Part 1 recap - what the current DOS machine can do

What we achieved so far

Up to now we have bootstrapped a virtual machine with a DOS version (in this example MS-DOS 5). Then we added support for mouse, CD/DVD and we made the machine CPU friendly. But there is more under the hood. Remember, to see what is going on, we commented out the DOSshell start command in our autoexec.bat.

Let's put that back in and then check what happens.


As can be seen in the small video, the following steps are performed
  • edit autoexec.bat - re-enable DOSshell
  • reboot the virtual machine
  • inside DOSshell click through to QBasic
  • navigate through the QBasic menus
  • return to DOSshell
  • open a command window from within DOSshell
  • return to the DOSshell via exit
So we can even do some programming already using QBasic.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bootstrapping DOS inside VirtualBox

Image
Bootstrapping DOS inside VirtualBox The biggest challenge with classic OSs like MS-DOS, DR-DOS and so on is the fact that there is no readily available downloadable ISO-image that you could just virtually insert into the virtual CD-tray of VirtualBox . For anything that is just a little bit younger than DOS, you can probably find the CD image file. Even Windows 95 (while still being available on floppy disk) was already distributed on a CD. The second 10 minutes exercise Floppy images - the solution Fortunately there is the concept of floppy disk images as well. These floppy image files can be inserted into the virtual disk drive of VirtualBox in the same way as CD images. The nice thing about that: it gives you the very original visual impression what it looked like, installing DOS on a brand new computer. What is missing though is the typical sound of these classic disk drives. So let's try DOS 5. You need 2 floppy images. Right click these links and choose "Sav
Read more

Adding Drivers - Part 1

Image
Adding initial drivers As mentioned in the previous blog post , this basic DOS machine still has some flaws. One CPU core fully utilized No CDROM / DVD image support We will fix these two now. Let's see how far we get. We might add some more stuff if time permits. As a prerequisite one additional floppy disk image will be needed. This is a custom compilation. The individual pieces are all available somewhere on the Internet for download. So feel free to use alternative sources. Right click the disk image below and save it somewhere on your host machine. DOS Addon floppy First changes to autoexec.bat When you clicked through the full MS-DOS 5 installation without making any adjustment, you will likely have the DOSshell enabled. The automatic startup of DOSshell has been removed in MS-DOS 6.x (as far as I know). Disadvantage of the DOSshell: we cannot see what drivers and programs are loaded during system startup as the result is immediately hidden by the
Read more

Adding Drivers - Part 2

Image
Making DOS network ready When I described how to add the first set of useful drivers, I already indicated that networking is also possible on MS-DOS machines. Actually when you look at today's network configuration settings (at least until Windows 7), you can easily spot the similarities to the very first network implementations on Microsoft operating systems. During this exercise, we will make use of the CD-ROM driver that was installed in the first driver session. You will need the following ISO-image, which contains all the MS-DOS related networking content that was previously available directly from Microsoft. Download link Microsoft-LAN-DOS.iso How to add networking to DOS Save the ISO image above to a place on your machine where VirtualBox runs. Start the MS-DOS Virtualbox. Insert the ISO-file into the VirtualBox virtual CD-ROM drive. Examine what is on the ISO image. To do that, switch to the command prompt if DOSshell is running. dir dir x:\ This should show yo
Read more