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I made my own DOS implementation (Announce)

posted by samwdpckr, 21.03.2024, 18:06

> This makes it more complex. I have an old laptop where I need an external
> USB diskette drive.
> And in virtual machines removing the whole diskette controller is not
> unusual.
> In this case the autoexec.bat (maybe others too) has several "C:\" inside
> that have to be modified via notepad.
 I modified the command prompt. Now it creates an environment variable %COMDRV% when it starts. That environment variable is the drive letter of the command prompt. It can be used to make batch files that are independent from the drive letter of the current boot drive.

> For reasons that I do not know notepad.app (started from GUI - filemanager
> - directory: \leetos\ - filenames: notepad.app) starts the notepad window
> and exits at once (maybe working directory or something else is wrong).
 Notepad needs a file to open. Otherwise it just exits. The file manager automatically opens files to Notepad when you click the "View" button.

> Several message boxes do not have an underlined letter key, e.g. OK, help,
> YES/NO etc. which makes it harder to
> work without mouse.
 OK/Yes works by pressing Enter. No/Cancel works by pressing Escape. It is mentioned in the documentation.

> I tried german keyboards (mkeyb gr and keyb gr,850,C:\dos\keyboard.sys -
> file was there) - both did
> not work, mkeyb seems to freeze)
 Most KEYB implementations that come with FreeDOS are dependent of some undocumented features of MS-DOS, and they will not work. ST-DOS's KEYB implementation is just a simple TSR program that replaces the default BIOS keyboard interrupt handler.

> One more strange behaviour: As I do not know the finnish keyboard, I typed
> through my keyboard layout
> (asdfghjklöä etc.) and after in about 25 keys there is a strange
> behaviour that I have not seen on other
> OSes till now: Especially after ' the "go back <--" button doesnt work and
> sometimes it is no longer possible
> to add other characters too. I am sure you can tell me a reason for this.
 They are called "dead keys". I think the German keyboard layout does not have them.

The KEYMAPS.TXT file in the root of the install disk contains instructions how to create your own keyboard layouts.

> A "?" in command line (C:\?) that shows the commands built in command.com
> would be helpful too, see:
> https://www.bootablecd.de/FreeDOS-Internet-version/help110-no-fish/en/hhstndrd/command/question.htm
 I will write a documentation for the command prompt. Currently it changes so much that I will not do it yet.

Now the SETUP program has a better support for installing from a USB storage stick. The target drive can also be changed, but the drive that it detects by default should usually be correct.

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