[Freedos-user] Re: Re: Re: Re: GRUB for DOS How-To

[Eric A. <eric@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE>]

Hi all,

> 1) Is it a bad practice to use the include monochrome area switch with 
> MS-DOS and its EMM386?

I think yes, unless you desperately need the 32k extra UMB space.
Whenever part of the mono area is modified by something which wants
to access the graphics card, you are in trouble. Normal color VGA
cards do support enabling the mono area and even an 128 kb frame
buffer which spans the whole axxx and bxxx segments. So the DEFAULT
should be NOT to use the mono area for UMB - you can always HINT
people that they can use mono for UMB if none of their programs breaks
by doing so.

> 2) Did it appear that I was suggesting how to configure FreeDOS?

Partially, yes. AND the whole how-to was quite interesting, so I would
suggest to make a technote of it and add it to our technote collection.

> - may EMM386 autoinclude given region in some way, if there will not be
>   detected mono adapter/mode? QEMM386 does this.

AUTOinclude does not sound good for something which potentially causes
worse system stability. Which reminds me that VDS should probably be
on by default but on the other hand is probably not stable enouh for
that yet? And, by the way, what exactly where the effects of the SB
switch for EMM386? Would be cool if that stuff could be either (if it
has no bad side effects) on by default or could have some auto-enable
feature which turns on the SB stuff when needed (for SBPCI DOS drivers).

> - what happen if I=B000-B800 will be used on system with mono adapter/mode?

Mapping is stronger than physical RAM, you could say, so the screen will
stay empty and the data which SHOULD go to the screen will instead over-
write UMB contents, and the system will crash.

Eric

PS on FreeDOS bundle thread: The ISO is not FULL, it is BASE-with-sources,
AND still too many people end up with FreeDOS on HARDDISK when they were
only trying to run it directly from CD. On the other hand, THAT does
create a proper config / autoexec for them ;-). It is nice that the ISO
now also contains most of ODIN as "live system" for use from CD, but it
would be nice, too, to have a MINI ISO which does not contain sources
and does not contain more tools than needed for install, giving a 5 MB ISO.
The NORMAL ISO can grow to 15 MB or so, with sources, ODIN, docs... As
shown in my Brezel experiment, MANY FreeDOS files fit on as little as 4-5 MB
(including a zip with all documentation, the help system, localization...).
Was meant to become a 3 floppy distro, if anybody has time to complete it...
1 floppy MAIN, 1 floppy DOCS, 1 floppy bigger-tools-and-localization-kit.