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Re: DOS development hardware?

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Nomen Nescio  <nobody@dizum.com> wrote:
>Oh that is good news. Thanks for telling me, because I was afraid I would
>need to find a SATA driver. Boy this is confusing. Does that mean I can
>mount a CD drive in DOS if my BIOS supports it too? Or is that too much to
>hope for ;) The 1.4M floppy limit gets old fast!

There aren't many kinds of drivers typically used on MS-DOS.  Basically,
it's just network drivers, mouse drivers, and CD-ROM drivers.  Anything
else is normally handled by the BIOS (eg. hard disk, keyboard, display),
or the application using the device (eg. sound card, printer).

To use a CD-ROM under MS-DOS you normally need a driver (eg. OAKCDROM.SYS
for an IDE/SATA optical drive), and MSCDEX.EXE which adds support for
the ISO 9660 file system.  If you boot MS-DOS from a CD-ROM however,
the BIOS will emulate the CD-ROM as if it were a floppy or hard drive.
The same thing will happen if you boot from a USB drive.  This emulation
is only enabled if you boot from the device.

Modern Ethernet devices, including ones found on modern motherboards,
often have NDIS 2 drivers available for use with MS-DOS networking
software.  You can also normally use modern USB mice with MS-DOS as most
BIOS's can emulate USB mice as PS/2 mice, allowing standard mice drivers
to work.

MS-DOS is suprisingly well supported on modern machines.

					Ross Ridge

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //	  

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Re: DOS development hardware? Ross Ridge <rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> - 2011-01-27 18:07 -0500

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