From: "Matthias Paul" Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 16:42:42 +0100 Subject: Possible DR-DOS enhancements [Was: Re: SCI-Tech Display Drivers] X-mailer: Pegasus Mail v3.22 Message-ID: Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com In the last century, Joseph Morris wrote: > > I for myself have (almost) ready many system extensions > > for (DR-)DOS, which I would like to polish for > > publishing once DR-DOS would have become really open... > > What do you have in mind? Very brief only, as it would fill pages to go into details: Any DOS environment: - FreeKEYB 7 (for FreeDOS, DR-DOS and any other DOS), Axel's and mine much enhanced international keyboard driver with multi-monitor screen saver, extended keyboard buffer, 4DOS KSTACK emulation, Copy cursor for copy/paste between multiple screen pages and applications, macro support, calculator, easy access to greek and scientific symbols, apo/accent/umlaut translation and literally hundereds of other smart enhancements making life easier at the prompt. Self-loadhighable (even on XTs) at a memory footprint of ca. 9 Kb with all the features included. Next version still under development (for many years now since good old K3PLUS times), but we'll be reaching release state soon... ;-) - Updated utilities and revised MPDOSTIPs (the issues on my web page are quite dated). Related to DR-DOS, although independently developed by me (it depends on Caldera/Lineo if this may happen to become part of Lineo's next DR-DOS box, like many of the 7.02/7.03 enhancements were): - Much enhanced COMMAND.COM shell more compatible with 4DOS, Win9x and NT CMD, plus a number of features for better coexistance in an Unix (Linux) environment. - (Once more) enhanced NLS system (client/server model that even works with remote resources) with support for up to 50 codepages simultanously (including all codepages supported by Eastern European DOSes, OS/2, NT, 98, Linux, Mac, ISO, etc.) and more, support for multiple COUNTRY.SYS files at the same time, even DR-DOS and MS-DOS files mixed. Support for Hebrew and Arabian extras. User definable extensions. User definable country data overriding system data, making it easy to have a context-sensitive NLS system depending on user, application, working directory, etc. Multi-lingual message server for external message files. Support for all DR DOS issues downto 5.0. All this at virtually no extra memory footprint thanks to the new NLSFUNC 4.xx technology I wrote back in 1997 (NLSFUNC 4.00 is already part of DR-DOS 7.03). - Much enhanced and fixed FDISK utility. - Much enhanced external utilities, like DISKCOPY (including better disk image support), DISKCOMP, FORMAT, SYS, GRAPHICS, DOSKEY, GRAFTABL, KEYB, and many more. - Alot of kernel fixes and enhancements. - Some memory manager/task manager enhancements and fixes. - More "intelligent" and flexible boot loader/method. - Enhanced CDROM support. - LBA support. - (Unicode support on DR-DOS, e.g. for Java and Internet applications - still a research project only, but based on the new NLSFUNC mentioned above.) - More... However, at present all these enhancements either require to some extend the original DR-DOS sources or only make sense in a DR-DOS environment due to its enhanced features. Some will not run on MS-DOS or FreeDOS as long as they don't support enhanced DR-DOS APIs. Matthias ------------------------------------------------------------------- Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany eMail: Web : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html -------------------------------------------------------------------