Re: DOS 4 and higher...

[Stewart Midwinter <midtoad@xxxxxxxx>]

Radek Svaqr wrote:

> Also I've heard somewhere that DOS5.0 booted from PC3k floppy will not
> recognize any other drives. It may support this idea that IO.SYS must
> be adapted... But I am not sure wheter is this true. (Hi Stewart can
> you confirm it?)

Hi Radek, I confess I do not know how you would boot any other version of
DOS, since the boot process in the ROM.  Only after c:\config.sys (which
you can not change) is processed does the PC3k load d:\config.sys (which
you *can* change).

One idea might be to format an SRAM card with another DOS Version, and make
it bootable.  You do this by, say, booting a laptop with DOS 5, then put
the SRAM in the laptop's PCMCIA slot and use sys.com to copy the OS over to
the SRAM.   I may have done this once but don't recall it working. If
anyone else has had success, please let me know!

Since you can boot Linux from DOS, I did have an idea to load Linux on the
PC3k, but even the smallest distributions of Linux with any real
functionality need at least 8 MB, and at least a 386 processor.

If you still want to play with other OS, you can try Geoworks 1.2, which I
have done. It gives a GUI and several tools like word processor, terminal,
database, but the poor CPU is struggling to keep with the demands. Same
thing with Windows 3.0, which I have also loaded on there.  By the time you
load Win3.0 and a tool like Write, you have little RAM left, and response
is very slow.

One last thing to look at is DR DOS.  It may be possible to have more boot
options with it, thought this is purely speculation on my part.

When you consider all the options, good old DOS doesn't look so bad!  And
with a 10 or 20 MB memory card, you can do just about everything you would
want to on the PC3k anyway.  And if you don't find what you need for
software, well, there's always Visual Basic for DOS which you can use to
"roll your own".

Ideas, please!

cheers,
--
Stewart Midwinter
midtoad at home.com (alternate: midtoad at iprimus.ca)
Visit http://midtoad.web.com