Many early laptops, such as the Tandy 200, NEC-8500, and Sord IS-11C
have all of their applications in ROM. So do some older i8088 laptops,
like the Tandy 600, HP-110+, etc, and some Tandy p.c.'s have the
DeskMate GUI in ROM.

I have noticed that ibm coruptibles take longer to access a 2.5" HDD
than my CoCo 3 or CP/M desktops take for a 5.25" floppy. But ROM-based
laptops-i8088 or not-are very hard to find. Dos laptops being dirt
cheap ($0-$25) I thought it might be worth asking if anyone knows if
it's possible to at least put MS or DR DOS in ROM, and preferably also
a set of applications or an integrated package. This would be faster
and also save battery life, since it would spend less time accessing
the disk drives.

I have a Tandy 1400LT, an ideal machine to experiment on, because it's
so big and has plenty of space inside to work with. But I also have
limited experience with this kind of thing, and no eprom programmer. I
would appriceate any advice anyone can give me.

This prodject would, of course, apply to DOS desktops as well, but
with CoCo 3's, C=128's, and Atari XE130's being so easy to get, who
would want one?

Leon Howell wrote:

<http://www.drdos.net/documentation/romhtml/romtoc.htm>
<http://www.linuxbios.org/>

Regards,

--
| Mark McDougall | "Electrical Engineers do it
| <http://to be announced> | with less resistance!"

************************************************** **
* Ham KH6JF AARS/MARS ABM6JF QCWA WW2 VET WD RADIO *
* Army MARS State Coordinator for Hawaii *
************************************************** **


On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Mark McDougall wrote:

I been wishing for something like that from MR BG for years.
If he did put the OS in a rom chip I would get rid of my old
Commodore128 which I am useing right now. His laptops I use just
for radio logging, playing solitare, not ever on the internet.
Joe

Your absolutely right ref os in rom. The virus hackers and
virus software companies would hate that whole idea of course.
Joe (aka kilroy)


************************************************** **
* Ham KH6JF AARS/MARS ABM6JF QCWA WW2 VET WD RADIO *
* Army MARS State Coordinator for Hawaii *
************************************************** **


On Fri, 6 Aug 2004, Leon Howell wrote:

On 6 Aug 2004 16:18:09 -0700, puritan_2076@yahoo.com (Leon Howell)
wrote:

Brother made a super-low-end laptop like this once, the GeoBook.
It had, IIRC, Starlight DOS, GEOS, and a handful of applications
in ROM. And of course there's always the HP 200LX; you still see
various flavors on eBay. I think both machines had some kind of
flash-memory slot, so you wouldn't even need an eprom burner
to add you own applications.

(I had a Tandy 102 once upon a time, and I'm still kicking myself
for selling it. When you turned it on, it was up and ready before
you could get your finger off the power switch. Stinking 8085 CPU,
and it was faster in practical terms than any gigahertz Pentium
system running Windows.)

--
Charles Dye raster@highfiber.com

"Leon Howell" <puritan_2076@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:ae64f04a.0408061518.1697dfd7@posting.google.c om...
I've done it. It's not hard. But I had the MicroSoft developers kit to do
it
with. In fact, if you go to a DOS box and do a VER /r it tells you
'Revision A'
(up through WIN98SE, XP does not support the /r). The 'Revision A' was
for the standard bootable version. The 'romable' developement kit said
'Revision B'. But there weren't any real differences.

It's been a long time, but I forget where the kit stopped being supported.
Maybe as long as DOS 6.31, but I'm not sure.

Mike

"Leon Howell" <puritan_2076@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:ae64f04a.0408061518.1697dfd7@posting.google.c om...
a free version. It ran on C128's so it can't be that resource hungry.
Worth a peek if you use older systems even if you don't use it in this
project.

limit or was there EMS-type stuff going on?

Could you start out running on a bare x86 emulator? BOCHS is a free one.

You might look around in the FreeDOS project. They probably have a ROMable
project. You might be able work on bits that don't need a ROM burner &
once you get working on it someone w/ a ROM burner could burn you a ROM
(hey, somebody's gotta test it!). Maybe you get your* fingerprints on the
project and I bet they could really use the help.

NASM (Netwide assembler) puts out ROM images as one of it's output
formats, so its documentation might be a resource too.

I think there is a open BIOS project too.

3ch

*assuming you need it.

On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 22:11:04 +0000, colonel_hack@yahoo.com wrote:

The ROM drive in the 1000TL is 512k paged in a 64k window. There is a
BIOS call to map ROM pages (i.e., EMS-type stuff going on ;-) ).

Jeffrey Hayes
http://tvdog.shacknet.nu
"I'm a Deutschesuedwestafrikaner in love."

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*DONT!!!*

pee see's are overpriced even if they're free. They could never take
the place of a C128 or other good computer.

On 6 Aug 2004 16:18:09 -0700, puritan_2076@yahoo.com (Leon Howell)
wrote:

One thing that I've done, with PC-type laptops and desktops, is to
replace the hard drive with a CompactFlash card & HDD adaptor. I have
run DOS and Win95 off CF, with no troubles at all, and the speed up is
substantial.

The CompactFlash standard dictates an "IDE mode", which makes turning
one into an IDE-compatible HDD a snap - all you need is a cheap
adaptor, for example: http://www.pcengines.ch/cflash.com There are
other manufactures as well.

This might suit your needs... on the other hand, I still use my
Cambridge Z88 - Z80 CPU, instant on because the whole application suit
is on ROM... and a full-sized keyboard. Weighs half of what most PC
notebooks weigh, too.

Anthony Albert

Maybe we can trim comp.os.msdos out of the non-dos admiration
society messages? (not that non-dos is not admirable. It just they
don't belong.)

On 18 Aug 2004, Leon Howell wrote:
3ch

I have one of those. It's great, almost the ultimate laptop, but I've
never liked. 8-line diplays-40 or 80 collum. It's weird because I do
like the M200's 40X16 screen. Maybe it's just that I prefer something
that sticks up where I can see it when I sit it on the table, wich is
were I prefer to sit a laptop. "Pad style" is better if you like to
sit it in your lap. I read an old magazine article about an
RGB/cassette interface for the Z88. Did they ever make those?

Leon Howell wrote:
That's just insupportable. I wouldn't be here (in comp.sys.tandy) if it
weren't for the IBM PC-compatible Tandy 1000s. (That's nothing against
the TRS-80s, I just came around later than that, so I never used them.)
The Tandy 1400LT which you mentioned you own is one of these. Now, I'll
agree that MS Windows later than v3.11 is an affliction upon the land,
but the DOS-era machines are perfectly respectable computers. If he
ever does decide to "get rid" of his C128, I hope he'll give it to
someone who'll appreciate it.

Stephen