[GEM Development] Liam Proven! DOS in VirtualPC

[Liam Proven]

On 9 December 2017 at 19:36, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
>
> DR DOS?  6, mainly, and 7.03 secondarily.  MS-DOS?  5 and 6.  PC DOS?  5, 6
> and 7.
>
> <snip>
>
> That's not saying much.  Anything that can run Windows 3.1 reliably in 386
> mode is "more MS-DOS compatible than FreeDOS", and that's not an opinion,
> that's a fact.  That is DR DOS's advantage over FreeDOS.

Heh. :-)
>
> 6 and 7 ;)
>
> Ironically, the oldest DR DOSes were more MS-like (DOSPLUS).

OK, interesting!

I wish you could give me some examples, because I don't see it myself.

Stuff like not needing separate parameters for commands -- e.g.
``xcopy c: d: /sev'' instead of ``xcopy c: d: /s /e /v''  --  I see as
a definite advantage, but you can ignore that.

Stuff like the colon column separators in ``DIR /w'' are the only
hangover I know about.

Anyway, small status update for anyone still following:

Due to a poster on the DOS-ain't-dead forum pointing out that Enhanced
DR-DOS 7.01-7 was a stable release too, and so 7.01-6 wasn't the
latest, I've updated my VM to 7.01-7.

Again, the boot disk image in the download is the wrong size for
Virtualbox. Again, it's empty anyway. So I had to resize it, then
populate it, then boot my VM off it and install from it.

There's a small feature regression: quitting TaskMgr now hangs the OS.
:-( And I'm still not seeing as much free RAM as I'd like. But it's
there and it works.

I will try to make a bootable USB from it next.

The key there seems to be:

[1] You need a DOS kernel that understands LBA.
[2] You need to make the partition from DOS. It's not happy with one
created by GParted, for example. But I can use Gparted to mark the
partition as active, that seems OK.
[3] With PC-DOS, anyway, it won't SYS it. I had to do ``format D:
/s''. I suspect DR-DOS _will_ format it. We'll see.



-- 
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