DOS ain't dead

As far as I know, the only reliable way to load AND unload block device drivers such as CDROM after bootup was by means of a quite cute utility called LOADSYS, written by a British folk called G. W. Robinson and still available on some sites; I am pretty much sure to have it on some floppy disc of mine as well.

I never tried it under DOS 7.x/8.0, though.

EDIT by rr: moved from category "Announce"

> As far as I know, the only reliable way to load AND unload block device
> drivers such as CDROM after bootup was by means of a quite cute utility
> called LOADSYS, written by a British folk called G. W. Robinson and still
> available on some sites; I am pretty much sure to have it on some floppy
> disc of mine as well.

I vaguely remember that one. For many years I used DDL/DDU (DDL = Device Driver Load and DDU = Device Driver Unload). I believe they were on simtel.net for sometime (so try there), HOWEVER I just tried and had forgotten how much I miss the original Simtel.... I gave up in the end as it was taking too long !

> I never tried it under DOS 7.x/8.0, though.
Should work ok. I have however seen problems myself with FreeDOS's Freecom (command.com replacement) rather than the kernel when doing things like this; to the point that I ended up knocking up a quick and dirty Freecom replacement with debug features just to get some stuff to work. FreeDOS overall is a very good project though and I hope to be able to feed some stuff into it one day.

Regards Richard

> I vaguely remember that one. For many years I used DDL/DDU (DDL = Device
> Driver Load and DDU = Device Driver Unload). I believe they were on
> simtel.net for sometime (so try there), HOWEVER I just tried and had
> forgotten how much I miss the original Simtel.... I gave up in the end as
> it was taking too long !

DDL is already part of FreeDOS now: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/ddl.zip

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Forum admin

> As far as I know, the only reliable way to load AND unload block device
> drivers such as CDROM after bootup was by means of a quite cute utility
> called LOADSYS, written by a British folk called G. W. Robinson

There are many, at least for loading, about reliability, I know only FreeDOS DEVLOAD and it seems reliable (but no unload)

> DDL is already part of FreeDOS now: ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/ddl.zip

No it isn't. It's just uploaded in FreeDOS area at ibiblio, and there is no source code. Even worse, it's from 1991, so from a time when FreeDOS didn't exist at all

Also, FAT28 support apparently broke many such "block-device" things, and FreeDOS DEVLOAD is possibly the only one that still works, in both FreeDOS and EDR-DOS

Finally, much better than such DEVLOAD/DEVUNLOAD hacks, is of course to include the load and unload feature into the primary project and design it as unloadable TSR instead of SYS, as done in Bret's USBDOS

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This is a LOGITECH mouse driver, but some software expect here
the following string:*** This is Copyright 1983 Microsoft ***

> I vaguely remember that one. For many years I used DDL/DDU (DDL = Device
> Driver Load and DDU = Device Driver Unload). I believe they were on
> simtel.net for sometime (so try there), HOWEVER I just tried and had
> forgotten how much I miss the original Simtel.... I gave up in the end as
> it was taking too long !

Yeah, Simtel kinda blows now due to all their ads, site layout, and other weird stuff. Try their FTP site directly, that should work (or find a mirror).

> > I never tried it under DOS 7.x/8.0, though.
> Should work ok. I have however seen problems myself with FreeDOS's
> Freecom (command.com replacement) rather than the kernel when doing things
> like this; to the point that I ended up knocking up a quick and dirty
> Freecom replacement with debug features just to get some stuff to work.
> FreeDOS overall is a very good project though and I hope to be able to
> feed some stuff into it one day.

The maintainer for FreeCOM was Blair Campbell, but he never updated it like he claimed he would (HD swapping?), and he's kinda erratic in his efforts (ClamAV, NCurses), so I don't really know what he's up to. The latest FreeCOM is 0.84-pre2 XMS_Swap, which I prefer and use, but even it has some very rare bugs (hence Eric Auer prefers 0.82pl3, which lacks LFNs and DESCRIPT.ION, for instance). Even 4DOS is yet again abandoned (stuck to 8.00 and apparently impossible or very hard to build with OpenWatcom).

Personally, I made up a big "wishlist" for things I'd like in a DOS command shell. In my imagination, such features will get added (by me, eventually) to either FreeCOM and/or Centroid's COMMAND.EXE (which is 386+ DJGPP but a thousand times easier to build than 4DOS or FreeCOM).

Whilst researching further DOS SYS drivers to test with. I have just become aware (/reminded) that PC Mag also released a SYS loader called DRVLOAD:

DRVLOAD.COM (VERSION 1.0) Copyright (c) 1993 Rick Knoblaugh
First Published in PC Magazine November 9, 1993 (Utilities)

Source to the above info. For more info see the reference "Buried software utilities in Simtel and 'pcmag' archives by Dr. W. Curtiss Priest".

If searching be aware there are several programs called DRVLOAD but unrelated to DOS device drivers.

BTW, I believe Jim Kyle wrote a DEVLOAD tool that was pretty much included verbatim in _Undocumented DOS_. I think this is the one that DR-DOS ships with. (I don't have the book, so I can't say for sure.)

> BTW, I believe Jim Kyle wrote a DEVLOAD tool that was pretty much included
> verbatim in _Undocumented DOS_. I think this is the one that DR-DOS
> ships with.
You are certainly right re "Undocumented DOS" (not sure re DR-DOS itself). It would appear both will be earlier versions. As Andrew's Schulman's DOS books appear to have stopped at DR-DOS 6/MS-DOS 5. (Latest version from Jim is Sept 1997).

Fortunately after a little investigation I discovered Jim has very kindly made the Turbo C or BC++ source and assembler files for his DEVLOAD freely available via his site which also contains lots of other interesting stuff.

Concerning DEVLOAD, the files you will want are:

+ DEVLOD7.ZIP, (46,835 bytes) contains the latest version of DEVLOD from Undocumented DOS, 2nd Edition, updated to work with Windows 95's DOS version. It also contains extended discussion of a number of problems with the DEVLOD concept. Needs DVSUPORT.ZIP to compile.

+ DVSUPORT.ZIP, (8,708 bytes) provides UNDOCDOS.H and other support files required for compiling the DEVLOD program.

Jim Kyle's homepage + Jim Kyle's download page.

> (I don't have the book, so I can't say for sure.)
Me neither (always wanted a copy).