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Night Owl CD-ROM (NOPV8) (Night Owl Publisher) (1993).ISO
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geosos2.arj
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GEOSOS2.DOC
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1992-07-20
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147 lines
Making Geoworks run under OS/2 2.0
by Marcus Groeber, Fido 2:2402/61.1
Using information by "AaronB6" from AOL
and the folks at GW tech support
Running Geoworks in a native "OS/2 MDOS" session
------------------------------------------------
This file describes a procedure to make Geoworks versions 1.2 and Pro run
under OS/2 in a DOS fullscreen session (no specific DOS VDM is required).
It includes some patches to be applied on the kernel.exe file, therefore it is
highly version dependant and will only work with those versions it's inteded
for (release level 1.2.4.3, 1.2.5.4 and 1.2.8.1 - look into SYSINFO if in
doubt).
As with all patches, it is highly recommended that you back up your kernel.exe
file before starting to patch it. You might need the original version anyway
because this patch might be a little unstable when used in "native dos" mode.
To apply the patches to your Geoworks kernel, you will have to do the
following:
- Copy the file "geosos2.pat" from this archive to the root directory of your
Geoworks drive.
- Change to the directory containing "kernel.exe".
- Enter the command "PATCH /A \geosos2.pat". This will use OS/2's built-in
patch utility to identify the kernel version you're using and modify it
appropriately.
- If the kernel can be patched, you will see one message of success and some
others indicating failure. This is all right, because PATCH always tries to
apply all the patches it knows (also those for versions you don't have).
- If you see only failure messages, your kernel version is not recognized.
You can't use this patch - sorry. You can still try to locate the data to be
patched (those behind VER) yourself and changed only the adress values. Seems
to work with all 1.2.x.x based versions.
- After patching you can rename the patched kernel to OS2KERN.EXE and use an
OS/2 DOS window to launch GeoWorks directly. Also copy the backup kernel back
to KERNEL.EXE and you can run GeoWorks under plain DOS with no problem.
In addition to patching the kernel, you'll need to change some OS/2 and
Geoworks settings for Geoworks to run correctly:
- It is best to create a new DOS icon in your "command prompts" folder
especially for Geoworks, so you can start it using an OS/2 icon. This can be
done by duplicating the old DOS fullscreen icon.
- The following settings are recommended for use with Geoworks (other changes
might improve performance even more):
Program/Path & filename: C:\GEO\OS2KERN.EXE (Path to patched kernel)
Session: DOS/Full Screen (must set AFTER setting above - OS/2 quirk)
DOS Settings:
DOS_FCBS 1
DOS_FCBS_KEEP 0
DOS_FILES 150 (Need at least 100; 150 is better)
DOS_HIGH On (gives GeoWorks more memory)
DOS_LASTDRIVE F (1 MORE than last drive!!!!!)
DOS_UMB On
DOS_VERSION add OS2KERN.EXE,05,00,255 (so GeoWorks will run)
or KERNEL.EXE,05,00,255 (if you didn't rename KERNEL.EXE)
VIDEO_SWITCH_NOTIFICATION On (Shouldn't make much difference)
- This archive should include an icon file which you can assign to your DOS
session icon using OS/2's icon editor (last page in the settings notebook),
so you'll get a real nice Geoworks logo in your WPS. :-)
You can also add the DOS_VERSION setting (see above) in the default fullscreen
icon, so you can run Geoworks in the DOS box.
Now you should be able to run Geoworks.
- Once it's up and running, you might experience problems with your mouse. In
this case you should use the keyboard to start the Preferences screen of
Geoworks to change the mouse driver to "MOUSE.COM / MOUSE.SYS".
- The parallel printer ports (in the "Computer" settings) should be set to
either BIOS or DOS.
- You'll notice that all hard drives are now displayed as network drives by
Geoworks, and that the floppy drives are missing. This is exactly what the
patch does, so you shouldn't have to bother with it. :-) A later patch might
also fix the disk drives so you can go on formatting those floppy disks from
Geoworks...
- You might loose control of your mouse pointer in Geoworks when you try to
switch Geoworks from fullscreen to windowed mode and then back. You can still
use your keyboard to leave Geoworks.
- Because OS/2 is doing its own printer spooling, the documents printed under
Geoworks might not be sent to the printer unless you leave Geoworks. I
haven't found any way yet to counter this problem.
- Geos won't be able to reload itself after running a DOS program, nor will
it be able to restart itself after changing something in preferences with the
kernel renamed to be OS2KERN.EXE (of course, you can also patch the
kernel.exe string you'll find early in the load image to match, except you'll
have to call it OS2KER.EXE, to keep the number of characters the same).
Running Geoworks in a "Specific DOS VDM"
----------------------------------------
If you want to run Geoworks in a specific DOS VDM (i.e. a DOS session booted
from drive A or from a disk image file), which might be useful in some extreme
situations, you must first set up a DOS boot disk that fullfills all the
requirements imposed by Geoworks itself (especially FILES=100 or higher).
Do not forget including the FSFILTER.SYS driver from the \OS2\MDOS directory
on your boot disk, and the line DEVICE=FSFILTER.SYS at the beginning of your
CONFIG.SYS. Otherwise, Dos will not have full access to your OS/2 partitions
(i.e. you might be able to read FAT partns, but neither write to them nor
access any HPFS data). You will probably also want to include the OS/2 mouse
driver, and possibly the HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.SYS as well.
Furthermore, you have to apply the same patches to KERNEL.EXE than for a
native MDOS session.
If you happen to have the program DRVSET.SET from Andrew Schulman's great
"Undocumented Dos" guide, there is even a way of getting around patching the
kernel, if using a specfic DOS VDM (tested with DOS 5.0): You can use
DRVSET C: NET
DRVSET D: NET ... etc ...
to make all hard disk partitions look like networks drives (actually, this is
how I got the idea for the patch) to Geoworks. This still doesn't fix all the
problems with the floppy disks, but it works on my machine, too.
Anyway, there is still a little quirk in the FSFILTER.SYS driver currently
disributed: It doesn't seem to recognize the high number of FILES set for DOS,
so Geoworks will fail when run (typically with a message like "No video driver
loaded" or sth misleading like that...
To tell FSFILTER.SYS that you want to stretch your files to the maximum, you
should run the program SETFILES.COM (included in this archive) prior to
starting Geoworks. It uses DOS function 67h to set the number of handles to
255. Normally, this setting is lost after the programm terminates, but under
OS/2 it seems to change more things internally.