Subj : Re: MS-DOS Emulation -use To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Tue Jul 28 2020 12:08:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > > > Back in the old days I had a Windows and if > > I started DOS then opened Windows it worked fine but if I configured it > > to start at Windows and shell to DOS would in short time lock up. Had > > others check and they didn't find a problem with the hardware nor > > software. (Guess that was the start of my annoyance with Windows.) > KM> Huh. That's very strange, but I'd guess when it went direct to > KM> Windows, the underlying DOS memory manager was not getting loaded > KM> correctly. Or the config options were different; as I vaguely > KM> recall Win3.1 used different config options for its DOS shell. > > Something like that. I did have at least one person take a look and > everything appeared correct. Oh well, just loaded DOS first, then > Windows when I needed it. If I had to bet, I'd be looking at the FILES= statement in CONFIG.SYS -- due to some cranks left over from the MSDOS4.x era, some programs, and therefore Win3.1x itself, needed them set to some ridiculously high number. I remember this specifically because DRDOS Did Things Differently there, and MSOffice 4.0 would not run, and Windows was a little goofy in some other way I've forgotten. So I called Microsoft, and was told to set FILES and HANDLES to some absurdly high numbers... and then suddenly all was well. (And Windows never, ever crashed again, nor even misbehaved in any noteworthy way. Seven years without a single crash!) Anyway, how this was set would change how Windows behaved, and whether it could load all at once or had to first wait for DOS to settle down. I vaguely recall that Windows had its own FILES statement, but was influenced by the one in CONFIG.SYS, at least for apps like Office that still believed the world ran on DOS4. In fact, to this day... C:\WINDOWS>setver WINWORD.EXE 4.10 EXCEL.EXE 4.10 METRO.EXE 3.31 DD.EXE 4.01 DD.BIN 4.01 LL3.EXE 4.01 You may note a common theme here... the problem was that DOS4.x didn't close files properly on disk, and apparently these programs compensated, which was disagreeable to other DOS versions (and thereby caused the very files-left-open problem it was supposed to prevent). > KM> I recall having some rather strange config.sys and autoexec.bat > KM> bits to deal with something like this, then again I was using > KM> DRDOS underneath, and while it had more functions, it also had > KM> more cranks compared to MSDOS. > > The 'we have good news and we have bad news' thing. I think I had tried > DRDOS but decided it would be best for me to stick with the 'mainstream' > stuff packed with the computers we were selling at the store and I could > (and did) provide some customer support. Yeah, I wound up using it because the person who got me started on this stuff was a DRDOS enthusiast, but fact was it wasn't worth the trouble, with rare exceptions -- frex, you could multiboot different species of DOS... tho what it actually did was shell to the next DOS, not a true multiboot. (At one point I had a very silly setup of three different DOSs on the same system, that chain-booted to the one you wanted.) DRDOS had a DPMI memory manager, which was great for Windows, but caused conflicts with stuff like DOOM that had its own DPMI manager... so needed a boot option to set up memory differently for that. And DRDOS's performance was (per actual test) 20% slower than MSDOS6. So after the Win3.1 system with DRDOS7 was finally retired, I never messed with it again., Nowadays when I use DOS, by preference it's MSDOS7 from Win98 (with the 8.0 mouse driver). Best performance and as bug-free as anything gets. FreeDOS is okay but I seem to run into more holes and stuff that doesn't work as expected. Geez, look what happens when you stir the ancient sludge in the sewers of Ky's brain... > > As far as running Windows on an RPi, I think the article suggested a > > Raspberry Pi 4 -- faster than the earlier versions so a plus there. > > I'd probably go with the 8 GB version over the 4 -- for this application > KM> Yeah, that way you're also flexible for other projects. > > Plus relatively easy to have a back up: the newer OS allow copying of > the entire SD card as opposed to just the data partition (maybe was also > part of the OS partiion, I don't recall). Having a clone of the card is > nice! Definitely! þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .