Questions tagged [ms-dos]
MS-DOS, the Microsoft Disk Operating System, its OEM-branded versions, and x86 DOS clones in general.
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Why does the ‘Get Next Selector Increment Value’ DPMI call exist?
In DPMI, interrupt 0x31 services 0x0000 and 0x0100 are capable of simultaneously allocating multiple protected-mode selectors in a single call. When that happens, both services return only the first ...
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How can I create a pipe for stdin/stdout of command.com (or 4dos.com) in C or a batch file?
I'm working on a retro project and was trying to create a pipe of stdin/out/err in DOS, but I can't find any functions to to this.
For instance the pipe() function from unistd.h isn't present in ...
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How can I output a blank line from a batch file on the Atari Portfolio?
I'm am trying to make a batch script on the Atari Portfolio which uses DIP DOS 2.11 (pretty similar to MS-DOS 2.11). I need to put a blank line in my file and it won't work. I have tried echo., echo/, ...
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Did the original MS-DOS Quake not have a menu item for freelook, and if so, why?
I know that Quake (the 1996 MS-DOS game) is a "full" 3D engine, and always had some kind of mouse support.
However, even the original Wolfenstein 3D from 1992 also had mouse support from the ...
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What is the oldest commercial MS-DOS program that can run on modern versions of Windows without third-party software?
What is the oldest commercial MS-DOS program that can run on modern versions of Windows (such as Windows 8.1 or Windows 10) without third-party emulators?
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How can I tell whether a DOS-looking exe. requires a 32-bit CPU to run?
Is there some simple method for determining if a DOS (or OS/2, or Windows etc.) binary (.exe or .dll) is 16-bit or 32-bit? The Linux file command just says "executable".
I want to ...
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Why can MS-DOS not read partitions starting at logical sector 0?
When creating a FAT file system, mtools and newer versions of mkfs.fat write a stub MBR partition table to the boot sector. This makes the file system accessible when written directly to media that ...
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What software used Turbo Vision back in its prime time?
Turbo Vision, Borland’s text-mode widget toolkit, is fairly widely known by those old enough to remember it, and apparently quite influential: it gave rise to a number of ports and reimplementations (...
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Educational DOS game involving teddy bears
I remember when I was very young (mid-to-late 90s) playing a probably educational DOS game that was like a whole bunch of minigames. At least one of the minigames (perhaps all of them) was teddy-bear-...
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DOS serial printer formats
Assume a DOS machine with a serial cable, and a selection of one of Epson FX-80, HP LaserJet, IBM Proprinter. At the other end of the serial cable is a modern machine, e.g. running Linux. On the DOS ...
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PS/2 Keyboard not working on Windows 95 and MS-DOS
I received a Packard Bell Multimedia 550 and it came with Windows 95. The problem is that keyboard input was not coming through. Before it attempts to boot into Windows 95, it shows the safemode ...
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How can I malloc() a block that's guaranteed to lie within a single DMA segment in Turbo C 2.01?
I'm following root42's videos about DOS programming using Turbo C 2.01. I've written my own Soundblaster 1.xx driver following the Creative Labs documentation, and I'm confused about memory allocation....
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How to remove Virus:DOS/V_Sign from a DOS 6.22 system
Fresh install of dos 6.22, unfortunately there appears to be a virus in MBR, each time I get Virus:DOS/V_Sign when re-using floppy from this machine. I can't connect HDD to modern PC, any idea how I ...
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Where was the DOS cdd utility from?
I distinctly remember, on the computer I had in the 90's, being able to type cdd D:\bla\bla in the MS-DOS command prompt, to change both the current directory and drive (avoiding having to type D: ...
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Why does DOS ask for the current date and time upon booting?
In most versions of DOS, when they are started from a medium that lacks an AUTOEXEC.BAT file, the very first thing COMMAND.COM does is ask the user to confirm the current date and time:
Starting PC ...
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Why did SMARTDRV have to be started with /x when DOS started?
In the default autoexec.bat for DOS 6.22, you see these lines:
C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE /X
@ECHO OFF
PROMPT $P$G
PATH C:\DOS
SET TEMP = C:\DOS
According to this source, /X disables write-behind caching. ...
- 114k
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1
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Is there a way to cut idle CPU usage under Multitasking MS-DOS 4.0?
The operating system variously known as ‘Multitasking MS-DOS 4.0’ or ‘European MS-DOS’, to avoid confusion with the better-known single-tasking MS-DOS 4.0, has the mildly irritating flaw that it doesn’...
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QEMU emulating MS-DOS cannot access CD-ROM
I am using qemu-system-i386 on a Windows 10 PC to emulate an MS-DOS system. I have installed MS-DOS 6.22 successfully from disk images from original Microsoft media.
I am starting QEMU using this ...
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Can I install DOS version 6.22 straight from IBM BASIC?
I accidentally deleted my previous version of DOS on my IBM model 8525. I was messing around with it, not knowing much of DOS, and now I'm back to using "IBM BASIC".
Would I be able to ...
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Why weren't bootable game disks ever common on the IBM PC?
While for other platforms of that era (primarily, Amiga), putting a game on a bootable disk was quite a normal practice, this approach never taken off on IBM PC. Why not?
I do remember people having ...
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How do DOS games like DOOM benefit from a PCI graphics card?
The original DOOM and its derivatives (DOOM II, Heretic, Hexen) were early 90s 3D games released at a time when DOS PCs usually had ISA bus Super VGA graphics cards. In the following few years, PCs ...
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C/C++ UI library similar to Visual Basic for DOS
I'm looking for a UI library that offers a similar "experience" to that provided by Microsoft's infamous, Visual Basic for DOS RAD environment.
I mean, it's such a compelling environment, ...
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Why would a CD-ROM in an MS-DOS 6.22 system not allow file access?
I have an OS/2 Warp CD that I am wanting to use as the installation media on an IBM PC 350 Pentium system. I have already installed MS-DOS 6.22 and the IBMIDECD.SYS driver for the CD-ROM drive on the ...
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How to convert .ttf to .fnt for use with M10_SCR.COM DOS font driver
I have a DOS program M10_SCR.COM that loads as a TSR and allows the use of fonts. It works with its own basic built-in fonts, so now I am trying to convert .ttf fonts into .fnt so I have more fonts to ...
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1
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Microsoft C 6, far pointer, cast to int, warning C4047
Trying to access one byte in memory using segment/offset, like this
union REGS in, out;
struct SEGS segs;
int v;
char _far* p;
...
int86x(...,&in,&out,&segs);
p = (segs.es << 16) + ...
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Does there exist a MPU-401 to OPL3 TSR for MS-DOS?
There are a few games for MS-DOS with music only through MPU-401, like the platformer Abuse and the RPG Avalon.
Is there a TSR available that intercepts MPU-401 port accesses and transforms them into ...
CommunityBot
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Why does MS-DOS 5.0 EDIT hang on my XT-class machine with a German 102-key keyboard?
Most times whene I call EDIT on my XT-class machine with MS-DOS 5.0 installed on the hard disk, the menus of EDIT appear, but the window that should contain the file contents stays blank and the ...
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Where and what was Haunt.bat? A game pre-loaded on a c1992 PC
This doesn't belong on the gaming SE, so I'm trying my luck here.
I'm looking for any info I can get on an old game that I simply known as "Haunt.bat".
Here is the back-story:
In the mid 90's a ...
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6
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How 3Dfx Voodoo 1 Emulator works
reading of this question brings up 3Dfx Voodoo 1 Emulator in my memories. I always wandered how did it work so good time as any to ask...
My memory is hazy on the details so I might miss remember ...
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Emulate a text-mode DOS program using a Unix terminal
Is it possible to run a text-mode DOS program in an emulator under a Unix-like operating system (Linux/*BSD/macOS) such that DOS text-mode input and output is done on a Unix terminal instead of a ...
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How does Windows 9x determine which disk drivers correspond to which BIOS disks/DOS drive letters?
Windows 9x can employ two kinds of disk drivers: native protected-mode drivers and compatibility-mode DOS drivers, and the former are used in preference to the latter whenever possible. When Windows ...
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Difference between INT 0x20 and INT 0x21 (0x4C)?
Checking the MS-DOS interrupt list we see INT 0x20 "Terminate the program" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_API) but if we check the same page we see INT 0x21 with function 0x4C will &...
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What are my options for multitasking in MS-DOS 5.0 on an 80186 with EMS?
I've got an HP 200LX, which runs DOS 5.0 from ROM, and I'm using EMM200 to provide some EMS from the C: RAM disk (it uses the memory controller to directly map the "disk" blocks into memory, ...
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How can I access/use memory outside of the standard 1 MB address range of MS-DOS?
How do you access more memory (above the 1MB) in DOS if the 640KB of conventional memory are not enough?
I have read a lot about this, but I couldn't figure out how to do this in actual code. Is ...
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Parity error under DOS
I'm facing a Parity Error problem on my new 486er DOS Retro PC. Every now and then, a running software crashes with a Parity Error output on screen. This happens for different software so I think the ...
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What other tricks were there to get more data onto floppy disks?
I remember using a utility back in MS-DOS 3.3 days, called MAXI Disk, that somehow magically managed to get 420K on a 360K 5¼″ disk. I assume it managed it by destroying some redundancy like a backup ...
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Use a USB mouse for DOS games
I have a Thinkpad T41 on which I installed Windows 98 SE.
I installed an old DOS game, and was wondering if I could get a USB mouse to work with it ? (the PC doesn't have a PS/2 port)
At the moment, ...
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What manages Upper Memory Blocks (UMBs) in MS-DOS?
I had always assumed that EMM386.EXE was responsible for managing the Upper Memory Blocks - UMBs - the memory space between 640KiB and 1MiB in real mode x86. For example, on MS-DOS 6.22, help emm386....
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Do you need to allocate memory before you use it in MS-DOS?
In modern operating systems (for example: Windows), you can't access a memory location before you allocate that memory location to your program (or else a segmentation fault will occur).
I am ...
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Is WinWorldPC legal? [closed]
I'm sure a lot of us have come across WinWorldPC online. With the valuable resources that it has for obsolete systems, is it actually legal? For example, I could download almost any Windows system I ...
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What is the *BEAST* event-recording software grammar?
I recently recovered a data-set my father (a biology professor) recorded at UC Berkeley in the 90s on Stickleback mating behaviors. He says the data was recorded using the "open-source BEAST ...
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Why might I get "drive not ready" when formatting a floppy?
I have a 3.5" floppy drive in an IBM XT 286 (5162). I can boot DOS from the floppy just fine but when I try to run FORMAT, it always says that the disk drive is not ready.
Specifically:
A:\>...
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What is most appropriate choice for DOS for a 1990 80386 PC?
I plan to install Windows 3.0 and PC/GEOS on top of DOS. Plus I will install numerous games from the 1984-1992 timeframe. Some of the later games will require >640K RAM and make use of an EMM driver.
...
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Accessing a USB drive from DOS
I am setting up a new development computer with FreeDOS and can boot off the SATA or USB drive. This is my first new computer with sophisticated UEFI (I have CSM enabled).
If I boot from the USB I ...
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Getting Music Functioning for Raptor: Call of the Shadows (1994)
I can't get the music audio working for the 1994 version of Raptor. Does anyone know how I can remedy this?
I'm not sure if this is the correct forum for this question, but here goes.
I have an ...
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Why are Windows 95 installation disks not uniquely bound to a single product key?
I was installing the OEM version of Windows 95 on VirtualBox the other day for reminiscence sake, and for some reason I had two different product keys. I tested both of them to see which one mapped to ...
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Can DOS boot to a hard drive other than HDA1?
I would like to experiment with DOS and would like to create a bootable partition on my hard drive (SDA) SATA device.
I created a 1G FAT32 formatted partition on my SATA hard drive (SDA) and tried to ...
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How to get Terminate running in DOSEMU on recent machines? [duplicate]
When trying to run http://www.terminate.com/ under http://www.dosemu.org/, I get Runtime Error 200.
I know that this is a well known issue with software compiled with Turbo / Borland Pascal and using ...
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64GB compact flash not booting up in DOS
I have purchased a 64GB compact flash UDMA card and am unable to boot up in DOS.
The machine I'm running has a Pentium 1.6Ghz process in it just to give you an idea about how "modern" it is compared ...
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How were console games ported to DOS?
Many popular DOS games were ported from video game consoles:
Earthworm Jim
Mega Man
The Lion King
The Lost Vikings
Turrican 2
Rayman
Oscar
Zool
Video game consoles generally have wildly different ...
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