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LZ-DOS 7.1 (Miscellaneous)

posted by sol, 19.11.2007, 20:06

> This is misleading. The string at 9E15Dh must be from COMMAND.COM! For
> those of us who use 4DOS instead, there is no such string, nowhere in the
> RAM. For those who are willing to confirm my words, please try my
> hex-boot disk, load
> LZ-DOS and examine menory (for example, you can start FM and press Alt-7).
> Of course, you will find nothing of the sort in memory.
>
> Sorry for breaking my promise not to post here anymore, but such
> misleading information is really something I can't stand. Do you think
> that if your theory is correct, the person who managed to pack a kernel in
> a non-standard format would fail to mention the so obvious copyright string
> and not remove it? And what about the huge difference between 9E15Dh and
> 0941Ch?
>
> By the way, we now suspect "sol" is in fact Andreas Grech. His goal is to
> discredit Jack and me in any possible way but he discredits himself
> instead.
You're right, it is from COMMAND.COM, my bad. I should've known better than to think whoever stole MS-DOS and renamed it would have any scruples and leave any string related to MS in it.

So let's do some further digging.

I downloaded your horrid excuse for a bootdisk and removed the settings causing it to crash.

I set it to DOS=LOW, and my bootdisk to DOS=LOW. I added a memory viewer and mem.exe. "MEM /C /P" reveals:

Lucho's Lame LZ-DOS 7.10 bootdisk "SYSTEM" memory size: 80048 bytes
My MS-DOS 7.10 bootdisk "SYSTEM" memory size: 80080 bytes

Weird! 32 bytes difference. Probably a buffer :) How'd this LZ-DOS manage to end up taking the same amount of space as MS-DOS?

0x1EC3 on Lucho's lame LZ-DOS 7.10 bootdisk: "COUNTRY.SYS"
0x1EC3 on my MS-DOS 7.10 bootdisk: "COUNTRY.SYS"
0x1DF13 in my MS-DOS 7.10 IO.SYS: "COUNTRY.SYS"

All the data around "COUNTRY.SYS" matches as well. Weird! What's LZ-DOS doing with an obscure COUNTRY.SYS reference that matches the one in IO.SYS from MS-DOS 7.10?

0x1910 on Lucho's lame LZ-DOS 7.10 bootdisk: CUEAAAACEEEIIAAEAA etc etc
0x1910 on my MS-DOS 7.10 bootdisk: CUEAAAACEEEIIAAEAA etc etc
0x1D960 in my MS-DOS 7.10 IO.SYS: CUEAAAACEEEIIAAEAA etc etc

Weird!!!! LZ-DOS also has a really strange, obscure string that MS-DOS 7.10 also has. In the exact same memory offset once again! What a strange coincidence! Now what on earth would a DOS cloner need this string for? No one knows.

If you take a peek at the IO.SYS in "LZ-DOS 7.10", you can see there are no obvious strings showing in it. Weird, where are the strings? Why when we view it with an asm viewer like HIEW or QVIEW, can't we see any legible assembly? Hrmm! Waitaminute! It's compressed! Why are they compressing it? What would the original filesize be? Perhaps because it would match IO.SYS from MS-DOS 7.10 exactly? :)

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