laptops and 5.25 inch floppy drives?

[Fred Cisin]

> > Most bootstrapping these days seems to consist of

On Thu, 18 Jan 2007, Chris M wrote:
>  These days?

Yeah.  They don't give you a front panel with toggle switches anymore.

> > Writing a DEBUG ROM would be especially useful.
> Sure would.

> And which version of Windont am I porting
> to the Vickie? Vista maybe. LOL LOL LOL.

NT would be the most practical; it's about 90+% portable C code, and
MICROS~1 even did ports to a few other types of machines.


> Curious if
> there ever was patches to allow Win 1.x to run on it.
doubtful

>  Yes, you're right, the necessary code could simply be
> added to a floppy disk, and the facilities inherent in
> the bios could be utilized also (but you would have to
> make absolute jumps...there is no interrupt vector
> table, so and INT ain't possible, right?).

The interrupt vector table exists, and during the bootstrapping process,
sections of it get filled in.  Therefore, BIOS INTs MIGHT be ready to go,
but OS INTs, NO.


>  Yes sir I would love to figure out how to make the
> thing recognize mfm formats. Oi I think I'll have to
> hit the books a bit more. This is all for fun you
> know.

Why else would we do this stuff?

> Someone did volunteer to send me the bootdisk.
> But it's DOS 1.25. Now just have to figure out how to
> get the images of 2.? to run.

2.11 would probably be the best; I don't think that they ever got to 3.31
for the Victor.  (1.25, 2.11, and 3.31 seem to be the most common versions
for "less compatible" DOS machines)

On "more compatible" machines, 1.25 can handle double sided 8 sector per
track, but not the 9 sector per track used in 2.xx

'Course, once you get 1.25 booted, then you can write programs to format a
2.xx diskette, and read the content through the serial port and write it
to disk.
Be aware that 1.25 doesn't know from sub-directories, nor "File handles",
so you'll have to use FCBs for any file I/O.  But, you'll have a version
of DEBUG!
The DeSmet C compiler tends to be a good choice for developing in a DOS
1.25 environment.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com