Hi all, > 1) Is it a bad practice to use the include monochrome area switch with > MS-DOS and its EMM386?
I think yes, unless you desperately need the 32k extra UMB space. Whenever part of the mono area is modified by something which wants to access the graphics card, you are in trouble. Normal color VGA cards do support enabling the mono area and even an 128 kb frame buffer which spans the whole axxx and bxxx segments. So the DEFAULT should be NOT to use the mono area for UMB - you can always HINT people that they can use mono for UMB if none of their programs breaks by doing so. > 2) Did it appear that I was suggesting how to configure FreeDOS? Partially, yes. AND the whole how-to was quite interesting, so I would suggest to make a technote of it and add it to our technote collection. > - may EMM386 autoinclude given region in some way, if there will not be > detected mono adapter/mode? QEMM386 does this. AUTOinclude does not sound good for something which potentially causes worse system stability. Which reminds me that VDS should probably be on by default but on the other hand is probably not stable enouh for that yet? And, by the way, what exactly where the effects of the SB switch for EMM386? Would be cool if that stuff could be either (if it has no bad side effects) on by default or could have some auto-enable feature which turns on the SB stuff when needed (for SBPCI DOS drivers). > - what happen if I=B000-B800 will be used on system with mono adapter/mode? Mapping is stronger than physical RAM, you could say, so the screen will stay empty and the data which SHOULD go to the screen will instead over- write UMB contents, and the system will crash. Eric PS on FreeDOS bundle thread: The ISO is not FULL, it is BASE-with-sources, AND still too many people end up with FreeDOS on HARDDISK when they were only trying to run it directly from CD. On the other hand, THAT does create a proper config / autoexec for them ;-). It is nice that the ISO now also contains most of ODIN as "live system" for use from CD, but it would be nice, too, to have a MINI ISO which does not contain sources and does not contain more tools than needed for install, giving a 5 MB ISO. The NORMAL ISO can grow to 15 MB or so, with sources, ODIN, docs... As shown in my Brezel experiment, MANY FreeDOS files fit on as little as 4-5 MB (including a zip with all documentation, the help system, localization...). Was meant to become a 3 floppy distro, if anybody has time to complete it... 1 floppy MAIN, 1 floppy DOCS, 1 floppy bigger-tools-and-localization-kit. ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by: Beat the post-holiday blues Get a FREE limited edition SourceForge.net t-shirt from ThinkGeek. It's fun and FREE -- well, almost....http://www.thinkgeek.com/sfshirt _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
