Open Sourcing DOS 4
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Open Sourcing DOS 4
1–10 of 382 posts
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#2I guess now we can finally try to understand what went wrong with the multitasking attempt.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#3Direct GitHub link to the repo. https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#4Holy cow, this is huge! DOS 1.x and 2.x are too old to run a lot of vintage DOS software, but 4.x would run just about everything.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#5Interesting MS-DOS history to be uncovered with the source code of MS-DOS 4.
I wonder if we will see MS-DOS 5 or 6 soon?
FreeDOS, an open source DOS clone, has been around for a while:
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#6Holy cow, this is huge! DOS 1.x and 2.x are too old to run a lot of vintage DOS software, but 4.x would run just about everything.
Are there specific parts of the DOS API that existing emulators like DOSBOX don't handle accurately enough?
I don't understand if this source can be usefully integrated into modern DOS preservation projects.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#7> ; Check for presence of \dev\ (Dam multiplan!) [0]
I assume this refers to the spreadsheet application.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/DOS/D...
EDT:
That one policy hadn't quite gone into effect yet ;-) [1]
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/CMD/C...
For posterity...
> RESEARCH:
> invoke path_search ; find the mother (result in execpath) > or AX, AX ; did we find anything?
> je badcomj45 ; null means no (sob)
> cmp AX, 04H ; 04H and 08H are .exe and .com
> jl rsrch_br1 ; fuckin' sixteen-bit machine ought
> jmp execute ; to be able to handle a SIXTEEN-BIT
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#8OMG, I remember copying official 5.25 disks back in the 90s...
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#9Holy cow, this is huge! DOS 1.x and 2.x are too old to run a lot of vintage DOS software, but 4.x would run just about everything.
Are there specific parts of the DOS API that existing emulators like DOSBOX don't handle accurately enough? I don't understand if this source can be usefully integrated into modern DOS preservation projects.
It was a long time since I messed with things, but "net drives" something didn't work in FreeDOS a long time ago. This was useful, because it meant you could from within a PC emulator access your host file system. It's entirely possible that works on FreeDOS now.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#10I guess now we can finally try to understand what went wrong with the multitasking attempt.
Graphics. Managers wanted "windowing systems" as well as multitasking.
People who just wanted mutitasking DOS had DesqView and ... "concurrent"? was it? i forget.
I wrote TSR's that snatched cycles off the timer interrupt and rode 21h for opportunity to flush buffers to/from disk.