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Free ROM-DOS available?

R

RuudB

Experienced Member
Joined
May 10, 2011
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158
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Heerlen - Netherlands
Hallo allemaal,

This question has been triggered by a previous thread, "Terminal Card for IBM compatibles" , started by Shadow Lord. He asked for an 8-bits card with several items including "Free-DOS/ROM-DOS in ROM for full DOS capability". I googled for a DOS in ROM and found some thing but nothing free. (or didn't search good enough)

My question: does any one of you know of a DOS that resides in ROM and is free?

I realize that a simple EPROM of 8K won't do and most probably bank switching is needed. But hardware isn't the problem for me, I can solder it.

Any info, link or what ever is welcome!
 
I'm sure that I was playing with something the other week, that had DOS in ROM. But for the life of me, I can't remember what it was.

Edited to add: I remember now. It was a Tandy 1000HX, with MSDOS 2.11 in ROM. So not free.
 
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Would a Disc-On-Chip be usable ? There are several types, I have some 2000 series with a fixed bootblock (not sure if it will boot on an XT class system) and also a Millenium version in which you can reprogram the bootblock also. Once booted it acts as a harddisk and you can use the rest of the flash for the OS (FreeDos for example).
 
One of these days I need to sit down and figure out how all this ROM boot stuff works, I would LOVE to replace the MS-DOS 3 ROM on my Tandy 1100FD with an image that includes a driver for a ZIP drive, or some other parallel port mass storage setup.
 
If it already uses a msdos 3 rom, it could be fairly easy to change the chip for a programmable one and reflash the dos you want, i mean, adding new drivers, changing autoexec.bat and config.sys, etc...
 
byates said:
http://www.rayer.g6.cz/romos/romose.htm
Click to expand...
I had a look at the sources and the comment gave the answer to the question I had: how is it done? In fact it is so simple that I still don't understand that I did not see it: it is a matter of changing the interrupt vectors for INT 13h and INT 19h and inserting you own routines. The most stupid thing is that I played a lot with XT-IDE and that program does in fact the same. But extending the idea from a piece of hardware with cylinders, heads and tracks to a piece of silicon didn't occur.

Nice to know :)
 
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