Recent searches
Search options
Sitting here keeping the camera view of my mailbox as the front most window on my computer. I'm waiting for yet another book on writing DOS drivers and I don't want to miss when it arrives. Every car that drives by makes my eyes dart over to check "Is that the USPS truck? Is that the USPS truck?”
Yes, USPS will update their tracking, but that could take over an hour after it's delivered and I want my book NOW! Because as soon as it arrives I plan to set it down and read it tomorrow.
DOS book #3 has arrived! This one even came with floppies!
This should help me add even *more* features to the RS232 #FujiNet!
The examples in the Undocumented DOS are written in … Pascal. Seems like an unusual choice. I guess the authors were former Mac programmers?
Their choice of Pascal meant they couldn’t do inline assembly. To work around it they made an array and hardcoded in the assembled bytes. There’s comments with assembly mnemonics but that doesn’t make it easy to modify.
Unsealed the little pocket on the back cover and imaged the disks because I wanted to try out the Pascal program. Put a copy of the disk images here: https://www.retrobattlestations.com/Undocumented-DOS-1st/
They conveniently included a compiled EXE so I didn't have to setup a system with Turbo Pascal to build it. The PHANTOM.EXE program seems to work as advertised, so now the trick is to convert it to C.
I've managed to convert most of it to C, but my Pascal is quite rusty and there's one procedure I can't figure out. I suspect my confusion stems from some trickery they're doing to access special MS-DOS functions.
Anyone know what the Turbo/Watcom C equivalent would be? (Text version of Pascal procedure is in screenshot's ALT.)
At last, some real progress with getting the network redirector working with #FujiNet! This was far more difficult than it should have been; partly because the DOS books are terrible (“look how clever we are!” making Watcomable code examples), partly because DOS makes me do all the heavy lifting, partly because I wanted to do things "the Watcom way” which makes using `__interrupt` extremely difficult.
