Tell us more about that
dd if=/dev/rsd1c | hexdump -C
00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
|................|
*
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records outThat DOS was already the better one back then.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/23/svardos_drdos_reborn/
It's a lot comfier and more familiar in some ways than FreeDOS, and I have a little hobby project based on it.
I am hopeful Freedos will also get there. I believe it is there already with out of tree work.
I tried WfWg 3.11 but on reflection it was a bad version to try, what with 32-bit file access and so on. It didn't start successfully.
But saying that, I ran and supported Windows 2.01, 3.0 and 3.1 in production. If I never seen any of them running again I will not be sorry. I have zero nostalgia for them, or indeed, for CP/M either.
MS-DOS is that immutable standard of the past which reached maximum maturity in 2001.
FreeDOS was originally an alternative, but is for the future now.
I like FreeDOS but when companies started to distribute their device drivers or software on floppies or CDROMs that were formatted using FreeDOS, it was not pretty.
Often there was no successful access or booting to the FAT volume, but all you needed to do was SYS the writable floppy with MS-DOS, or go through the ordeal of "ripping" the CD to correctly SYS its contents.
Regardless of the '90's or today I would recommend very strong familiarity with MS-DOS for some time, there is really nothing new there, before moving forward to include FreeDOS in your toolbox.
This is how it happened organically when FreeDOS was first emerging.
But I never had any compatibility issues with FreeDOS? It seems like a good implementation of DOS. I mostly use DOSBox-X, but I use FreeDOS now and then as well. It is the only DOS I would consider running on hardware.
BTW did anyone else notice that Microsoft included almost a complete 1988 vintage 16-bit DOS toolchain in their MIT-licensed MS-DOS repo? It has Microsoft C 5.1, MASM 5.1, Make, and several other tools, plus libraries and include-files. All of it in less than 3 MB.
https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v4.0/src/TOOLS
Along the same lines, maybe the best platform is a dead platform. And there is a mature emulator, or many, for pretty much every modern platform. I've definitely been exploring DOS as a way forward (lol) out of the madness of modern computers.
Radically simple, single tasking, and local first with a stable platform that is close to the metal. What is not to love? I mean maybe it doesn't hurt it was on my first computers so a nostalgia factor I'm sure is at play as well.
I remember this project (https://jimhall.itch.io/toy-cpu), where the author shipped his emulator as a DOS binary instead of a web-based JavaScript version that would eventually break over time.
DOS can serve as a lightweight, efficient, and predictable runtime with extremely low system requirements and no need for updates. It can run on bare metal or as a WASM binary.
The development tools are small, free, and reproducible (e.g., Turbo C), ensuring that the code will still compile and run just fine even 10 years from now. Oh, and it also has some cool TUI libraries a la QuickBASIC. I’d argue it’s still a worthy option, if it’s not user-facing.
Not if the static version is buggy.
you're reading a discussion of a bug in that code...
I can't work out what you're trying to say here.
Lots of companies sell FreeDOS laptops. The config is often very weird, c.f.
https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...
It's a complex setup of an elderly Debian with no desktop, a QEMU VM and a PDF viewer. It's not really DOS at all.
Is that what you mean?
With plain Windows, one year you would get an app that's supposed to be installed from bootable floppies, they had been formatted using MSDOS/Windows and everthing went as expected. Same basic workflow as installing Windows from floppies at the time.
Then there was a trend to shipping floppies that had been formatted and/or contained non-MS DOS instead, if a new version came out like that it sometimes failed to boot on far more machines.
SYS the bootable one to MS-DOS and it worked.
I ran and worked with MS-DOS in production use for years. I am that old. I have deployed hundreds of DOS machines and I was an expert in DOS memory management.
I installed lots of apps from floppies as well.
No, usually installation floppies were _not_ bootable, in my extensive experience. If they were, I can't see how or why that would affect the app so long as the app wasn't tied to one specific version of DOS.
At the time when DOS ruled business PC computing, there were not very many alternative versions. Even DR-DOS came along quite late. Aside from DR's own multitasking TASKMGR.EXE I don't think I ever saw anything else that was specific to DR-DOS. GEM and ViewMax ran fine on MS-DOS.
There was no practical difference between IBM's PC DOS and MS-DOS except for BASICA. Only when MS dicontinued MS-DOS did IBM PC DOS start to diverge, dropping BASIC for Rexx, dropping EDIT.EXE for IBM E, and so on.
I cannot work out what you could mean.
Perhaps specific examples would help.
Eg: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware/c/UEz0...
If you have more info I'd be very interested in hearing about it. I also have no info on the China DOS Union.
There is a todo shown:
>? added Partition specific Geometry setting
>? add docs for above
>Add warning about Letter Assigners in DOS and Windows
> Force LogOnly and set size
>Geometry needs to be set to match Partitions settings.
What I've found using recent Windows is that Diskpart will autocorrect the CHS figures based on what LBA changes you make when using other apps, but you have to use Diskpart to "touch" that particular partition after you make the changes, preferably after a reboot. When I need this done without other modifications, I use Diskpart's SetID command, where you type "Help Setid" to get the Diskpart syntax doc on it, but tha command is like "SET ID=de" (with a space there) to change the partition type. To type DE for instance, a "Dell" OEM type. The CHS correction happens silently. Then change it back to type 0C if FAT32, or 07 if NTFS, or basically what you had before.
If you check the structure I'm using, both FATs are written in the same stroke on the size mostly found in UEFI boot volumes :)
That's because of my bug report. I used Letter Assinger v1.2.0 by Vadim Burtyansky and tried formatting a partition from Win98. The wrong partition was about to be formatted. Mr. Loew investigated and found the bug in the Letter Assigner, not RFORMAT.
> Diskpart will autocorrect the CHS figures based on what LBA changes you make when using other apps.
I saw many partitioning programs do that. Most ask for confirmation, some don't. It's great that you know how to edit partitioning table and FAT parameters by hand, but why waste time when there are tools that offers (probably) the same flexibility?
For partitioning, I use Ranish Partition Manager. RPM and RFORMAT are the best partitioning/formatting tools by far. Too bad I have to use a boot stick to run them. And too bad nobody wrote something as capable as RPM for Linux. mkfs.vfat comes close to RFORMAT, but none of the partitioning tools are as capable as RPM.
> If you check the structure I'm using, both FATs are written in the same stroke on the size mostly found in UEFI boot volumes :)
I don't care. I don't have UEFI.
The only repeatable way when ongoing testing is underway is to zero the media each time, since many times DOS will rely strongest on what is already there during a Format or SYS. So will every version of Windows, but without full consistency at all.
If using Win10 or 11, you may find that even with a zeroed floppy or HDD partition when you power off, the partition will be silently formatted just as Windows last remembers it when you reboot, transparently without notice.
Plus even with successfully zeroed media, there is often a difference in what the Format comes out like depending on whether you booted the PC to an actual floppy, HDD, or SSD, and what their geometry was. And this can often come out different on different motherboards because of their dissimilar bios recognition of what the geometry is and what will be compatible with potential booting on that particular device.
Other times it seemed like some bioses were not suitable for formatting some media well enough to be bootable on their own device. But worked just fine if formatted on a more "universal" motherboard, then boot fine on the problem PC.
These days I want my FAT32 volumes, which are often being used as boot volumes as expected under UEFI, to be fully formatted under DOS for best reliability. None of the intentionally lesser stuff ever since. But I also want my structure to align with 4096 byte sectors which really helps with AF HDDs and SSDs. DOS won't do this on its own. Plus Windows mostly defaults to putting the bootsector at 2048 now instead of 63 on LBA gear, so I format a zeroed FAT32 partition using Windows 10 or 11 first. Then to the disk editor where everything is re-zeroed except the bootsector and the following 8 sectors. Edit the bootsector & backup bootsector (6 sectors later) for 2048 Hidden Sectors. And 2048, 4096 or a multiple of 4096 Sectors Per Fat, depending on which multiple is closest to the value that was there by default (according to the size of the partition) when there was no awareness of SSDs.
Then back to DOS and Format /Q, on a good motherboard it will retain the values you edited in, and you've got a more reliable foundation for your boot files or anything else.