Device Driver loaders... any working? \ VOGONS

Device Driver loaders... any working?

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First post, by danielc

Posted on 2009-04-17, 21:53

danielc Offline

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Joined: 2009-03-10, 23:11

'ello people....

Well i'm wondering if someone knows of a device driver loader thing [an alternative to CONFIG.SYS's DEVICE(HIGH)= commands] that actually works in DOSBox, whether very well or even sometimes - everything I seem to try either causes DOSBox to freeze (usually for UMB/EMS loaded drivers) or crash completely (usually for ones that wanna load in XMS). Others just fail to load and terminate.

Here are the ones i've tried, they can be found on the page at http://www.mdgx.com/dos.htm

CTLOAD.COM (freezes dosbox)
DEVLOAD.COM (freezes DOSBox)
DRVLOAD.COM (sometimes works)
LOADSYS.EXE (always terminates, whinging that it's not a TSR, playing with switches I can make DOSBox crash)

DRVLOAD works sorta, but with the driver I want to load (an EMS ramdisk driver), it says "Mounted RAM disk to A:" then straight after it says...

1DOS internal data bad.
2Fatal error finished processing
3Reboot your computer immediately!

...and pushes me back to commandline with the driver not loaded. Its happened with a few drivers now...

Can native DOSBox just not support this? Or am I an idiot for expecting a RAMDisk driver to work? =\

Oh... and yeah I know I could use REAL MS-DOS 6.22, but I really can't afford to loose the Z:\ programs =(

Thanks alot guys.... =)

Regards,
CosmicDan

Reply 1 of 5, by Qbix

Posted on 2009-04-17, 21:57

Qbix Offline

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you don't need a ramdrive.
and no device drivers don't work and won't work in a future version.

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 2 of 5, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2009-04-17, 21:57

h-a-l-9000 Offline

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Probably block device stuff which isn't really supported by DOSBox.

Oh and mounted drives are quite fast as the files are cached in memory by the host.

1+1=10

Reply 3 of 5, by danielc

Posted on 2009-04-17, 22:47

danielc Offline

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Qbix wrote:
you don't need a ramdrive.

No, I don't NEED a computer and both arms either. But they are NICE to have...

...🤣. Don't worry, I wasn't complaining. Just wondering if it's possible. I was wanting to have a scratch disk is all, purely temporary less-than 1024byte files with a lot of I/O, and I thought a RAM drive might have been faster (it is in pure dos anyway)

Qbix wrote:
and no device drivers don't work and won't work in a future version.

DRVLOAD does actually work with some things though. Well, it did when I first tested it about a year ago anyway. I think they were only on-screen TSR programs though (like, a hard-disk and modem activity lights) but the doc's would say "use DEVICEHIGH=" because it loaded like a driver. Oh well.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:
Probably block device stuff which isn't really supported by DOSBox.

Yeah, well, it seems to be spazzing-out at the "drive letter" part. In verbose mode, the driver actually appears to load but then gets that wierd error from the drive mounting or whatever.

It works if I boot into MS-DOS 6.22, using DRVLOAD, but as I said - loosing the programs on Z: really doesnt make that good =(

h-a-l-9000 wrote:
Oh and mounted drives are quite fast as the files are cached in memory by the host.

OK, yeah I suppose it's alright. Oh well - i'll live!

Thanks for the feedback guys!

Last edited by danielc on 2009-04-17, 22:54. Edited 3 times in total.

Regards,
CosmicDan

Reply 4 of 5, by ripa

Posted on 2009-04-17, 22:48

ripa Offline

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Create a ramdrive on your host OS and mount that.

Reply 5 of 5, by danielc

Posted on 2009-04-17, 22:57

danielc Offline

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Posts: 102
Joined: 2009-03-10, 23:11

ripa wrote:
Create a ramdrive on your host OS and mount that.

Good idea, however what i'm trying to create would like to be "inside" DOSBox 100% in order to make it cross-platform with as little hassle as possible - not just Windows/Linux either, I mean Symbian S60 and PSP aswell (where RAMdisk is not possible, that I know of)

Don't worry, i'll just try something else 😀

Regards,
CosmicDan

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