The MASM Forum

Miscellaneous => 16 bit DOS Programming => Topic started by: Shintaro on January 01, 2022, 05:04:10 PM

Title: Win 3.x and 386Max
Post by: Shintaro on January 01, 2022, 05:04:10 PM
Hi,
For the people that programmed around that era of Windows 3.x.
I see that 386 Max was bundled Microsoft C.What I don't know is, why?
Did it make a difference with MASM and/or Microsoft C?

Did you use 386Max because it came bundled with Microsoft products? Or because it seemed to make running and testing code easier when using Microsoft tools?

Or did you just use Qemm or some other memory manager?

Cheers.

Title: Re: Win 3.x and 386Max
Post by: Gunther on January 04, 2022, 10:33:41 PM
Shintaro,

if I understand you correctly, you want to experiment with DOS. Why not?

If I were you, I would use FreeDOS (https://www.freedos.org/). It comes with sources and has its own memory manager JEMM. As far as I know this one was written by Japheth and is very good. You can run
FreeDOS as a virtual machine or native on a USB stick. With this you should have everything. With 386 Max, you just have a binary clump without knowing what's actually going on.

I hope this helps you.
Title: Re: Win 3.x and 386Max
Post by: Shintaro on January 05, 2022, 03:55:35 PM
Hi,
I find tinkering with MS-DOS strangely satisfying, odd huh.But anyway I found that the code for 6.0 was listed over on the BetaArchive.
So I was going to give that a go.  I have period hardware (486DX2), so that's not a problem. Actually, I was going to add a 386DX.
I am sure that DOS source is forbidden, so I'll limit my questions to code.

Cheers,
Craig
Title: Re: Win 3.x and 386Max
Post by: Gunther on January 06, 2022, 12:08:20 AM
Craig,

that's your decision. But if you want to go deeper, you won't get around FreeDOS. It's not just the large number of tools there.
It is even possible to build a Beowulf cluster (https://dosbeowulf.tripod.com/) with FreeDOS. I saw one just recently at work at CERN.
I wonder if this works with MSDOS, DRDOS or PCDOS? I have reasonable doubts about that.

But it is - as already said - your decision.