DOS ain't dead

DOSLITE Project (Developers)

posted by usotsuki, 08.08.2022, 20:43

I released what I had knowing that it was far from ready for primetime. I'm not exactly the best programmer on earth and my ASM-fu is probably about on par with my C-fu when I tried coding a DOS clone previously. I've gotten quite a bit further this time around than I did 20 years ago.

I did actually implement a fairly complete COMMAND.COM back then but it has some serious issues.

Uploading to Github was more to get suggestions and advice to try to improve it, and I kind-of wanted to wait until I got further. Particularly, I was trying to rewrite Robert Nordier's FORMAT.COM into ASM, but that code is a total rat's nest. There's a lot of half-finished stuff in the "exper" folder because I'm having trouble figuring out how to implement.

I think a lot of DOS 6.2 could be optimized a bit, and run fine on a system with 3.31, which would make it more useful on a 286. The kernel is actually lower priority since I can just temporarily host the userland on an MS-DOS kernel - and because one of the things I'm also trying to do is use my code to torture test other kernels (like RxDOS). Besides - the userland is enough of a challenge.

I did leave some notes as to how perhaps the MS-DOS 2.11 command.com could be brought up to what is needed for a DOS 6.2 clone. I'm not sure I know enough to actually do the implementation though.

Divide and conquer is an important part of my strategy here. If something has DOS 2.11-level support - go up one version at a time until reaching 6.21 (this was the first strategy I used with FIND, for example, until I just got annoyed trying to read Microsoft's code and just knuckled down and rewrote it from scratch).

Complete thread:

• DOSLITE Project - roytam, 01.08.2022, 09:40 (Developers)
  • DOSLITE Project - tkchia, 01.08.2022, 15:33
  • DOSLITE Project - tom, 01.08.2022, 18:00
    • DOSLITE Project - usotsuki, 08.08.2022, 20:43
      • DOSLITE Project - usotsuki, 08.08.2022, 20:45
        • DOSLITE Project - tom, 08.08.2022, 21:23
          • DOSLITE Project - rr, 09.08.2022, 20:18
            • DOSLITE Project - glennmcc, 10.08.2022, 02:11
            • DOSLITE Project - Zyzzle, 10.08.2022, 05:28
              • DOSLITE Project - usotsuki, 10.08.2022, 15:17
                • DOSLITE Project - rr, 12.03.2024, 16:03
                  • DOSLITE Project - roytam, 26.03.2024, 01:59
                  • DOSLITE Project - usotsuki, 29.03.2024, 16:30
        • DOSLITE Project - DosWorld, 10.08.2022, 16:37
  • DOSLITE Project - glennmcc, 01.08.2022, 18:50
  • DOSLITE Project - ecm, 01.08.2022, 19:21