We need a few key developements, like a driver format. Once we have drivers, we'll be equal to DOS in capability, we'll just have to make the programs to "flesh it out", so to speak.

Your right tonyMac, we do need to be able to load and unload drivers for Dex4u to be fully useable as a Dos Extreme :wink:. To this end i am going to make Dex4u's ramdisk, as a separate loadable driver, as a test bed and proof of concept for loadable drivers etc in Dex4u.

Awesome. I look foreward to seeing it, and it's format.

Getting fancy now! :shock: I'm looking forward to trying Dex4U on real hardware (in a few months :P), but by then there should be some neat-o stuff ready :D. Btw. How are you planning on doing Ram Disks? Cheers, DH.

The ramdisk will be a virtual floppy set to b:\ drive, you will be able to load a full floppy to it or load things like screenshots, for later load to floppy, hdd etc. The basics of the module (driver) interface is still in the design faze, i have lots of ideas, which i will try and see which works best.

A little recommendation to you dex: don't make it b:\ only. I know that people will be writing other drivers, and trust me: there will be conflicts. I can't remember the exact senario, but having three floppies on MS-DOS 5 (iirc), will not work. Two are regarded as the same or something. While this _is_ obsecure, i don't doubt people will try to have several ram disks at once. Not good :(. I have a question regarding batches and such. I recall you saying batches were a security flaw (or possibly exploitable). How do you go about doing Autoexec.bat and config.sys type stuff? I REALLY don't want to go and type "load ramdisk {bla}" (or run, depending on how you do it) every time i boot. I don't really plan on using Dex4U for anything minus testing/playing (i just don't like dos enough to do more than that :() but I think this is an important question (seeing how much i personally use them). Cheers, DH. ps. if that wasn't you who said that, my bad!

With the multiple floppy disk scenario, that was 16 bit mode, perhaps with 32 bit mode that issue won't arise. "a:" and "b:" in this case are merely labels to latch to them, there is no real hirarchy to the drive layout. The letters were chosen to add familiarity. They could as easily be reffered to as "Floppy1", or "Outdated magnetic media 1" :lol:

@Dragon_Hilord, I have had second thoughts on batch files and will be making a form of batch/script language to read from a startup file on booting to load drivers etc. Also you maybe underestimating Dex4u, if you see it just as a Dos clone, as once we make it full module, it can go in any direction programmers, want it to.

"Outdated magnetic media 1", great! Hope things don't turn to something like this: "Dex4u, the OS which runs completly from an Outdated Megnetic Media Disk (OMMD). What a piece of........" I'll stop.... Jas2o

hahaha, I was being a little rediculous with the names. I was trying to underscore our seperation from DOS on the functional level.

@tonyMac: Understood. It's just that the fact that DEX4U is dos, so it may have similar/same downfalls. I personally like the Object Oriented approach and have come up with a simple "@" naming system: cd @fd0 You get the idea :D. @Dex: You've seen the light 8). Long live homebrew hacking! Cheers, DH.

It's just that the fact that DEX4U is dos, so it may have similar/same downfalls. Well, it is disk based, and it's an operating system, so it could be called DOS I guess... :lol: The code struscture is completely different, only the use of an interrupt call structure and similar user interface really put the 2 in the same category.as far as I know, Dex4u doesn't share any code at all with DOS, at least not the last time I had an updated copy of the source...

Heres what append, when i start to think about writing a OS many moons ago, everyone used win 95/98, then came linux. I so much wanted to use it, but thought why do they do s**t like "/dev/fd0 /mnt" instead of A: . I thought when i make my OS i will base it on the commands of dos, so everyone can use it easily, but by the time i had got going, people had moved on from dos As for dos like, it only as far as commands go, from a design, it more like http://v2os.v2.nl/old/ PS: Where would you even get dos code from ?.

DOS code can be gotten from the FreeDOS project, it's a home-brew DOS compatible. As for using /dev/fd0 or /dev/hda1 , it makes sense in servers and mainframes, where the removal of a disk in Windows would change all of the drive letters (In XP somehow drives retain their letters, I really don't even want to know how). Using the unified architecture allows for devices to be accessed unifromly, and being logically grouped into a folder helps them be found. Only it's D@4n confusing for new users...

xp has some weird *nix backing that goes like "bus(0)device(0)partition(0)" or something. look in boot.cfg or whatever that file is for it. I like the *nix system. In *DOS, I could never mount an image file before linux, and I simply _*LOVE*_ straight GCC compared to some derrived versions out there (MigWin, and the now dead DJgcc). In the end, it's all prefrence :D Cheers, DH.