The PC DOS Revival Project
From
Steve Nickolas@21:1/5 to
All on Mon May 13 05:34:21 2024
I had no sooner heard about the MS-DOS 4 code drop, I downloaded it from
Git and started kitbashing on it - was probably one of the first to get it rolled ;p
I'm hoping for more drops, but even if not, I still have a to do/wish list
for stuff I'd like to try to implement. I called my project "PC DOS/RE" because "PC DOS" isn't trademarked, and I wanted to indicate the
connection to it while also saying that it's its own thing.
So...
Don't mind if I get rambly, this is going to be about an infodump here.
First thing is I want to try to keep the base system under the existing
license for pragmatic reasons. Having just the single license and a basic copyright just makes everything easier.
I brought in CHOICE from DOSLITE. I was working on replacing ATTRIB
(unless we get a DOS 5 drop), though to fix that thing up, I'll need to implement proper int23 and int24 handlers to restore the APPEND state as
the original build does, and I'm not sure how to do that in Microsoft C
5.1 - though frankly, I don't really want to be using the Microsoft tools
here, I want to eventually get all this stuff ported over to Watcom. Pipe dream, no doubt.
I think the whole "Message Server" thing should go, but shy of a 3.3 drop
I'm not sure how I'd purge it out of the code. (It may need to remain in COMMAND.COM for compatibility purposes.) Most of my issues porting to
Watcom seem to be related to this, but there's also some struct-related
monkey business and such that requires MASM 5.1 that WASM doesn't like.
Really hoping for a 6.21 drop, but I think trying to get a drop of PC DOS
7 or 7.1 is completely unreasonable and anything I want from those is
going to need to be reimplemented from scratch, which includes FAT32
support (because it's getting harder to find small enough hard drives or
SSDs for FAT16), and DYNALOAD.
And even if we get 5 or 6, it would be nice to try to replace some of the
tools with new ones (DEFRAG coming from Norton, and EDIT and HELP
requiring the big bulky QBASIC interface, are two particular examples I
think will need rewritten). I tried to write a new FDISK and don't
understand things enough, but I got positive reaction to a mockup
screenshot... These would no doubt need a CUA library and I'd prefer one
that doesn't use too much RAM.
Note: I'm not going to support current PCs; it's not in my purvey. 16 and 32-bit PCs only, and no UEFI stuff.
-uso.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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