The following is a list of internal commands supported by MSX-DOS. This meant that it was possible to have both, a 5¼" floppy disk drive and a 3½" disk drive, and the user could boot from either one of them depending on which drive had a bootable floppy in it. Also, because there could be more than one floppy disk controller in two or more cartridge slots, MSX-DOS could boot from several different floppy disk drives. One major difference between MSX-DOS and MS-DOS 2.x was that MSX-DOS did not use the "boot sector" on the floppy to boot, but instead booted using the BDOS ROM routines, and, in a fashion much like MS-DOS 1.25, it used the FAT ID value from the first byte of the FAT to select file system parameter profiles for its FAT12 file system instead of from the BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) in the boot sector. If MSX-DOS is not invoked and Disk BASIC starts, a BASIC program named "AUTOEXEC.BAS" will be carried out instead, if present. Also, due to the BDOS ROM, basic file access capabilities were available even without a command interpreter by using extended BASIC commands.Īt initial startup, COMMAND.COM looks for an optional batch file named AUTOEXEC.BAT and, if it exists, executes the commands specified in there.
#Dos floppy disk emulator software#
At the same time, the original BIOS ROMs could still be accessed through a "memory bank switch" mechanism, so that DOS-based software could still use BIOS calls to control the hardware and other software mechanisms the main ROMs supplied. In that case, the BDOS bypassed the BASIC ROMs, so that the whole 64 KB of address space of the Z80 microprocessor inside the MSX computer could be used for the DOS or for other boot-able disks, for example disk based games. It not only added floppy disk support commands to MSX BASIC, but also a booting system, with which it was possible to boot a real disk operating system. Once MSX-DOS has been loaded, the system searches the MSX-DOS disk for the COMMAND.COM file and loads it into memory. Spectravideo also released an MSX-DOS disk in conjunction with the SVI-707 which could be loaded into an MSX system.
The standard BIOS of an unexpanded MSX computer did not have any floppy disk support, so the additional floppy disk expansion system came with its own BIOS extension ROM (built-in on the disk controller) called the BDOS. Like other DOSes, third party GUIs can be installed.MSX-DOS and the extended BASIC with 3½-inch floppy disk support were simultaneously developed by Microsoft and Spectravideo as a software and hardware standard for the MSX home computer standard, to add disk capabilities to BASIC and to give the system a cheaper software medium than Memory Cartridges, and a more powerful storage system than cassette tape. It uses a command line interface, however PC-DOS 4 and later, like MS-DOS, also included the optional graphical DOSShell program. This last version of DOS is still in use by some hardware developers usually embedded into recovery tools and BIOS flashers. The last version released by IBM was PC-DOS 7.1, which had updates all the way up until 2003. The first version of PC-DOS was released in August 1981 with the IBM PC.
#Dos floppy disk emulator driver#
The major differences between PC-DOS and MS-DOS were only in terms of driver support and built in programs until version 6.1 where development diverged.įor Microsoft and other OEM DOS releases, please see the MS-DOS product page.
#Dos floppy disk emulator Pc#
Its direct competitors on the PC at the time were CP/M-86 and UCSD p-System. Although not the only OS available for the IBM PC when it came out, it quickly became popular due to its low cost in comparison to the others. Versions of PC-DOS paralleled that of MS-DOS up until version 6.1, where PC-DOS was independently maintained by IBM up until 7.1, the last version. IBM PC-DOS was an IBM branded version of MS-DOS licensed from Microsoft for use on the IBM PC system.