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Compiling Word for Windows v1.1a

richardlewis.org

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Re: Compiling Word for Windows v1.1a

#11

Post by yuhong »

tom_ wrote: post #10

This is dredging up some long-unused memories but you should be able to get a bit more memory by supplying the RAM parameter to emm386. Get yourself some upper memory blocks (UMBs) - usable memory above the 640 K mark. DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS RAM HIGHSCAN (HIGHSCAN directs EMM386 to try harder to find upper memory blocks.) Then use FILESHIGH to set the file count. FILESHIGH=30 MEM should show you now have some upper…

I believe that this only works on MS-DOS 7.0 and later versions, which had to implement a workaround for SFT scanning code in Windows 3.1 KRNL386 (still used in mini.cab in Windows 9x Setup) to support this.

Re: Compiling Word for Windows v1.1a

#14

Post by limmeau »

core-questions wrote: post #9
thelazydogsback wrote: post #4

I still have my green & white steel-balled mouse somewhere :) CGA/EGA gfx mode was pretty bad though, so still used EGA text mode in WW until final editing. (But it beat Electric Pencil in all upper case lol.) I really miss the slow-burn green screen w/the Hercules text card though -- esp. as a 2nd screen for debugging.

I've heard tell of the dual-screen DOS machine with a Hercules. How did this actually work? Did special debuggers support it, or something?

The reason why this works is that IBM CGA/EGA/VGA map their text-mode video-RAM at segment 0xB800..0xBFFF, and in graphics-mode at 0xA000..0xAFFF. MDA and Hercules, on the other hand, map the video memory at 0xB000..0xB7FF, for reasons I never fully understood.

So, if you plug a Hercules card and a VGA card, you can have two screens. Some debuggers supported it. I never got it to work back in the day with my ET4000 and an MDA scavenged from a PC-XT, but I was just a teenager with no access to StackOverflow.

Re: Compiling Word for Windows v1.1a

#15

Post by tom_ »

yuhong wrote: post #11
tom_ wrote: post #10

This is dredging up some long-unused memories but you should be able to get a bit more memory by supplying the RAM parameter to emm386. Get yourself some upper memory blocks (UMBs) - usable memory above the 640 K mark. DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS RAM HIGHSCAN (HIGHSCAN directs EMM386 to try harder to find upper memory blocks.) Then use FILESHIGH to set the file count. FILESHIGH=30 MEM should show you now have some upper…

I believe that this only works on MS-DOS 7.0 and later versions, which had to implement a workaround for SFT scanning code in Windows 3.1 KRNL386 (still used in mini.cab in Windows 9x Setup) to support this.

Ah, thanks - i thought FILESHIGH was from the Windows 3 era.

Re: Compiling Word for Windows v1.1a

#16

Post by yetihehe »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #7

Thanks for the little trip down memory lane. Despite the much greater scale that modern tech gives us in almost every way, there is still something special about the early PC era, when an enthusiastic geek really could know every command that DOS provided (because your PC came with a manual that described them all and you could read it cover to cover in a few hours) and understand how the OS worked all the way down a…

> I doubt any of the kids learning to program like that ever enjoys the same feeling of truly understanding your PC and how you can use it that we had back then.

I still have that feeling programming for small microcontrollers today. Stepping through some disassembled code and comparing/changing registers on the fly is just pure bliss.

Re: Compiling Word for Windows v1.1a

#17

Post by pjmlp »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #7

Thanks for the little trip down memory lane. Despite the much greater scale that modern tech gives us in almost every way, there is still something special about the early PC era, when an enthusiastic geek really could know every command that DOS provided (because your PC came with a manual that described them all and you could read it cover to cover in a few hours) and understand how the OS worked all the way down a…

And a couple of books from Peter Norton or stuff like "PC Intern: System Programming : The Encyclopedia of DOS Programming Know How".

Re: Compiling Word for Windows v1.1a

#18

Post by phendrenad2 »

I wonder how much work it would be to compile this in the latest Visual C++. Probably all of the assembly stuff would need to be wrapped in something to tell a modern x64 CPU to go into 16-bit mode temporarily? Other than that, seems like a pretty standard win32 app. I smiled when I saw the familiar "winmain" procedure...

Re: Compiling Word for Windows v1.1a

#20

Post by elvis70 »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #7

Thanks for the little trip down memory lane. Despite the much greater scale that modern tech gives us in almost every way, there is still something special about the early PC era, when an enthusiastic geek really could know every command that DOS provided (because your PC came with a manual that described them all and you could read it cover to cover in a few hours) and understand how the OS worked all the way down a…

I remember renting "The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC" to the local library. I was very impressed as a teen and I was using DEBUG to create programs under DOS 3.3, taking note of labels and addresses on a notebook until I switched to A86 assembler from Eric Isaacson. Great time.
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