Hi everybody, while we got a lot of feedback about the malfunction of the monthly reminder mail, there has been almost none about the FDAPM and UHDD updates recently. So please check out those new driver versions and share your experiences :-) "Jack Ellis has released an updated UHDD driver. The new version uses mostly caching logic for noncached work, saving 650+ bytes! UHDD.SYS is now less than 5K, for "boot" diskettes etc. All UHDD features, switches and cache speeds remain unchanged. The "/B" noncached UHDD, not often used, is about 300 bytes larger than before. We've mirrored the new release on the FreeDOS files archive at Ibiblio, in the uhdd/2021-10-30/ directory. Thanks Jack!" https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/ellis/uhdd/2021-10-30/uhdd_2021-10-30.zip This means you now get a very powerful driver while spending very little disk space. To underline the improvement, Jack has stopped working on UIDE: You can no longer use the excuse that UHDD plus UDVD2 would be too large, because they are no longer large and they clearly have more power than UIDE :-) Please add UHDD to the distro "base" category and move UIDE to the extra/bonus category, to keep UIDE only for reference. I guess https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=18304 which is about compiling MPLAYER in DOS being slow should have used UHDD to make the process a lot faster ;-) About FDAPM, ECM writes: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=18399 Announcement - FDAPM extended I extended Eric's FDAPM some, mostly based on my TSR example. To quote the blurb on my website:
The power savings utility for FreeDOS, originally by Eric Auer. Extended to use IISP headers, an AMIS multiplexer, and to provide the UNLOAD command, with the advanced deinstallation method.
Note that I tweaked the TSR installation a bit, but I did not perform a total conversion to my optimal installation method. I also did not implement my TSR's option switches such as /N install new even if already installed) and /X= (try a specific AMIS multiplex number first). As is, it assumes that there is only ever one instance of the resident FDAPM. And the check for a resident program still uses the old POWER services on the traditional multiplex interrupt 2Fh. Only the newly added UNLOAD command searches for the resident using the Alternate Multiplex Interrupt 2Dh. The repo and a release file for download are available at https://pushbx.org/ecm/web/#projects-fdapm. (End of Announcement) I guess it woudl be cool to also extend FDAPM to support ACPI tables larger than 64k, by looking at overlapping 64k snippets, so in case ECM is reading this: Thank you for considering the idea in your next FDAPM update :-) Note that FDAPM does various things for POWER compatibility, but improved TSR load/unload support certainly has advantages, so thanks for the IISP / AMIS / UNLOAD stuff :-) Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
