Jay Litwyn wrote:
Lots are people are into the game of dropping backward compatibility. I think it is called "planned obsolescence", only most people hav no clue what the schedule for it is.
Eventually, I went with VirtualBox rather than cygwin, because cygwin's download manajer crumbles during dial-up retrains. I had to create a bootable CD. Ahead Nero chose Caldera OpenDOS. Unfortunately, their configuration leaves me with 324k, which is enough to run FDISK on a virtual drive. It is not enough to "FORMAT C: /X /S". I was sweating a little bit at that point, double-checking that this was indeed a virtual drive, simulated in space on an NTFS volume.
Dir C: ...no used space.
The biggest consumer of memory seems to be something called FAT32: 119kB.
Does anyone hav a bootable CD image with more memory to spare than that? http://www.allbootdisks.com/downloads/ISO/AllBootDisks_ISO_Image_Downloads25...
Ah-ha. Maybe I can even shell out of fractint when I am done. What concerns me is how to move things saved on a virtual C: drive to a real FAT32 partition on my USB drive. I think that's what Oracle calls an attachment.
I once ran FRACTINT under the command processor for DOS, which was great in a way, because then I had XMS. Unfortunately, the Dos Protected Mode Interface (DPMI) was broken, so when I ran a batch file, SIMPLGIF broke -- I'd hav to run it under CMD.EXE. It seems like Micro$oft should be doing this stuff, rather than Oracle, but then it would *probably* not be open-source. Lots are people are into the game of dropping support for old versions.
MS wants to kill off DOS entirely. As OpenDOS and FreeDOS <http://www.freedos.org> show, MS doesn't control DOS anymore. (You might try FreeDOS instead of OpenDOS.) DOSBox running on Linux here (with default settings) reports 634KB free conventional memory, 63KB in free upper memory, and 15280KB EACH of free extended and expanded memory. You might try out DOSBox for Windows. It seems to provide a lot more available memory. I don't see why you'd need the DOS FAT32 driver installed to access a Fat32 drive partition - that should be handled transparently by the host OS. I mounted my home directory on the DOSBox command line and got the shortened DOS-style filenames that Windows would provide a straight DOS session ... -- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community