Hi Jerome, combining 20 tools of 1-2 kilobytes each into one tool of 10 kB sounds like a good plan and using "residency" sounds even better:
Outside the floppy world, each of your tools will use at least 4 kB because sizes get rounded up to full, often large, clusters. Also, having some sort of resident part would allow you to have some persistent state between tool invocations. This could be a simple memory area that you can allocate and free. I think it is not useful to make the whole tool itself stay in RAM for this :-) Having resident data will reduce issues with needing SET /P which has limitations (e.g. using pipes, which in most DOS command.com variants need temp files on a writeable drive) and is not in the classic MS DOS version of command.com (in case somebody tries to use your batch files to upgrade an existing MS DOS install). Of course I do not know if ALL instances of SET /P can be avoided this way, but it would be interesting to hear more about this :-) Eric PS: Regarding the block driver discussion, I *guess* that exFAT is too different from FAT. So a block driver to make it look like FAT to a DOS kernel would have to trick a lot. Better use CDEX/net API. Easier block cases include "compress a FAT diskimage transparently" as we know from stacker / doublespace / drivespace style drivers :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
