I downloaded 4DOS recently, and I had on an old DOS laptop a version of ANSI.SYS. I thank you for your information about ANSI art: I should try it. 😀

Harry Potter wrote on 2023-04-12, 10:48:

I downloaded 4DOS recently, and I had on an old DOS laptop a version of ANSI.SYS. I thank you for your information about ANSI art: I should try it. 😀

No worries! So you found a version of 4DOS which is happy on Windows 98 SE?

doshea wrote on 2023-04-12, 08:49:

Harry Potter wrote on 2023-04-06, 21:56:

I am looking at the instructions for EMM386 right now. I need a list of my computer's RAM usage in DOS, i.e. what's used by the BIOS and hardware and what's available for UMBs. I remember using such a utility a long time ago. It came with an alternate memory manager.

EMM386 can sometimes figure that out for itself without you needing to tell it.

Since you've used QEMM before, possibly the utility you used in the past was Quarterdeck Manifest (the command name is MFT).

I forgot to mention that Manifest comes with QEMM, at least QEMM version 7.0.

Example output in Bochs:

1    Quarterdeck  ▀  ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
2┌─    MANIFEST   ─┐ ║  Overview   Programs   Interrupts   BIOS Data   Timings  ║
3│                 │ ╟──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
4│     System    ▄ │ ║                                                          ║
5│  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ │ ║                                                 ▄        ║
6│ <  First Meg >▄ │ ║         Memory Area   Size  Description         █        ║
7│  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ │ ║         0000 - 003F     1K  Interrupt Area      █        ║
8│    Expanded   ▄ │ ║         0040 - 004F   0.3K  BIOS Data Area      █        ║
9│  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ │ ║         0050 - 006F   0.5K  System Data         █        ║
10│    Extended   ▄ │ ║         0070 - 0E36    55K  DOS                 █        ║
11│  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ │ ║         0E37 - 0F6E   4.9K  Program Area        █        ║
12│      DOS      ▄ │ ║         0F6F - 9FBF   577K  [Available]         █        ║
13│  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ │ ║         ═══Conventional memory ends at 639K════ █        ║
14│    Adapters   ▄ │ ║         9FC0 - 9FFF     1K  Extended Bios Area  █        ║
15│  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ │ ║         A000 - AFFF    64K  VGA Graphics        █        ║
16│   MS Windows  ▄ │ ║         B000 - B7FF    32K  Unused              █        ║
17│  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ │ ║         B800 - BFFF    32K  VGA Text            █        ║
18│     Hints     ▄ │ ║         C000 - C8DF    35K  Video ROM           █        ║
19│  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ │ ║         C8E0 - EFFF   156K  Unused              █        ║
20│                 │ ║         F000 - FFFF    64K  System ROM          █        ║
21│                 │ ║             HMA        64K  First 64K Extended  █        ║
22│                 │ ║                                                 █        ║
23│                 │ ║         ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀        ║
24│F1=Help  F2=Print│ ║                                                          ║
25└─────Esc=Exit────┘ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

I plan to start off with HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE first then upgrade to QEMM, even though I have QEMM on the computer's hard drive. I like the idea of displaying ANSI pictures upon start-up if starting in DOS mode or on a DOS computer. On a WIn98SE setup, I like both the text output and the boot screen and sometimes press ESC upon start-up to see the diagnostics output. I have the XrX logo tools and a lot of start-up screens from the web page and some I created from screenshots of some C64 games. If you're interested, I can give URLs to the tools, the example screens and my own screens. Are there any other sites with Win98 start-up screens? I'm sorry: I just like frills and am an egotist. 😀 BTW, I'm still looking for other ideas to better my DOS and WIn98SE setups. 😀

I have Windows 98 logon screens, themes and wallpaper. I also like colors and can play around with Win98's color settings. I like cool graphics and sound. Other than what I suggested here, what else can I add to a WIn98 setup to make it more fun? Same with DOS mode?

Oh yeah, I meant to reply to you before about that! I don't know about fun exactly but some of the customisation I did to my Windows 95 machine included:

I had installed Linux on another drive, so it had installed the LILO boot manager. I customised the LILO config to use 320x200x8bpp graphics with a background image that matched my custom Windows startup image (at least I think I customised that) and the wallpaper for the default account (which appears behind the login dialog). This was a Pentium 1 machine with an old BIOS that didn't have a boot menu, so to avoid accidentally booting off floppy disks (think of the virus risks!) I set the BIOS boot order to C,A then added a LILO entry to boot from floppy. I'd actually never seen a BIOS with a boot menu at this point so I'm surprised I came up with this idea 😁 (I'm sure I wasn't the first to come up with it though) These days I'd use GRUB or SYSLINUX instead of LILO. SYSLINUX is more convenient since it has DOS tools. I think they both support VESA resolutions instead of just plain VGA.

I customised my PROMPTs with ANSI escape sequences so that when booted into DOS 6 it'd say "[DOS] C:\>" with "DOS" in yellow, and in an MS-DOS Prompt in Windows it'd say "[WIN] C:\>" with "WIN" in blue, or something like that (too lazy to start up my VM where I restored my backup of that machine to check!). That way I could tell the difference between being booted into DOS or being in Windows with a full-screen command prompt. Someone posted a thread somewhat recently with a really cool ANSI PROMPT which I think put a blue bar at the top of the screen, like I think OS/2 did.

It occurs to me that between the bootloader, Windows splash screen, default desktop and my own account's desktop there are four different background images during the startup (and I think in my case they were four different resolutions!). I suppose one could pick four different images which form a meaningful sequence if they wanted. I wonder if someone who wanted four images instead of three but didn't want to have to log in to Windows could configure automatic login - would it still display the default account's desktop for a little while at the point that the login dialog should appear? I'm just slightly curious but I don't think I'll ever try that myself - these days I rarely even set my desktop wallpaper!

Uhh...is there a way to create a DOS partition and a Win98SE partition on the same hard drive and have Win98 access the DOS partition without giving it a drive letter?

Maybe, but it wouldn't be nice like with Windows 2000 mount points (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_volume_mount_point) as I'm pretty certain that 9x doesn't support the modern Windows kind of thing where you can go into Disk Management, remove a drive letter, then mount the drive elsewhere, unless there was an obscure tool you could get from elsewhere for that.

I think you could do it this way:

First, prevent Windows 9x from mounting the DOS partition by hiding it when Windows is running. Re: DOS 6.22 and Windows 98SE on one machine covers some options which other users on here have posted.

Then, in Windows 9x, use some kind of application to access the DOS partition.

It's possible that someone has made a Windows Explorer extension/addon which can make the partition show up in Explorer even though it doesn't have a drive letter, but I doubt it - it would be a lot of work and not something that many people would use.

I'm pretty sure that I got mtools (command line tool for accessing FAT filesystems) and https://mtoolsfm.sourceforge.net/ (GUI which uses mtools) running under some version of Windows XP so that I could graphically browse disk images. Perhaps they can be convinced to talk directly to a partition, and made to work on Windows 9x. perhaps they can be convinced to talk directly to a partition. I think I had to compile MToolsFM myself on Cygwin, and I compiled it using Win32 GTK libraries so I didn't need an X server to run it. It looks like I have that stuff in an old broken Cygwin install from 20 years ago, I can't seem to run it now.

Maybe there are nicer tools for accessing FAT filesystems from Windows 9x now, but there weren't back then because most people who were using Windows just had their FAT filesystems on their disks, which were mounted, and most people who had images of FAT filesystems were using Linux I guess!

This is all painful stuff though. Why do you want to not have it mounted, is it because you want Windows 9x to be/stay as C:?

Oops, I forgot to mention that if you don't mind using the command line, mtools shouldn't be too hard to get running on Windows 9x. Basically you end up running commands that are like DOS commands but they start with "M", like MCOPY, MDIR, etc.

I'm sorry for not responding to you sooner: I didn't quite read your reply. 🙁 I really do want the DOS drive to be visible from Windows, but I didn't want the Windows drive assignments to change, i.e. I want the CD and RAM drives to stay the same. Somebody here said that the drive assignments for the hard drives are determined at startup. It would be nice if maybe I could change the DOS partition's drive letter to, let's say, Drive H: upon startup. I used to use the JAM compression software on a DOS laptop, and it had a utility that can swap drive letters at any time. If I could do that during DOS's setup, it would help. Is there another program that can do that online?

No worries! I suspect that what you want to achieve isn't possible because I think you simply can't have two separate bootable FAT partitions for DOS and/or Windows 9x which can see each other. The normal solutions are either to hide partitions, or to have both DOS and Windows 9x boot from the same partition (either using Windows 9x's DOS 7.x or using Windows 9x's support for multi-boot).

Maybe someone else knows a way around this though.

I've lost what the current setup is?

Are we trying to setup a dos version other then MS Dos 7 and Win98 system?
If that's the case I'm also not aware of any way to have the 2 partitions visible to each other. If you create an extended partition and logical drive this will be available to both OS's and at least gives you a common drive.

If your just wanting to boot into Windows 98 and also a command prompt, (so using Dos 7 that sits under Win98) I'd simply create a shortcut to command.com on windows desktop and modify the start up files from within the shortcut. It'll reboot the PC and then startup just as a pure dos install.

I do want to set up an older DOS version on the Win98SE computer. I'd better forget about this, though, as I can use Win98SE's DOS mode to do the job.

I'm at my mother's house right now and am almost ready to set up DOS mode. Now, I'm familiar with the DOS and WIn98 DOS setup files. I also have open in my browser some information on some config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but first, I want to for now disable startup of Windows. I also want to disable bootup of DriveSpace for DOS, as I for now probably don't need it in plain DOS. I can use ATTRIB to disable some protective attributes but don't know the settings I need to do this. I want a list of all Win98 MSDOS.SYS settings. Where online can I get them?

Umm...I just asked a stupid question: I found the information using Google. 🙁

I just remembered having on an old Win98SE PC a program called Bionix Wallpaper. I have to Google it. I also remember finding an alternate program launcher for Win98 but not using it. Can somebody give me the name and URL of one of the latter? I have a lot of icons I can use to decorate my desktop's icons and some folders, mostly from iconarchive.com. I also know about Rainbow Folders. How else can I add to the experience?

I know how to create the DOS shortcuts as chinny22 stated and used to do that to network to a DOS laptop with no hard drive so as to act as a second simulated hard drive. I used a ZIP disk and a very large RAM drive on each of the two systems. I got away with the extremely large RAM drives, as the DOS laptop had 28MB of RAM, some of which I didn't need, and the Win98 system had plenty of memory not otherwise needed by the DOS mode software. On my current Win98se setup, I have QEMM97, but it didn't work properly in DOS mode: As soon as Windows starts, the computer crashes with an Invalid Instruction error, and QEMM only registered 256MB on a 1GB system. That's good enough for DOS mode, though. 😀 I can manually optimize a DOS configuration but want to know if I can get QEMM to optimize such a configuration automatically.

On my Win11/64 laptop, I have a program called Worms Deskmate. I love that guy. He crawls all over my monitor, does tricks and talks. He annoys a lot of other people, though. 🙁 I don't think he'll work on Win98SE, though. Is there any other fun stuff I can use on Win98SE? Little desktop toys or pets? Things like icons from iconarchive.com? Or Rainbow Folders? BTW, it already has installed MSWord, but I want to install MSWorks for its database program.

There's the classic Neko (Wikipedia link. neozeed's blog has posts about various versions of it, the most recent is about "Neko98" so maybe it works on Windows 98? I think I ran an earlier version on Windows 3.0.

I remember there was another, newer program called Felix, I never used it though so don't know what Windows version it required. No, I don't know of any that aren't cats 😁

Have you checked out all of the "Desktop Themes" (might require Windows Plus!, I'm not sure)? They come with different icon sets.

Thank you. I actually have some themes for Win98 but apparently put them in the wrong place, as the one I tried didn't display most settings. 🙁 I need to fix it next time I'm there.