So I had mentioned a few things during the videocall today, and it would
probably take a lot of time to go into the details of what exactly I was
intending to do with them. The main idea was to write some tools to
replicate MS-DOS 6 functionality, to use with the 4.01 code drop, since
I've been maintaining a fork of that for a while; but the usefulness
wouldn't necessarily be limited to *MS-DOS*, and I figured maybe it would
be worth mentioning, even though I haven't gotten very far along on
anything here. Some of these aren't even off the ground.
I tried using a couple existing CUA libraries, couldn't figure them out,
so I was working on an ad-hoc CUA library to use in these tools, as they
would generally need to replicate the general look and feel of, say,
QBASIC, since I wanted consistency between the various apps.
1. A help viewer using the QuickHelp format (i.e., a drop-in replacement
for HELP in MS-DOS 6). The source for this would need to also include a
compressor; I'm pretty sure the format is completely reverse-engineered,
though I don't know how it works. I started it but it's not very far
along at all. (https://5.buric.co/helpcom-240519.zip)
2. A text editor similar in UI to Microsoft's (i.e., a drop-in replacement
for EDIT in MS-DOS 5 and 6 and PC DOS 5). Actually, I'd want it more like
the Win9x version. This hasn't been started.
The above two would be useful anyway because not needing a full copy of
QBASIC they wouldn't be as RAM-heavy as the MS-DOS versions.
3. A disk partitioning utility like FDISK, but with a more CUA-like
interface (I've done some mockups for this and could upload them if need
be). I started some of the UI library but got lost trying to implement
the back-end stuff (and the IBM code, while perfectly open-source, is ugly
as hell and makes my eyes glaze over).
(https://5.buric.co/nfdisk-24101720.zip)
4. An installer; my DOS fork is going to need that. Most likely this will
be relatively easy to write the guts of, though perhaps adding support for
decompression (like the .??_ files in MS-DOS 5 and 6) would be nice.
Nothing started here, but it might share UI code with the above, esp. with
the FDISK replacement.
5. Tooling. I'm aware of ecm's work porting MS-DOS 4 to NASM; I'd prolly
be a little more conservative, but I've considered doing that as well,
because right now, it's extremely dependent on MASM 5.1 and its associated
linker and attempts to replace the tooling with open tooling are proving
to be a pain. A lightweight C compiler for the C stuff would be nice too,
since Watcom is massive overkill and Borland isn't open source, but that's
WAY out of my league. (I could talk about MASM 5.1 source; that's a very
complicated subject and probably best avoided.) This would probably be a
nice thing to have here too but less necessary, I think, than just
sticking with Watcom.
-uso.
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