DOS ain't dead - PDOS/386

kerravon

Ligao, Free World North,
14.05.2020, 21:26

PDOS/386 (Announce)

For those who aren't aware, I have created a
32-bit version of MSDOS called PDOS/386. As of
a couple of weeks ago, the version in git is
self-hosting, ie PDOS/386 is good enough to
run gcc, as, and ld to rebuild itself.

There is also PDOS/86 which is designed to be
a clone of MSDOS, ie it is only 16-bit. It is
good enough to run micro-emacs, but it's very
wasteful of memory and isn't really meant to
be used.

More information can be found here:
http://pdos.sourceforge.net/

RayeR

CZ,
15.05.2020, 02:25

@ kerravon

PDOS/386

Post reply

Hi, good to know, I will have a look and try. Two questions:
Is the PDOS32 suitable on real HW or only for play in VM?
What is compatability of PDOS32 with existing programs for DOS (what sort it can run - rm/pm progs)?

I saw some various experimental version of 32bit freedos and others but none was usefull and finished.

BTW from Vogons forum I just read about some OSx16 https://gryftech.wordpress.com/home/osx16-operating-system/
that should be ms-dos compatible and have USB sound drivers, hm... ?

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

kerravon

Ligao, Free World North,
15.05.2020, 06:23

@ RayeR

PDOS/386

Post reply

> Hi, good to know, I will have a look and try. Two questions:
> Is the PDOS32 suitable on real HW or only for play in VM?

It is meant to run on real hardware, but when
I tried burning an image onto USB stick, it
didn't work (rebooted), so it needs to be
debugged. It works fine under Bochs.

> What is compatability of PDOS32 with existing programs for DOS (what sort
> it can run - rm/pm progs)?

Nothing. You need to recompile. But it will
run some Windows console mode executables.

PDOS/86 will run some MSDOS real mode
executables though, like micro-emacs.

> I saw some various experimental version of 32bit freedos and others but
> none was usefull and finished.

Yes, and this is public domian too, very rare.

> BTW from Vogons forum I just read about some OSx16
> https://gryftech.wordpress.com/home/osx16-operating-system/
> that should be ms-dos compatible and have USB sound drivers, hm... ?

I took a look, but that is closed source.
Note that PDOS/386 and PDOS/86 don't support
device drivers currently.

BFN. Paul.

iw2evk Magenta (Italy), 15.05.2020, 13:34 @ kerravon	PDOS/386 Post reply
	Hi, pddos support navely LFN and multitasking like drdos 7.02 ?

kerravon Ligao, Free World North, 15.05.2020, 15:05 @ iw2evk	PDOS/386 Post reply
	> pddos support navely LFN and multitasking like drdos 7.02 ? It supports LFN. There is also support for INT 21H AH=80H which is multitasking, but I've never tested it myself (it was added by someone else). BFN. Paul.

RayeR

CZ,
16.05.2020, 01:34

@ kerravon

PDOS/386

Post reply

Well, I tried to boot it on my primary PC (i7-2600K) without floppy so I used GRUB4DOS.EXE to load PDOS32.IMA. When I started GRUB4DOS from bare MS-DOS 7.1 it imm. rebooted but when I started it from bare FreeDOS it booted so I could try it. I found it supports LFN but near half of my partitions (FAT16 and few FAT32) lists total garbage or repeat the listing of root dir in endless loop via dir command. There was nothing much to run than few test programs but running win32 con. may be advantege - would it be better than HXDOS?

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

kerravon

Ligao, Free World North,
16.05.2020, 03:18

@ RayeR

PDOS/386

Post reply

> Well, I tried to boot it on my primary PC (i7-2600K) without floppy so I

Thanks for your feedback.

> used GRUB4DOS.EXE to load PDOS32.IMA. When I started GRUB4DOS from bare
> MS-DOS 7.1 it imm. rebooted but when I started it from bare FreeDOS it
> booted so I could try it.

That's very strange that you get a different
result in MSDOS vs FreeDOS. PDOS/386 should
not care about how it was booted.

Also I'm not sure how a disk image can be
booted like that. The code is designed to
do BIOS calls to read sectors from a disk.
Are those BIOS calls intercepted?

> I found it supports LFN but near half of my
> partitions (FAT16 and few FAT32) lists total garbage or repeat the listing
> of root dir in endless loop via dir command.

Ok. Some more work still needed then.

> There was nothing much to run
> than few test programs but running win32 con. may be advantege - would it
> be better than HXDOS?

I assume HXDOS is a more mature product at
this point.

I'm not 100% sure what the purpose of
PDOS/386 is. I just thought there should be
a public domain operating system out there,
and I also thought that there should be a
32-bit version of MSDOS. So I just plugged
the gaps. The project has taken 25 years to
reach this point of self-hosting.

BFN. Paul.