Hi there,

There's me.

I myself own a true 4.77 MHz 8088 PC that I use from time to time. I 
subscribed to your list many years ago with the goal to help 
troubleshoot on this machine. However, I'm so busy I could not find the 
time to do it. When Freedos 1.0 went out, I tested it quickly and found 
out that it was almost two times slower than MS-DOS 3.21 (which is the 
official OS of my machine). I mentioned it on the list but did not 
investigate to understand why however, for lack of time. UPX -8086 is 
fine, I used it myself to compress my MS-DOS 3.21 from two to one 5"1/4 
floppy with some additional network tools (yes, my machine has an 
ethernet connection !).

I hadn't noticed about this ODIN distro and I will give it a try. 
However, the main website seems to be down, so I'm not sure this is 
still maintained ? Is it worth testing it ?

Thanks.

Le 24.05.2015 12:48, Rugxulo a écrit :
> 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 friendly, if at all possible, but it's way too messy and also outdated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 8086 friendly, but that too is fairly outdated.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!
>
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