1. Interface to DOS info
- Posted by John Kinne <JDKINNE at MIAMIU.BITNET> Jun 25, 1996
- 2513 views
Hello All and welcome to the list. I have been programming in Euphoria for a month or so. I am writing a program that will install network software. This is my first major DOS project: I am normally a mainframer. I would like to collect a bit of info about the DOS machines: I can get the DOS version, hard drive size, amount of conventional memory by using interrupts. From contents on the hard drive I can determine the existence of Win31. I can not find anyway to determine extended memory size (I can trap the output of the MEM command but that assumes the existence of the MEM command. The format of the output from MEM changes from one DOS release to another.) Processor (I can use P.D. SNIFF, I'd like to get it directly from inside euphoria) processor speed (I don't have anyway to get this) Manufacturer Model Thanks for any ideas, John Kinne Miami University
2. Re: Interface to DOS info
- Posted by David Alan Gay <moggie at INTERLOG.COM> Jun 27, 1996
- 2488 views
John Kinne Thanks for work on the listserv. It is so far a lot of fun :) >I would like to collect a bit of info about the DOS machines: I can get >the DOS version, hard drive size, amount of conventional memory >by using interrupts. From contents on the hard drive I can determine the >existence of Win31. I can not find anyway to determine I know of many shareware programs that will dump the settings of your system into a text file (or can be tricked into doing so by using DOS piping commands to reroute text screen display to file). The problem with these programs is that they do not tend to be right most of the time. One computer program thought my P-90 was a 486SX. I know some Assembler programmers can get the information by reading the BIOS data somewhere, but being Assembler-illiterate, I do not know how to do that. Hope this helps David Gay
3. Re: Interface to DOS info
- Posted by John Kinne <JDKINNE at MIAMIU.BITNET> Jun 27, 1996
- 2478 views
>>I would like to collect a bit of info about the DOS machines: I can get >>the DOS version, hard drive size, amount of conventional memory >>by using interrupts. From contents on the hard drive I can determine the >>existence of Win31. I can not find anyway to determine > >... >I know some Assembler programmers can get the information by reading the >BIOS data somewhere, but being Assembler-illiterate, I do not know how to do >that. > >... > Yes, and the Euphoria PEEK instruction would let me read data directly from memory. Being a mainframer, I expect that DOS keeps lots of interesting data in memory - like my mainframe systems do. My mainframe systems come with logic manuals that detail what is kept in memory, and how to find it. When I took on this project I expected that reporting the model number of the machine the program is executing on would be trivial. Not so. X-Mailer: MailBook 95.01.263 I have found very generic descriptions of how DOS uses memory. But as far as I can tell, it is up to each manufacturer of each model PC to store a byte here or there that might indicate what model machine this is. Very different than the tight adherence to standards to which I am accustomed. Not to slam the technology! It is just a bit of a challenge. Thanks for the note. John Kinne