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Lots of Convenient Accessories for Retro Systems
Based on "MS-DOS 7.10," the custom repack of 9x DOS by the China DOS Union
Designed to be able to install Windows 9x on a machine with USB ports but no functional CDROM, though I imagine it could be useful in other situations.
This is very much DOS for "modern" machines (Pentium and above). No consideration was given to memory conservation, and the included utilities are only really useful if you have big storage, USB drives, and existing Windows installations. It presumes that EMS and XMS are available, and it works best when installed to RAM.
My original use case was a Pentium 233 laptop with a dead CDROM, but working FDD and USB ports. Win95 ISO goes on the USB, mount it as virtual CDROM, copy the contents to HDD, run Setup from there. Remarkably, ALL the utilities I find essential to a modern DOS getup-zip tools, shsucd/shsufd, LFN, NTFS, etc fit on a single 1.44--which I honestly found very surprising. (and a few KB to spare!!)
[USB] - Out of the box, the system will scan for USB flash drives and CDROM drives. Tested working with a PNY 8GB USB stick and a modern ASUS USB 2.0 CD/DVD combo drive. Should work without much configuration, but can be extremely picky about hardware (I'm about 50/50 on my whether or not a flash drive from my stock will work)
[VIRTUAL DISKS] - SHSUCDX/SHSUFDRV are included, which are virtual disk (CD/FD) drivers for DOS. Mount ISOs and IMGs effortlessly. Details below.
[DISK IMAGING] - snatch can create IMG files from floppies. These IMG files
are compatible with SHSUFDRV above. When system is installed to RAM,
you can eject the LCARS disk and back up floppies to HDD/USB
[NIXINESS] - ls invokes h.com which is the app HotDIR, which gives
colorful, paginated output.
more can be invoked with less.
rm.com provides nearly-identical syntax as UNIX rm.
grep provides nearly-identical syntax as UNIX grep.
DOSKEY provides command history and tab completion.
[CDROM] - Includes VIDE-CDD.SYS and is compatible with USB CDROM drives
[DOSLFN] - DOS / Win9x Long Filename support
[FAT32] - FAT32 disk support (even on USB!)
[NTFS] - Read-only NTFS disk support (even on USB!)
[HIMEM / EMM386] - Configured out of the box for high memory support to enable RAMDISKS or CD-ROM software
[CTMOUSE] - FreeDOS mouse drivers included
Grab the LCARS-v7.10_latest.img file from the repo, and write it to a
floppy with dd in linux, I have not tested it with any DOS/Windows tools.
Alternatively, take a Windows 98 boot floppy, and copy all the contents of the DISK directory over to the floppy, overwriting everything else.
At boot, you are presented with two options: FULL or FAST
FULL loads USB drivers (flash drives or optical drives [yes, even modern ones]) also loads IDE CDROM drivers, and copies entire disk to RAM for faster operation (however, this takes much much longer to boot, as the USB scanning takes time and the RAM copy process can take up to a couple minutes) Of course, once the OS is in RAM, the floppy can be removed.
FAST loads just the essentials--no CDROM, no USB, no copy to RAM, but otherwise contains the entire rest of the system including mouse drivers, etc.
If you choose FAST, you can manually install to RAM by running
RAMSTALL
After running RAMSTALL, use Z: in place of A:
You can run the following commands for some basic help:
NOTES // view disk image mounting commands
MORENOTE // view this README
Mounts a CDROM image (ISO, BIN) or floppy image (IMG) to the next
available drive letter. For your convenience, a frontend script is
provided to simplify mounting, though full features are installed
(see http://adoxa.altervista.org/shsucdx/index.html)
(see http://adoxa.altervista.org/shsufdrv/index.html)
USAGE: mount <PATH_TO_IMAGE> // mounts disk to next available letter
umount // unmounts all mounted image files
fmount <PATH_TO_IMAGE> // mounts floppy disk IMG file
fmount -u // unmounts mounted floppy IMGs
Installed to CONFIG.SYS. Scans USB controllers on boot, and mounts any
detected FAT32 USB Mass Storage devices. Can be picky about drives.
MBR only, FAT16 or FAT32 only. Anecdotally, it's best to have your
drive freshly formatted on a Windows machine
(Linux partition + format tools don't always work).
IT IS SERIOUSLY PICKY ABOUT DRIVES. NOTHING I CAN DO. KEEP TRYING TO
REFORMAT/KEEP PARTITIONS UNDER 2GB/ETC. USB CD DRIVES WORK *SOMETIMES*
Classic and self-explanatory. Baked right in.
Creates virtual disk drives in memory.
XMSDSK <SIZE_IN_MB> <DRIVELETTER>: /Y // creates new disk in ram
XMSDSK 2048 Z: /Y // example. creates 2MB ramdisk
Includes Volkov Commander, the excellent two-pane file manager for DOS.
Invoke it with
vc
[SCANDISK] - Windows 95 Disk Check Utility [FORMAT] - Disk Format Utility [FDISK] - Disk Partition Utility [XCOPY] - Bulk Copy / Backup Utility
Classic DOS Disk Utilities, included.
Classic DOS text editor, included.
Creates IMG files from floppy disks, and can write IMG files back to
floppy disks.
SNATCH DRIVE: [-W] [-P FILENAME]
-W Write image to specified drive
Will only read DISKETTE.IMG from
current directory. Cannot specify
filename manually in write mode.
-P Output image to specified file
Default DISKETTE.IMG if not specified
`ls` invokes HOTDIR 2.0, a DIR replacement with colorful output,
sorting features, pagination, and more. Switches and output are not
similar to UNIX `ls`, but force of habit and all that.
`rm`, `grep`, and `less` work more or less the same as their UNIX
counterparts and have built-in help functions.
`DELTREE` is not included in newer images as `rm` provides
better functionality.
`reboot` will by default bring up a menu to select your reboot type,
`reboot 1` will immediately perform a default reboot.
- 0.3
- Remove APPEND.EXE
- Remove DELTREE, replace with RM.COM
- Remove CHKDSK.EXE (Redundant with SCANDISK)
- Replace LS.BAT with LS.COM which is HOTDIR 2.0
- Add RM.COM
- Add GREP.COM
- Add SNATCH.EXE
- Add REBOOT.COM
- Install NANSI.SYS (3.4 GPL)
- Revert to black and white color mode
- Fix bug in AUTOEXEC.BAT when IDE and USB CDROMs are both present
- TODO: Replace EMM386/HIMEM.SYS with JEMM, investigate mt, map, tde (editor)
- 0.2
- Update AUTOEXEC.BAT
- Update documentation
- Update MORENOTE.BAT
- 0.1
- Initial Release
live long and prosper, loves \\//_ ~qkj