Re: UMB and 386/486 --> status of FreeDOS emm386 etc.

>
> I just stopped further developement of EMM386, because my
> goals are reached; VCPI is left as an exercise to the reader.
>

There are however a lot of things missing. Not only VCPI, but even the
simple things like being able to load the program from the command line are
missing. The UMB routines are liable for a  good optimization and you cannot
even think about using VCPI without a full implementation of EMS 4.0.

So there is certainly still a lot that needs to be done. Basically you do
not want to do it, and we respect this. But looking at the sources is not
very easy. They are not very easy to read and figure out.

What should be done is a good clean-up of the sources, before we do anything
else. We should restructure them so that somebody just downloading the
sources doesn't take one peek and just throws away the sources. With the
sources in the current situation it is virtually impossible to move a single
statement without getting into some serious problems.

What i would start with is splitting up the sources in seperate files, like:

emmbegin.asm : contains the startup code in assemby
emmstart.c: contains the startup code in C (the command line parsing, also
move some code from usefull.c here)
V86.asm: contains the basic code for the V86 task handling (basically, all
of the V86_SEGMENT, without the EMS routines).
emm.asm: the routines that implement the ems functions (should be extended
for EMS 4.0).
desctbls.inc: the descriptor tables.
paging.asm: routines to work on the page table.

What than could be added is:

vcpi.asm: the routines that implement the VCPI functions.

Of course all the comments need to be translated into english and more
information on the ems routines might also make everything a lot more
comprehensible.

Last, but not least, Tom's emm386 is the one on the maintainers list,
therefor it is the one we should work with. We have never done it in any
other way in the past.

Imre


> tom
>
> ----------
> list options/archives/etc.: http://www.topica.com/lists/fd-dev
> unsubscribe: send blank email to: [email protected]
>
>