[GEM Development] Liam Proven! DOS in VirtualPC

[Liam Proven]

On 8 December 2017 at 22:46, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am poking at my DR-DOS VM right now, actually, now you've reminded me.

Status update after a few hours' more work:

My X200 is now booting PC DOS 7.1 off its own hard disk successfully.

I am having some strange issues with HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE which I
have wasted an hour or so investigating to no avail, but it works. I
have MS Word 6 and WordPerfect 6.2 executing happily, and very
quickly, on the bare metal, which was the primary object of the
exercise.

I have also found how to create bootable USB keys, I think.

Bizarrely, while experimenting with this, I came across one that I
made earlier, which is very strange indeed. But anyway, it works.

PC DOS 7.1 will make a hard disk bootable if formatted with ``FORMAT
X: /S'', but the SYS command (from PC DOS 7.01) sadly does not work.
Without a floppy, Norton DISKTOOL can't make a partition bootable,
either.

This means I can now see into my FAT32 partitions when booted into
DOS. This pleases me quite a lot.

I need, well, _want_ to resolve this memory-manager issue but it is
perhaps not critical. I may try the files from the embedded DOS in
Windows 98SE, as they are known to work with a FAT32-supporting DOS.

Oddly, dynamically-loading the CD driver in DR-DOS 7.01-6 does _not_
work. I don't know why, but it _must_ be loaded from CONFIG.SYS,
sadly. It is possible to make it conditional but that means the
machine will not boot on its own, i.e. non-interactively.

So, some real progress tonight. However, I am now back at my day job
-- tech author for SUSE -- after 7 weeks off sick with a broken
shoulder, so I will have less time to devote to this in the near
future. I will therefore try to polish something up and release it
soon, if I can -- as in, I hope, before the end of the year.

I cannot release my PC DOS 7.1 work publicly, I'm afraid. I have asked
IBM for permission and it refused.

But I should be fine with releasing my DR-DOS 7.01-6 version, which
has pretty much the same functionality. This is why I am working on
both in parallel.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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