How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

DOS specific questions.
D.J.Peters
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How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by D.J.Peters »

How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC ? (no DosBox or virtual PC)
I mean FreeBASIC self does not fit on a floppy do you use RAR and split it on different disks
or is there a network card DOS driver where you can use a kind of FTP command ?

Joshy
caseih
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by caseih »

You could use an ISA IDE adapter card, and then a standard SD Card to IDE adapter. I have seen such things in my travels. Might come as a DIY kit (board, solder on chips, etc). Not sure how they deal with the BIOS extension, but I've read there are such things available.

Alternatively you could use a null modem cable and transmit it from a modern PC to an old hard drive with zmodem.

There definitely are network stacks for MS-DOS that support TCP/IP. Maybe even nfs.
marcov
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by marcov »

I see quite some retro computers use laplink (parallel port<->parallel port) to load data onto their dos pcs, with a parallel to usb converter on one side.

I just saw it on fairs, don't know what software they used on the non-dos side to manage the usb parallel though.

But the parallel port is not too bad in speed, and later dos even come with (iirc) interlink as driver. It might be worth a few googles
D.J.Peters
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by D.J.Peters »

Good Tip the parallel port thank you :-)
Should be easy to create a simple DOS <--> WIndows XP or 7 8-bit protocol for data transfer.
(On Windows 10 there isn't any of this hardware I/O port drivers any more)

Joshy
marcov
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by marcov »

If the machine can run any new OS and has network, it might be easier to have a dual boot or a bootable live CD, mount the drive, transfer files, and reboot to dos.

Even with laplink, for really _big_ files, it is slow. On my dos testing machine (a P-II 233 laptop) I used to dual boot to win98 and then transfer files. Occasionally for the big transfers, and do small potato stuff via laplink
caseih
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by caseih »

D.J.Peters wrote:On Windows 10 there isn't any of this hardware I/O port drivers any more)
Really?

Pretty sure parallel and serial ports work just like they do in other versions of Windows.
marcov
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by marcov »

I'm 100% certain that serial works, I use it daily. Now that you say it, I also have combined serial and parallel cards, and the lpt's show up, even though I never use them (I got them for the serial ports)
D.J.Peters
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by D.J.Peters »

Since Windows 7 you need a port I/O driver to access harware ports from user space assembler "out dx,al" or "in dx,al"
I used the Parallel port with stepper motor drivers and an port I/O driver like InOut32 and InOut64.
This driver was open source and worked for XP and was signed for Windows 7/8 and Vista also.

On Windows 10 32/64-bit the LPT port are shown as a working device in the device manager.
It works only as an printer only port you can send stuff to an LPT connected printer PC-->LPT (only paper out is an input bit)
but you can't program the LPT port any more (changing the direction of the bits or reading 8 bit etc.)

Serial I/O is full supported on Windows 10 I tested it with many micro-controllers and connected retro oscilloscopes and logic analyzer.
(MC's from AVR's, ST8, STM32, and the funky Propeller Chip from Parallax)

Joshy
marcov
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by marcov »

D.J.Peters wrote:Since Windows 7 you need a port I/O driver to access harware ports from user space assembler "out dx,al" or "in dx,al"
I used the Parallel port with stepper motor drivers and an port I/O driver like InOut32 and InOut64.
This driver was open source and worked for XP and was signed for Windows 7/8 and Vista also.
(afaik you needed it for all 64-bit versions too)
On Windows 10 32/64-bit the LPT port are shown as a working device in the device manager.
It works only as an printer only port you can send stuff to an LPT connected printer PC-->LPT (only paper out is an input bit)
but you can't program the LPT port any more (changing the direction of the bits or reading 8 bit etc.)
Can't via dos/portIO or can't via Windows driver?
D.J.Peters
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by D.J.Peters »

To day I got for an old laptop a SONY VAIO docking station (port replicator) from eBay.
I was in hope I can use Windows 7 laptop to control my DIY CNC machine via LPT
or use the laptop as LPT file server for the "retro" DOS PC.

I plugged a DC-power adapter and laptop in the docking station no LPT port was shown in the Windows 7 (32-bit) device manager !
(I searched in the list for the LPT I/O address range also)

"google" told me the LPT ports on SONY docking station are virtual printer ports only :-(
(it will shown in the printer dialog but not as a real I/O port with a BIOS addess range)

Next time I will write my own "serial" file transfer program to get more stuff on the retro floppy only PC.
(I will use data compression before transfering over slow serial connection)

Joshy
rugxulo
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by rugxulo »

D.J.Peters wrote:How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC ? (no DosBox or virtual PC)
You mean a legacy machine with no bootable USB? So you can't use a jump drive (made by e.g. RUFUS)? Those are very convenient!

FreeDOS 1.3rc2 is out and has several ways to install (see readme).

So usually install from USB, CD, floppy, network, etc.
I mean FreeBASIC self does not fit on a floppy do you use RAR and split it on different disks
You could use 7-Zip (either Win32's 7ZA.EXE with Japheth's HX or a DJGPP port of p7zip 9.20.1 or 16.02).

Not sure about auto-splitting and joining archives, but it's easy to work around that. .7z is much more efficient than .ZIP because of bigger dictionary. (RARX from 2010 was 32-bit EMX/DOS, the shareware is still around, if you prefer that.)
or is there a network card DOS driver where you can use a kind of FTP command ?
FreeDOS -> Software List -> Networking

Packet drivers are somewhat rare (Crynwr), but if you find one that works (even if only under VBox or QEMU), that can help to fill up your virtual floppy image for rawriting / copying / extracting later (MTools or 7z or libguestfs). See MetaDOS.

So yes, you can use Curl, Wget, Links2, FTP, etc. (N.B. Curl's website points to Michael Kostylev, but his site is always down. He's done some good builds for some of these things. They just haven't been properly vetted and mirrored.)
rugxulo
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by rugxulo »

marcov wrote:I see quite some retro computers use laplink (parallel port<->parallel port) to load data onto their dos pcs, with a parallel to usb converter on one side.

But the parallel port is not too bad in speed, and later dos even come with (iirc) interlink as driver.
How about File Maven? "Freeware file manager with high speed PC-to-PC file transfers via serial or parallel cable", "LapLink-style file transfers with 32-bit CRC error checking".
rugxulo
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by rugxulo »

D.J.Peters wrote: Next time I will write my own "serial" file transfer program to get more stuff on the retro floppy only PC.
(I will use data compression before transfering over slow serial connection)
You mean like Ken Silverman's CCOPY? "Copies files at 115,200 baud using the serial port. Uses compression. Automatically skips files AND parts of files that haven't changed. For example, if you appended some bytes at the end of a huge text file, CCOPY will update the file very quickly."
D.J.Peters
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by D.J.Peters »

@rugxulo first part are a kind of "simple file server" written in FreeBASIC that can send,recive,read,write,compress and decompress files and folders on any Windows / Linux host computer (may be a Raspberry Pi floating around here).

The second part are a command like "ftp" for the serial port running on DOS written in FreeBASIC for DOS

But that is not at top on my to do list :-)

Joshy
NorbyDroid
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Re: How do you get FreeBASIC for DOS on a real retro PC?

Post by NorbyDroid »

The way I have done it back in the 9x/xp days was to use a null-modem cable on the parallel ports of both systems and then in dos using a program called “File Maven” i would have one as host and the other computer connects and transfers files from the host. There is also usb support in DOS for systems with usb ya can also do. One orher item mentioned is get an adapter that converts sd to say IDE and use that.
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