Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/01/27/15:02:41
In article <5ci2qd$sh4 AT mailnews DOT kub DOT nl>,
Student s757810 <s757810 AT kub DOT nl> wrote:
>Does somebody know of a mirror for Opendos? I tried at least a thousand methods
>to get it from Caldera's homepage (http://www.caldera.com/dos/html/dload.htm)
>but it failed all the time. I also looked on their ftp site but couldn't find
>it there either. Is there perhaps some other wwwpage/ftp-site I could download
>it from? and I wanna have it too )-:
I hope the Caldera folks don't get mad, but OpenDOS is supposed to
be free of charge, right? I don't know if this will work, but try
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jbeppu. It's not a real web page---merely
a single file which contains the 5 disk version of OpenDOS (with Z
network support).
The thing is, I don't know whether that page would be accessible 2
people who aren't on a UCI machine. I guess someone will have to
try it and find out. If Caldera doesn't approve of this, I'll re-
move the file immediately upon notification.
...and now,
My First Impression of OpenDOS...
I was looking forward to trying the multitasker out, and it works,
but its very far from perfect. Dare I say, Win 3.11 does a better
job as far as being a task-switcher/multitasker for DOS. This can
be fixed, of course, but OpenDOS is still a little raw.
Let me stop being negative and give you the success stories first.
The first thing I tried was to run the 4k intro from ASM94 called
Fractal Dreams while multitasking a DOS shell that was just sitting
there. It was going between mode 13h and mode 03h well, and I must
say that this first test was successful.
However, OpenDOS didn't save the video state very well for mode 54h
text mode (which is Cirrus Logic specific). Mode 54h is a 132x43
text mode and it is my preferred screen dimension for DOS sessions.
When using OpenDOS to just task-switch (and *not* to multi-task) it
saves the text mode, but neglects to save the palette information.
This is odd because with mode 03h text modes, palette information
seems to be preserved correctly. When using the multitasker, mode
54h doesn't display anything to the screen--about the only thing
visible is the cursor. Trying to copy bytes to B800:nnnn (real
mode style) doesn't display anything. Task Manager can manage to
get its task-switching menu displayed, but it would work only once
and on subsequent trys, the outline of the box would be there, but
the actual text would not display. Windows 3.11 is capable of
saving the video state for my text mode correctly, however.
It's funny that I never used Windows to task-switch DOS sessions
for me before, but I wanted to compare OpenDOS to something I
already had.
Anyway, saving video states properly is one thing OpenDOS ought to
improve upon.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jbeppu (OpenDOS v7.01 might be here)
Remember, if you're going to try to use anything from the DJGPP
package, type ("dpmi off") at the command line. That reminds me
of another OpenDOS oddity. After running a program from the
DJGPP package, the Task Manager window cannot be called from the
particular task the program was invoked in. One can still switch
tasks through the <ctrl><numpad> method. One can also start ano-
ther task by running Task Manager from the command line with the
appropriate arguments, and the Task Manager window can be called
from the new task.
If OpenDOS is used like a normal single tasking DOS, then most
things seem OK. Another nice thing was uninstalling OpenDOS--
it's a very painless procedure, and it was nice of the OpenDOS
folk to include it. Therefore, no one should feel like installing
OpenDOS is risky--uninstallation will return you to whatever DOS
you previously had.
(No, I haven't given up on OpenDOS.)
--
beppu AT uci DOT edu .............................................................
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