First post, by jade_angel
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Does anyone here pick-and-mix various bits from various DOS versions to create a sort of "ultimate DOS", or "advanced DOS"? If so, do you have a favorite recipe?
I ask because I ended up doing that back in the day - I had bits and pieces from MS-DOS 6.22 and PC DOS 5 glued onto DR-DOS 7.02, and in my recent tinkerings, I've wound up sticking pieces of FreeDOS into MS-DOS (on one machine) and into PC DOS (on another), and it got me thinking. If you were rolling up a DOS environment for use, and not just as a bare game launcher shell, what would you include?
Here's what I'd want:
1) QBASIC. BASICA was cool, but QBASIC is better.
2) MS Scandisk with FAT32 support.
3) The archiver tools packages from FreeDOS. Having things like Info-Zip and GNU tar and gzip is very handy.
3) MS-DOS EDIT.COM. This is better, IMHO, than DR-DOS's EDIT.COM or PC DOS's E.EXE (or its OS/2 equivalent, TEDIT).
4) the PC DOS kernel from 7.1 - has FAT32 support and has DOSDATA=UMB, so can free up more conventional memory than MS-DOS can. Also uses the same boot menu format as MS-DOS (while FreeDOS and DR-DOS use a different one) There is the kernel from DR-DOS 8.1 too, but good luck finding it, and it's a bit witchety.
5) All three of EMM386 from PC DOS, EMM386 from DR-DOS and JEMM. I can think of at least one machine or one app that works fine with one and horks with the others.
6) DR-DOS' network tools.
7) INTERLNK. Great when you don't have a NIC - even most modern boxen have a serial port, and you can run INTERSVR in DOSbox or Virtualbox.
8) COMPRESS and EXPAND, because they can come in handy.
Main Box: Macbook Pro M2 Max
Alas, I'm down to emulation.