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PC Compatible DeskMate

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First post, by RX9

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Many thanks to WD and all the others who solved the Tandy 1000 HX/PDM2 problem. I thought I would now start a new thread on a related subject.

The final DOS/PC compatible version of DeskMate was version 3.05, and can be downloaded here: http://www.pcxt-micro.com/download/deskmate.exe

I have had this version up and running independently on my Win_98SE system for years with no problem, but I noticed that it cannot be launched from within DOSBox. While there is no current reason for me to do so, I also realize that I am not going to get away with using Win_98SE forever, and the day will come when this will be useful. Experimenting has disclosed that all PC-compatibles versions of DeskMate (3.00-3.05) behave the same way: after mounting the drive and executing "DESK," the file ID tag comes up, then the program exits before doing anything. Note that an environment variable is necessary (set dmconfig=<directory>) which is usually set in autoexec.bat, but can also be included in a regular batch file. I also tried it as a -c command, but note that this does not affect the actual launch of the program anyway; it is merely for config location info. There is something else causing the execution failure.

Does anyone have an interest in looking at this? Thanks.😀

Last edited by RX9 on 2007-07-01, 05:15. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 3, by DosFreak

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Well it's definetly not your copy. I used my copy and one I found off the internet and it does the same thing.

In the DosBox debugger it looks like "desk.exe" tries to load three files on execution:

DMEMM.RES
DMCSR.R89
PRGUF.RES

Looking at the header of these files they appear to be executables.

Renaming these files to .exe and running them just results in:

CPU:Illegal Unhandled Interrupt Called 0 in the debug console.

So it looks like DosBox cannot run the files which cause the Desktop interface to come up so it just exits back to DOS without giving an error since as far as "desk.exe" is concerned it did it's job.

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Reply 2 of 3, by RX9

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If it matters, DMEMM.RES is an extended memory manager, and the other two files are resource providers that call the video driver among other things. It could be that this is a brick wall that we aren't going to be able to penetrate. If so, it makes me appreciate the progress we made with PDM2 even more. It appears that the architecture of this earlier proprietary version is just different enough not to cause these stumbling blocks. Thanks for looking at it anyway.

Reply 3 of 3, by RX9

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I created a bootable disk image with DOS 6 and the core DeskMate 3 files as an experiment. Using the "boot" command with desk.exe in the autoexec.bat, the program did indeed launch. Thanks to this forum and its vast resources for giving me the clue as to how to proceed. It required a little homework, but that made the result even more gratifying. The power and flexibility of DOSBox continues to amaze me.

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