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Windows 3.11 on FreeDOS

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Willow

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Aug 17, 2008, 1:09:14 AM8/17/08
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Hi,

I just found out that Windows 3.11 runs on FreeDOS 1.0 (FreeCom 0.84-
pre2) if you add InDOSPolling=true to [386Enh] in system.ini and if
you run SYSTEM\DOSX.EXE to start Windows instead of WIN.COM. That is
so cool!

Does anyone know why it works and why WIN.COM prints a message about
it being an invalid MS-DOS version? Apparantly FreeDOS is able to fool
WIN.COM, but win.com starts WIN386.EXE normally and that is the
program that prints the MS-DOS version bad message.

The only catch is you can not run a DOS prompt from within Windows--
prints an error about not being able to find WINOLDAP.MOD.

I am thinking of modifying FreeDOS to make it more compatible with
Windows 3.11. I think DOSX.EXE stats Windows 3.11 in Standard Mode.
Yes, I know that's impossible, I just did it though. Maybe I'm
wrong...

I wrote my own disassembler (GPL) you can check out here:
http://code.google.com/p/vm64dec/downloads/list -- it dosn't run in
DOS or anything but could help identify what changes to FreeDOS are
needed to make Windows 3.11 run via WIN.COM, e.g. WIN386.EXE, so we
can run Command Prompts form Windows.

I'm armed with my own disassembler and BOCHS, which I can modify to
follow indirect jumps/calls etc. Is anyone else out there interested
in seeing Windows 3.11 run in Enhanced mode with MS-DOS Prompt support
on FreeDOS ?

Willow

Michael Reichenbach

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Aug 17, 2008, 12:10:36 PM8/17/08
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Hi!

You are pretty much welcome to contribute to the FreeDOS project. This
newsgroup doesn't seam to be monitored by the FreeDOS developers that
much. I recommend to repost this on the official FreeDOS mailing list.

-mr

John Moser

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Oct 6, 2008, 6:20:46 PM10/6/08
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On Aug 17, 1:09 am, Willow <wrschlan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm armed with my own disassembler and BOCHS, which I can modify to
> follow indirect jumps/calls etc. Is anyone else out there interested
> in seeing Windows 3.11 run in Enhanced mode with MS-DOS Prompt support
> on FreeDOS ?

I'm interested in seeing Windows 3.1 and 3.11 run in all modes on
FreeDOS; but also, I'm curious as to why nobody's bothered to start
binary cloning 3.11 as with ReactOS. I suppose it's a huge
undertaking, even using the Wine DLLs (in which case you probably have
to thunk all 16 bit calls into 32-bit calls).

>
> Willow

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