From: "daSilva, Joe" 

The key advantage of DR-DOS in achieving the maximum
free conventional memory is the DPMS driver, which
allows DPMS-aware drivers such as NWCDEX and NWCACHE
(also, some builds of Netware, I believe) to load
almost entirely into extended memory.

With a bit of work, you can achieve over 100K extra
free conventional memory compared to an equivalent
MS-DOS configuration.

DR-DOS also supports task switching and multi-tasking,
although for me these weren't stable, unfortunately.

However, the official releases of DR-DOS only support
LBA and FAT32 using additional drivers, which totally
negates the memory benefits of using DR-DOS. Udo's
enhanced OpenDOS 7.01 provides native support of LBA
and FAT32, so if you're interested in pursuing DR-DOS
as your O/S, that's the way to go.

As for W95, the original version (MS-DOS 7.0) did NOT
support FAT32. I don't know if it supported LBA, but
that point would be mute, anyway. It was W95A (MS-DOS
7.1) that introduced FAT32 support.

Similarly for PC-DOS, version 7.0 and 2000 did not
support FAT32 (nor I believe, LBA). Version 7.1, which
doesn't seem to have been released as a stand-alone
product, does support FAT32 and LBA.

As for LFN support, the command processors of DR-DOS
7.02/7.02 (possibly also OpenDOS 7.01) will work with
Henrik Haftmann's DOSLFN driver. However, Caldera never
did implement this stuff properly, so deleting a file
for example, can result in invalid LFN entries in the
directory.

MS-DOS 7.1's command processor also will work with
Henrik Haftmann's DOSLFN driver. PC-DOS 7.1 however,
won't (it probably supports LFN under Windoze but
assumes there's no third-party LFN functionality
avaliable, such as DOSLFN).

Joe.

> 

Joe daSilva
Senior Electronic Engineer
Landis+Gyr
Phone: +61 2 9690 7309
joe.dasilva{at}landisgyr.com
http://www.landisgyr.com/

Manage Energy Better

-----Original Message-----
> From: RiverWind [mailto:riverwind{at}shellworld.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, 4 February 2009 3:54 AM
> To: Open Dos Discussion Group
> Subject: Specific Technical Questions Concerning DRDOS
> 
> 
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Well good people, I hate to impose upon you yet again. I have
> downloaded a file called "drdos73.exe." I believe that when the
> executable is run it will produce multiple installation disks for
> DRDOS7.3.
> 
> Now then, I am interested in how I would go about tweaking memory
> in order to hopefully surpass conventional memory or perhaps use it
> more advantageously. You see, MSDOS has its "memmaker" and
"emm386"
> with which the machine's memory is maximized as much as possible.
> Moreover, PCDOS put out by IBM has its "emm386" and also
> "ramboost." Now ramboost is by far one of the best memory
> management programs I've ever seen. However, it still seems
> restricted to the confines of conventional memory. My question is
> this. To what extent, if any, is DRDOS able to circumnavigate this
> restriction? For that matter is such a thing even possible?
> 
> Lastly, does DRDOS provide any sort of multi-tasking facility which
> would allow one to run more than one DOS application at the same
> time, like say through a shell feature? Does DRDOS support long
> file names? Lastly, what kind of tutorial documentation does it
> come with?
> 
> Bright Blessings,
> RiverWind
> 
> 

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