2024-02-18

In the last three weeks several developments occurred. Last Friday, I also created release 7 of lDebug.

Several bugfixes:

• /MS= didn't allow sector sizes other than 8192 to be specified
• /MS= and /MO= didn't accept hexadecimal input with 0x prefix
• All switches allow equals sign to separate keywords from the switches
• If /BO /IR is used, actually write the FSIBOOT stage rather than corrupting it with an all-1s pattern

The /G switch is newly supported. /G auto will query the DOS for the currently used CHS Heads, CHS Sectors, and hidden sectors, just like FreeDOS SYS does.

The hg repo is updated with the most recent commits of Debug/X. The downloads/fddebug/ directory now contains the release archives of versions 2.00, 2.01, and 2.02.

Comments on int 13h function 08h changing es were added. No code change was needed for this.

The test result writer kernel (testwrit) was updated to use the ldQueryPatchValue at all. Further, a new flag 40h was defined to instruct testwrit to skip all redetection and trust the values detected by iniload.

• Update lz4 tool used to compress
• Add /G switch to instsect command help
• Change dpb.eld to allow residently installing it
• Add variable.eld commands VARIABLES ON, VARIABLES OFF, VARIABLES RUN
• Add hint.eld and hintoth.eld. The hint.eld displays this debugger's listing hints to another debugger's AMIS message service. The hintoth.eld displays another debugger's listing hints to this debugger's terminal.
• Add eldiListing field to store the listing filename of every resident ELD
• In eldcomp clear the eldiListing field
• amismsg.eld: Increase buffer size from 128 Bytes to 384 Bytes, function 40h returns code 0FEh if buffer overflows
• dosdir.eld, bootdir.eld: Display date as blanks if it is a zero (would display as "1980-00-00")
• Do not list RM command in main online help any longer
• Update main online help dump in manual, adding ATTACH and dropping RM, RN, X
• Note in manual sections on X, RM, RN commands that they are disabled by default and can be installed from ELDs
• boot.asm: Comment on int 13h function 08h changing es, no code change needed
• Support commas around run WHILE, SILENT, ss REVERSE, SILENT, RANGE, if keywords
• Update LSM and manual news section for release 7
• Add release7 branch

The loader overlap blog post and its corresponding bug report were created. The ecm-boot-overlap branch and a Pull Request were also added. The prior PR, ecm-boot32-dl, was merged.

Some discussion of GRUB4DOS, lDebug, chainloading and loading other kernels, and EDR-DOS occurred in a bug report to the FreeDOS kernel.

Little progress was made in the new hang bug on installing a Book8088 USB driver. Some talk in that bug report concerning how to load lDebug as a bootloaded debugger happened.

An earlier Book8088 bug where the ROM-BIOS corrupts memory if DS != 40h on LBA function calls was discovered.

A commit to the kernel repo broke the makefile for GNU make, relating to how the country.sys file is built.

A DOS Watcom 386 build of the kernel was added to the CI by Andrew. He also set it up to run the CI boot test I added a while ago.

The 186 machine check was adapted to also detect NEC V20/V30 as an 186.

As documented in an earlier blog post, I helped rr debug an incompatibility in the way SvarCOM reads its command line tail. The unexpected format was caused by a bug in Dos Navigator.

The sources for the NewDOS collection of applications were released under the GNU GPL v2-only recently. Back in the day I used to use their resident CLOCK program, until I replaced it by my own lClock.

I reported a bug to this project. It aims to trace programs to automatically emulate 186+ instructions when running on an 8086 or 8088 machine. The bug concerned handling of int 21h function 00h.