DOS User's Guide

I cannot make a comprehensive User's Guide to DOS here - after all, there were entire books written for that purpose. But I hope to cover some situations you may encounter setting up a machine in MartyPC.

Setting up a Hard Disk

So you've created a VHD and mounted it Drive0 in MartyPC. Now what?

The easiest thing to do would be to run DOS setup, which will handle partitioning and formatting the drive for you. But if you want the oldschool experience, you can partition and format the drive yourself.

Boot from a DOS diskette in Drive A: and run the FDISK command.

The appearance of FDISK may change slightly between DOS versions. The screenshots here are from DOS 3.30.

Press 1 to create a new DOS partition. Press 1 to create a Primary DOS partition. Choose Y to create the partition at the maximum size.

If you have an existing partition, you can skip this step.

The system will now reboot:

Once you are back at the A: prompt, type FORMAT C:, and confirm with Y.

The hard disk will now be formatted. This may take a moment (it took ages on a real computer):

Eventually, the format will complete:

From the A: drive still, type SYS C: You should get confirmation that the system was transferred:

Finally, type COPY COMMAND.COM C: to transfer the command interpreter to the C: drive.

Now you should be able to eject the floppy and boot from the C: drive.

Things you may want to do next:

• Type LABEL to give the drive a label.
• Make a DOS folder: MKDIR DOS and copy the DOS files from your diskette into the DOS directory: COPY A:\*.* C:\DOS. Repeat if you have multiple DOS diskettes.
• Put PATH C:\DOS; in a new AUTOEXEC.BAT: ECHO PATH C:\DOS > AUTOEXEC.BAT
• Install some software!

International Keyboards

MartyPC's keyboard emulation is transparent to keyboard layout. To use an international keyboard layout with your emulated computer, you'll need to tell the emulated operating system what sort of keyboard you have.

For DOS 3.30 and later, this was done with the KEYB command.

For example, to switch to an Italian layout using code page 850, you would type:

KEYB IT,850 C:\DOS\KEYBOARD.SYS

More info on the use of the KEYB command can be found here: http://info.wsisiz.edu.pl/~bse26236/batutil/help/KEYB_S.HTM