DOS ain't dead

GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 22.03.2010, 17:47

> > Tell me if you're impatient,
> No rush from my side particularly as I was actually thinking more of
> others when I made this comment. I have plenty of asm sources to
> look/work with here but more sources is always good :)

One issue is the macros, but that's easily fixed. I'm just not 100% sure what he's doing with memory (as he's setting up his own stack, etc), esp. dumb things like @curseg which is a MASM-y feature (and I'm unsure if $$ is a direct equivalent).

> > sure it didn't assemble something incorrectly. (NDISASM to the rescue!)
> I properly tried NDISASM for the first time yesterday and to be honest I
> wasn't that impressed.

It's nice for small projects. I probably wouldn't use it for anything big.

> indeed it amuses me to this day to think that parts of
> DOS now are still CP/M, e.g. Int 20h.

CP/M was 8-bit, hence 16-bit was a bit jump up. But yeah, DOS was meant to be somewhat "compatible", imagine that! (BTW, Tim Paterson is obviously one smart guy, see his blog.)

> > and requires DOS 3 (instead of DOS 2).
> Supporting anything before DOS 3 is unusual. I remember years ago looking
> at supporting DOS 2 myself but very quickly realizing that DOS 3 brought
> along far too many useful/important features that it simply wasn't worth
> my time trying to support anything before it. That said I like providing
> backwards compatibility in personal projects but you have to draw the line
> somewhere at times. I think most folks agree would agree DOS 3 is a good
> line!

I think DJGPP apps require DOS 3. It's not a stretch anymore. Obviously FreeDOS is freely available, so upgrading is pretty painless. I imagine that only old old machines where you can't (easily) upgrade would be the main problem, but those are rare. From what I've heard, DOS 3.3 was the most popular until 5 came around (first to have an upgrade version).

> > But I still like FD touch too. It's
> > probably one of (if not the) oldest utils contributed for FreeDOS
> that's
> > still in use!
>

He started it in 1989, which probably explains why he bothered to support DOS 2!

---
Know your limits.h

Complete thread:

• TOUCH.COM 1.4.3 (minor fix: debug script) - Rugxulo, 02.03.2010, 01:10 (Developers)
  • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) - Rugxulo, 02.03.2010, 01:22
    • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) - Arjay, 11.03.2010, 17:09
      • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) - Rugxulo, 11.03.2010, 19:41
        • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) - Arjay, 18.03.2010, 16:31
          • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) - Rugxulo, 19.03.2010, 00:58
            • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) - Arjay, 22.03.2010, 00:40
              • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) - Rugxulo, 22.03.2010, 17:47
                • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) / Tim Paterson / DOS v3 required - Arjay, 23.03.2010, 16:25
                  • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) / Tim Paterson / DOS v3 required - Rugxulo, 23.03.2010, 16:59
                    • [deleted] - Arjay, 23.03.2010, 19:32
                      • TOUCH 1.4.4 - Rugxulo, 07.04.2010, 00:05
    • GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH) - Rugxulo, 07.04.2010, 01:06