eM-!3 wrote on 2026-06-29, 08:34:So your favorite DOS utility is your own file manager that you made few days ago? […]
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Caldor wrote on 2026-06-28, 20:27:
I found that Claude could actually do Assembly pretty well, so I have made Claude Commander... might rename it Caldor Commander at some point. So it is 50kb with all of its tools, well, maybe more now that I added some tools specific to Gold Box games (the SSI AD&D RPG games)
So your favorite DOS utility is your own file manager that you made few days ago?
Nice hobby project but it's not ready. I am trying to use Gemini & Claude for ASM and it's really hit & miss. I am trying to make something much easier (more.com replacement) and still I see how many bugs it can put inside. It makes totally wrong assumptions all the time (from modern computers, modern OSes, modern programming), it needs to be controlled and tested after every single change. 5% time is getting first version that looks like it's working but then 95% is looking for edge cases when it isn't, preparing tests and so on. You can't trust AI to have a tiny little feature working until you really put it to hard tests and it takes time.
Just after short look I see that your program have "Menu" on F2 and F9, clock appears and disappears sometimes. Page Down on file list doesn't work as it should. Screen is fully redrawn after every key press, selecting some DIRs add 4096 to selected size but sometimes it adds zero.
Edit: And it's using wrong chars for corners.
Ahh, no. Its not my favorite DOS utility, most of those have already been mentioned. But it is the smallest file manager I have seen and Volkov Commander made me see how useful it can be to have a small one, having the option to have a simple boot floppy that can have some pretty powerful utilities.
Thanks for the tests and feedback. As I wrote its a work in progress and I have not had time to go over everything in detail. I know about the two menus, the blinking and there are other things as well. But my expectations were that it would be a lot worse at assembly. My experience so far is that if I describe a problem to it that I find in this app, it will fix it. Often in the first try... well, it has its own debug loop where it runs the app using DOSBox, but it does need me for real tests and I am not sure if I mentioned the flickering yet. It might also have come with the clock since it needs to update. But its update cycle should only be once per second, in a previous version it just updated every time I did some action.
But I would mainly put this down to the lack of instructions, because I have not given it a full spec of all the file manager features I wanted, and in what way I wanted them to be implemented. I think maybe with the dirs it might be because there are files in the subfolders? But folder trees can be complicated. To begin with there were problems with sub-directories and just going into and out of them. Also copying a full folder could cause all kinds of problems.
So I have not focused much on the cosmetic problems yet, the first week or so I mainly focused on just adding features and f.ex. making sure I could actually open a zip file as a folder and copy files into and out of zip folders. I suspect all the features do not work as well for ARJ, RAR and so on.
But my favorite file manager for DOS is still Norton Commander. But another DOS tool that is one of my favorites that I have not seen in this thread yet is DOS32A:
https://github.com/amindlost/dos32a
Especially because one of the ways I play DOS games is the MiSTer FPGA, and it has a 486 PC core. So it can run with 256MB of RAM, which can be a problem for many DOS games if they have an old version of DOS4GW, DOS32A can replace DOS4GW in all the games that use it. Even in C&C despite its DOS4GW is hidden inside a larger file. Somehow you can just run DOS32A on the larger file and run the whole game without the exe file. DOS32A is also written in Assembly.
Hmm, now I do not remember if Game Wizard has been mentioned in this thread, but it is another favorite of mine for DOS. Its like game genie and all those other memory tools but for DOS. It can do save states, screenshots, do memory searches. It can even run a console... all while being inside a game. With some games it does not work, because it places itself as I think its called a TSR and then you can press ½ to get it up. Should also be possible to use other keys. So if that game uses that memory area it tries to stay in, then it probably wont work. I see there are some thread about it:
How To Get 'Game Wizard 32 Pro 3.0a' Working In DOSBox
DOSBox isnt too happy about it, but I find that it works pretty with with 86Box and PCEmu.
I do plan on polishing this file manager some more. Get the flickering fixed and I am trying to figure out what the best menu system is, I am experimenting a bit with a dropdown menu. I think there was a reason for the two menus, that F2 was supposed to be a shortcut / favorites kind of menu while F9 opens the dropdown menus.
But the main goal is for it to be a minimal file manager, which is why I am trying to make a compiler or installer package for it where you can select which features you want and then maybe how much space it would use to have those.
