DOS ain't dead

RJDOS v0.01f (beta) (Announce)

posted by Arjay, 22.07.2012, 15:26

Currently the latest public version of my shell, RJDOS is v0.01a (beta). Sadly some of the original source to RJDOS v0.01c/0.01d was lost during a drive failure :( Last night I recompiled an "old" newer version (v0.01e) from a part recovery of the lost source and use of another older library I wrote. I am happy to do a limited release "as is" to be called v0.01f - if anyone wants a test copy to play with drop me a line (hosting issues at min).

It's nothing too special but at least the CD command was supported, RJDOS did support command aliasing to other external shells but that code was lost

It will be around 10k (compressed) and should run on pretty much anything 8086 and above that allows 16 bit DOS apps. A 32bit version will come about.


The future?
Now that I have the basic shell compiling again, I plan to start to merge it with some other experimental code into something a bit more interesting than yet another shell - whilst working to reduce/keep the overall filesize small by using more asm and also using several compiler tricks I have developed.

The basic road map includes adding long filename support (high priority) and moving to a module based approach (busybox style) to include other related code, e.g. RJDUMP. Importantly I want to rip up the traditional DOS shell rule book; e.g. I will continue my !: drive approach but plan to change it to operate more like Linux's /dev directory with all the benefits that dev has.
I also don't plan to support BATCH files directly e.g. aliasing them to other shells and instead plan to provide a "smaller" faster way of the same thing.

In terms of filesize my "max" file size target is around 16k uncompressed, since I want RJDOS to continue to fit easily into silicon, small places.

I also want RJDOS to be something a bit different which provides people with an easier way of accessing the lowlevel world of PC's; e.g. I imagine a shell which allows commands such as "copy b800:0000 vidsave.bin" "jmp ffff:0000" "dir !:/dev/lpt*" "hexedit c000:0000" "outb 80 99" "pokeb b800:0001 05"
I also plan long term to reuse some code to add a basic GUI via a module.

That an insight of where I am aiming to go with rjdos or to put it another way merging various traditional commands from command.com with debug.exe :)

Complete thread:

• RJDOS v0.01f (beta) - Arjay, 22.07.2012, 15:26 (Announce)
  • RJDOS v0.01f (beta) - jassenna, 27.07.2012, 06:09
    • RJDOS v0.01g (beta) - Arjay, 02.08.2012, 00:22
      • RJDOS v0.01g (beta) - update for jassenna+ronan et al - Arjay, 28.08.2012, 23:10