos.snippets.org/

FreeDOS http://www.freedos.org/
DR-DOS/OpenDOS http://www.drdosprojects.de/
PDOS http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdos

DOSBOX http://www.dosbox.com/information.php?page=0
DOSEMU http://www.dosemu.org/
(others BHOLE, MINDE, MDOS...)

DJGPP http://www.delorie.com
DJELF http://www.geocities.com/dborca/djgpp/elf/djelf.html
OpenWatcom http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Main_Page

HXRT http://www.japheth.de/HX.html
(numerous DPMI hosts/DOS Extenders...)

GRUB4DOS http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos
DOS USB http://www.stefan2000.com/darkehorse/PC/DOS/Drivers/USB/

Chris Giese's mirror of John Fine's pages
(partcopy, jloc linker, DOS pci registers, bootloaders, v86, OS devel...)
http://my.execpc.com/~geezer/johnfine/

http://www.rahul.net/dkaufman/index.html
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~phekda/richdawe/mysoft.html

etc...

Rod Pemberton

Rod Pemberton

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May 15, 2008, 5:21:34 PM5/15/08
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"Terence" <tbwr...@cantv.net> wrote in message
news:fee90552-a5ab-4367...@v26g2000prm.googlegroups.com...

> dedicated to discussions

Perhaps these:

Programmers Heaven DOS
http://www.programmersheaven.com/mb/MS-DOS/Board.aspx?S=B20000
FreeDOS forums http://www.freedos.org/freedos/lists/
DR-DOS forum http://www.drdosprojects.de/forum/drp_forum/

DOS Webring http://f.webring.com/hub?ring=dosnet
DOS Games Webring http://l.webring.com/hub?ring=dosgamesring

comp.os.msdos.batch
alt.msdos.batch


Rod Pemberton

Terence

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May 15, 2008, 10:21:09 PM5/15/08
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Thanks Rod.
I wanted to find where I could get (and evaluate) some O/S that ran
DOS programs (you would label these as generic emulators), but without
the limitations imposed by MS NT/XP, and one supposes, VISTA.
Thing away the port access really hurt, although everything else I
have runs fine on versions up to NT (with some reservations).

I've never had to face a problem I couldn't solve on an AT machine,
mainly using Fortran with ASM additions.

Rod Pemberton

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May 16, 2008, 3:49:19 AM5/16/08
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"Terence" <tbwr...@cantv.net> wrote in message
news:3a836a66-4402-40ae...@a9g2000prl.googlegroups.com...
> [taking] away the port access [in a DOS console] really hurt ...

I doubt any of those below (or in my prior post) will provide direct access
to I/O ports. I do recall there are some .dll's that allow port access.
Searching, I come across these:

http://geekhideout.com/iodll.shtml
http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm
WinIO http://www.internals.com/

> I wanted to find where I could get (and evaluate) some O/S that ran
> DOS programs (you would label these as generic emulators),

You might look at QEMU or BOCHS. I've had good luck with QEMU for running
bootable images of other OSes. I've used .iso images (usually Linux),
bootable floppy images (mostly DOS), and harddisk images (rare). I've not
used BOCHS, but I've seen posts from other hobbyist OS developers who swear
by it.

QEMU http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
BOCHS http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

I'm not sure if this is useful to you or not. It's MetroPipe's "Portable
Virtual Private Machine" (QEMU and DSL Linux).
http://www.metropipe.net/ProductsPVPM.shtml

I didn't mention it and I've never seen it mentioned..., but the MAME
(Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) developers also created an emulator
called MESS (Multiple Emulator Super System) which does DOS. Well,
actually, it emulates four different PC "platforms" (for DOS games, of
course...). While MAME emulates numerous arcade platforms (the game ROM's
are separate for legal...), MESS emulates non-arcade gaming platforms such
as Atari, Coleco, Apple II, Commodore 64, and many others. Let me try to
find those... okay, here:

MESS http://www.mess.org/
MAME http://mamedev.org/

DOSEMU is really an interface, not an emulator, that allows an actual DOS to
run on Linux (probably in v86 mode). You provide MS-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS.

DOSBox is an emulator of DOS for DOS games. One the one hand, they claim
their hardware emulation is good enough to run Linux and Windows (unreleased
code...). On the other hand, the claim they didn't try to recreate DOS in
it's entirety. They've only programmed what they needed to accurately run
the DOS games by using the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library.

SDL http://www.libsdl.org/


Rod Pemberton

Terence

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May 16, 2008, 7:46:46 PM5/16/08
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On May 16, 5:49 pm, "Rod Pemberton" <do_not_h...@nohavenot.cmm> wrote:

> http://geekhideout.com/iodll.shtmlhttp://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm

I know about Porttalk but haven't actually tried it.
An interesteing pont for me was the directive that, by executing
under the DOS emulator on 2000/NT/XP, the "Allowio" process in the
same directory as the user DOS program "test.exe" like this:-

wherever>.Allowio Test.exe hex-port-address-as-0xNNN <ret> ...

then that port 8-register set from 0xNNN on is freed for use.

Further notes seem to indicate this port remains cleared while the
same DOS emultor is still running.
Do you know if this is true?
Because then a dummy program could be so executed in DOS-under-Windows
before executing further programs that need to talk (in my case to the
RS232c) port..

Rod Pemberton

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May 17, 2008, 5:10:13 AM5/17/08
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"Terence" <tbwr...@cantv.net> wrote in message
news:0a7c65c4-4325-4c76...@w5g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
> Do you know if [porttalk issue] is true?

Sorry, I don't know. I'm not running 2k/nt/xp...


Rod Pemberton

Sjouke Burry

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May 17, 2008, 12:16:46 PM5/17/08
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I would advise yo use userport.zip.
It enables access to ports, for dos as well as
windows, link:
http://www.embeddedtronics.com/public/Electronics/minidaq/userport/
if thats to long,cut in two:
http://www.embeddedtronics.com/
public/Electronics/minidaq/userport/

Terence

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May 17, 2008, 8:41:21 PM5/17/08
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On May 18, 2:16 am, Sjouke Burry <burrynulnulf...@ppllaanneett.nnlll>
wrote:

> I would advise yo use userport.zip.
> It enables access to ports, for dos as well as
> windows, link:http://www.embeddedtronics.com/public/Electronics/minidaq/userport/

Thanks, Sjourke!

I have to control external reading devices, rather like a low-
resolution, but very fast (2/3 pages per second) scanner, normally
hooked to RS232c ports. I use a DOS program becaus I couldn't get the
Windows version to do things like change port parameters, set time-out
times, and of course write (signal) and read data.....

Hm.. some come with a USB plug...

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