[GEM Development] Batch File Programming for GEM.BAT

[Night Hawk]

Shane,
  Yes, I do have a few ideas. From your last e-mail I gathered that the main 
point is to discover which two drive letters are free to use, given that 
this will not be known in advance. I can write a small utility in "C" (or 
even assembly, but it take longer) to basically ask how much free space 
there is on a series of drive letters (and as Owen suggested start with 'Z' 
and work down from there). If the drive letter returns an error, then that 
drive letter does not exist. Once the utility finds a drive letter that does 
exist then the utility can compare the free space returned against the total 
size of the drive. If equal then that drive letter is free to use.
  From there it's downhill. I will have the utility put the ASCII value of 
the drive letter directly into an environment variable so that the new 
GEM.BAT file will then just have to do something like

  subst %SWAPDRIVE% C:\OPENGEM\GEMSWAP
  subst %GEMDRIVE% C:\OPENGEM

  The idea is to have the utility get the free drive info and  present the 
info in such a way for the GEM.BAT file to access it. Then using SUBST will 
be easy.

  I have a question about FreeDOS...does FreeDOS use the same function calls 
as MS-DOS (for file I/O) ?

Todd E. Bedwell
The Night Hawk