VOGONS


First post, by pchangover

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Ok I have an unusual problem that I hope someone can help me with. My uncle is a machinist and is starting to get interested in computers and wants to program on a laptop while away from home. He got a copy of the control software from work. It's a very basic Anilam program - p6m that is made in DOS.

Here is what I did:
I installed DosBox and used a spare hard drive as "C". In this drive there are two folders. The first folder is P6M, where the program is stored. The second folder is Users, where the coded files are stored - g code. In the P6M folder is an exe, aptly titled P6M.exe. This executable references the Users folder for all of the saved files that the user created. Here is what my autoexec looks like:

mount a a:\ -t floppy
mount c k:\
C:
C:\P6M\P6M.EXE

k:\ is where I have those two folders.

Now the problem is that whenever the program launches:
1. It doesn't recognize the drive type (CDS) so it can't do error checking which really isn't a problem.
2. I can't see the floppy drive from within the program. Here lies the biggest problem as he needs to be able to write to the floppy so he can load the file into his mill.

I have him using vmware running DOS for now which works fine with the floppy but I would much rather use DosBox as it is easier to use and less of a resource hog. So any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!

Reply 1 of 8, by h-a-l-9000

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Sounds like lowlevel floppy access which isn't supported in DOSBox.

You could try to mount a floppy image. Needs copying to a real floppy then.

1+1=10

Reply 2 of 8, by pchangover

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Is there any dos emulator that does support low level floppy access?

Reply 3 of 8, by peterferrie

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Bochs (bochs.sourceforge.net) supports low-level floppy access.

Reply 4 of 8, by wd

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Bochs is a full-pc emulator, so access wise not much different from vmware.
Don't know if bochs can be configured to take little cpu time.

Reply 5 of 8, by pchangover

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bochs seems to work but holy crap is it slow. Is there any way to speed it up?

Reply 7 of 8, by peterferrie

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I finally had a look at this. The problem in DOSBox is nothing low-level.

One problem is in the Current Directory Structure. The CDS array contains only one entry, which makes it "impossible" (as far as P6M is concerned, and this would be true for real DOS, too) for the C: drive to exist.

One problem is that the device attributes are zero for the drive A:, so P6M thinks that the device does not exist.

One problem is in the Drive Parameter Block, which contains junk, instead of useful information such as the media ID, the bytes per sector, and the sectors per cluster.

If I put something useful into each of these places, then the program sees the A: drive and tries to check the disk. It "finds" some missing clusters which do not really exist, so there seems to be yet another problem somewhere, but it's progress.

Reply 8 of 8, by wd

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Are you talking about msdos in dosbox or dosbox alone? As dpb stuff is
way too lowlevel if they really depend on information from that.