Message-ID: <007b01c08c51$98c71f40$0508e289@mpaul> From: "Matthias Paul" To: References: <01FD6EC775C6D4119CDF0090273F74A4021F15 AT emwatent02 DOT meters DOT com DOT au> Subject: Re: using DRDOS7.05 COMMAND.COM with WinMe Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 04:02:32 +0100 Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id IAA16970 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com 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