Hi, On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 5:29 AM, Mateusz Viste <[email protected]> wrote: > > Not sure that anybody cares about this, but just in case - I recently > tested the 1-diskette FreeDOS distribution "ODIN" on an 8086 PC, and > spotted a few more or less serious problems.
Thank you very much for testing this, of course! But I'm not sure there's many people around with both interest, skill, and hardware to "fix" these problems. (I don't have any 8086s myself.) :-( I guess there are some emulators that are 8086 (or similar) "only", which might help with testing. E.g. Joris' Retro or maybe 8086tiny (which still doesn't have 186 support, AFAIK). http://jorisvr.nl/retro/ http://jorisvr.nl/freedos.html BTW, that second link is to his modified (8086-friendly) floppy .img files, so you could take a look there. Granted, it's been a while since I looked, and it's probably not perfect, but at least it's an easy thing to point to. (Ironically, he points to me for newer images, sigh. My [2008?] RUFFIDEA disk #2 was meant to roughly be 8086 friendly, if at all possible, but it's way too messy and also outdated to be much help. Even my [2008?] BARE_DOS was meant to potentially be 8086 friendly, but that too is fairly outdated. All of my latest MetaDOS has been 386+ only, mainly due to just lack of time and effort. I did eventually want to make it easy to fix for pure 8086, if at all possible, but that's not top priority.) > I got the ODIN image from odin.fdos.org, and more specifically this: > http://odin.fdos.org/fdodin06.8088.zip Did you not also test ODIN070, aka 2005? http://odin.fdos.org/odin2005/ > Now, here goes the list. > > MEM: The command MEM is missing. You know you can use GNU Mtools to add to a disk image, right? Anyways, as you probably already know, here's MEM: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/mem/mem1_11.zip > MEMA: Prints out garbage to screen and quits. I've heard of it but haven't used it lately. No idea, probably just compiled for wrong target. (There just isn't a lot of incentive for 8086 compatibility these days. Of course I'm sympathetic, but I can't do everything myself.) > KEYB: immediately crash with "Runtime error 105 at 0000:252F" I don't remember exactly, but FD KEYB isn't meant to fully work on XTs. Or maybe 286+ only. I just can't remember. Not sure about Tom's mKEYB either. > DEFRAG: Blanks the entire screen, and freezes Again, dunno. > SORT: Freezes. When executed with "DIR | SORT" it tries to write > something to my diskette (!) that I had write protected, fortunately. Obviously any temp files rely on writing to %TEMP% (or root??). > MORE: Exactly same symptoms as SORT. Yuck. Well, some things are bound to slip between the cracks. > DIR: When using DIR/P, DIR seems to think that the screen is 1-row high, > and asks for a keypress for every line (the screen is CGA-based, 25 rows). I think there was a patch for fixing that, but since FreeCOM is such a beast to recompile (and no active maintainer), a lot of stuff never got fixed. > MODE: MODE MONO makes the screen blank. Had to type in blindly "MODE > BW80" to recover. Might not be a bug, but would be nice if MODE could > check if a given mode is supported, before running it. IIRC, it's not hard to check for EGA presence, but most people already have it (or better). Not many worry with CGA anymore. (The guys to ask would be Jim Leonard or Jason Knight.) Even Mike Chambers' 8086-friendly hack of Wolf3d still relied on VGA. I know this email wasn't that helpful. Sorry! If I can be of more (admittedly limited) help, let me know! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
