Mail Archives: opendos/2001/02/01/08:41:28
On 2001-01-31, Joe Da Silva wrote:
> Good point ... however, I expect it's COMMAND.COM that is finding
> the mismatch. Windoze should not care what executable you wish to
> run, it probably has no way of knowing how appropriate the executable
> may be. The COMMAND.COM OTOH, will probably look for a "suitable"
> kernel (ie. DR-DOS 7.05) before it will run ...
This is how it should be, of course...
Well, I donīt use Windows ME (and donīt plan to, except for - maybe at some
point - tracking down issues like this). In general, DR-DOS COMMAND.COM
works well in a Windows 9x DOS-box, the only thing I am currently aware
of the shipping issue does not support is the trivial "shutdown API" that will allow
Windows to close the shell when it is sitting at the prompt and you press the
X button or shut down the system. This is a minor inconvenience, but you can
always type EXIT instead...
In contrast to MS-DOS COMMAND.COM, the DR-DOS COMMAND.COM
does not contain anything such as "IF DOSVER = 8.0 THEN FAIL". Instead it
adapts to the underlaying OS platform. At least this works with Windows 95
- 98 SE.
Normally, ME should not be able to detect, that you are attempting to run
a 3rd party shell, but who knows, what they might have changed.
Some (DOS and Windows) applications handle an executable named
COMMAND.COM differently from other executables. Also, it might be
possible, that ME (un???)-intentionally traps one of the "non-standard"
API calls issued by DR-DOS COMMAND.COM when it starts up and
tries to detect the underlaying OS.
So, what exactly goes wrong? Do you get an error message, or is the system
just hanging? Any startup message from COMMAND.COM? What happens
if you rename COMMAND.COM to say DRCMD.EXE or DRCMD.COM?
What happens if you use the DR-DOS 7.03 COMMAND.COM instead of
the 7.05 one? Does this happen on a "patched" ME, that is, with a MS-DOS
COMMAND.COM loaded (directly via CONFIG.SYS SHELL=) before the
GUI starts up, or is this an unmodified configuration? One thing to play with
might be .PIF file settings (if they still exist in ME)...
Hope it helps,
Matthias
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