First post, by emendelson
This question has nothing to do with games or anything that DOSBox is designed to do, so I am not asking the developers to take any interest in it. I hope some expert users might be curious about the problem I describe.
I have a project, based on DOSBox SVN with a few custom patches provided by the helpful people here, which runs WordPerfect for DOS 5.1 and 6.x. I've written some WordPerfect macros that launch a DOS command from inside WordPerfect (which shells itself out while the command is performed); the specific command that I run from inside WordPerfect is one that starts 4DOS and runs a .BTM file (a 4DOS batch file).
Under WPDOS 6.2, if I use WordPerfect's "shell to DOS" feature and then run 4DOS by hand from the DOS prompt, 4DOS works perfectly. But if I use a slightly different feature in WordPerfect that runs a single DOS command without opening a DOS prompt, then 4DOS doesn't start. It doesn't display an error message - it simply doesn't run.
Under WPDOS 5.1, which seems to use a different way of managing memory, 4DOS runs correctly whether I use the "shell to DOS" feature or the feature that runs a single DOS command. The problem only occurs with WPDOS 6.x.
When I shell to DOS under either 5.1 or 6.2, MEM reports 615 KB free, so I don't think the problem is a lack of RAM. I hope I've made this problem clear, and I wonder if anyone has any insight into what might be going wrong and how I might be able to fix it.
Again, I am fully aware that this has nothing to do with things that DOSBox was designed to do. The fact is that DOSBox is so well written is that it runs WordPerfect under 64-bit Windows or OS X far better than anything else does, and that's why I'm asking for help with it. I fully understand that this issue is not something the developers need to spend any time with.
Thanks in advance for any help with this.