Re: Variants of DOS 3.3?

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Lyrical Nanoha wrote:
> System disks for AmDOS, David-DOS, ProntoDOS and DiversiDOS have shown 
> up on Asimov, so I know where they come from, but I've never seen 
> similar for other DOS 3.3 variants.  Does anyone know where, more 
> specifically, some of the others originated, like UniDOS, ESDOS ][ and 
> ZDOS 2.2?
>
> btw I have somewhere a hack that has ZDOS's unusual habit of doing a 
> GR:TEXT:HOME before displaying the prompt, but doesn't click like ZDOS.
>
> Also I have seen a couple different versions that are verbose when RWTS 
> is called, and some that hide the ] that appears when you boot DOS 3.3 
> (but just run a normal program, sometimes even Applesoft).

DOS 3.3 was very widely patched, first by those who reverse-engineered
parts of it, and then by many users with programs designed to patch
DOS to change prompts, commands, error messages, catalog listings, speed
up loading, protect Language Card contents--you name it.

And then there were all the patched versions to alter disk formatting,
usually for copy protection or to bypass copy protection.

Only a handful became moderately widely used, "named" versions.  And
even fewer were more than a modest patch to DOS 3.3.

It's safe to say, though, that there are literally thousands of
"versions" of DOS 3.3 out there...

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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