This page is the DFTECH website Operating System Development Section.
With this site I aim to promote my work and also at the same time promote the OSDEV community.
In my experience there is in the amature OSDEV community a lot of ideas and knowledge but just not the support.
I aim to help in my small way by providing some documents about how I have got around problems.
Hence I hope to after reaching each major step to write a short tutorial on how I did it and other ways to handle the problem.
Not much work has taken place lately unfortunatly because of a number of reasons like time and motivation.
Major delay in future versions unfortunatly I have suffered a major hard drive failer on the computer that stored my OS development code. Not related to OS development but with the intention of backing up my data that same day it meant it was about as far away from a backup as it gets so almost all the FAT12 writing driver code was lost and my motivation has been low to work on something I have already done once.
I hope to finish the FAT12 driver (again) at some point and end DF-DOS project with at least all the current features fully working and not half done. But any work beyond version 0.5 is not yet decided. I will however look into pmode code and concentrate on that a bit as a change but any visible results on anything could take a very long time.
The bootloader has been the centre of my attention recently and in the last month's surge of work I have writen the code to enable protected mode within my bootloader and writen up a short tutorial on implementing the A20 line. However the bootloader won't be uploaded until I've got the kernel loading to the correct area of memory (1mb mark) which will require re-organising the code a bit to enter pmode setup everything so I can drop out and load the kernel before loading the pmode and the kernel properly.
A number of ideas on this site are just that and I have no unrealistic expectations to fullfill them all but if I can get a couple of ideas constructed I'll be quite happy. (eg. floppy disk viewer for showing docs when you don't know the password/os of the computer you will use to display your document)
Note: the installation instructions for my OS may not work on some versions of windows if you follow the instructions exactly. The reason is that windows will only read the FAT when changing drive's not
at the start of each command/operation. This is a problem as my bootloader FAT is different to the existing one so you end up with files over writing the bootloader. The way to avoid this problem is to
install the bootloader (stages one and two) and then put a different disk in and open it and then put the original disk in or failing that reboot before copying the kernel.com file to the disk.
14th March - Bootloader second stage successfully entering pmode. Will continue working on it to get a new version out soon.
10th March - Just added up the page views (I was bored) for my tutorials at osdever.net and reached 15004 views.
9th March - My hello world tutorial mirrored at osdever.net has become a 'featured tutorial' :-)
8th March 2005 - After a long quiet spell added a A20 line tutorial
Big delay due to HDD crash and a lot of lost information/progress, that I don't have time to redo.
1st July - Interrupt table tutorial written.
5th March (Late evening) - FAT12 write code tested, but not released until polished off and linked to interrupts and commands.
5th March - First FAT12 write code completed and in testing! :-D
2003 - Missed the planned date for version 0.4 :-( But it is progressing
28th December - Added a new tutorial on loading raw sectors. (Only a brief draft though)
16th December - Added ls command to DFDOS. Released an early snapshot of ver004.
23rd October - Added a FAT12 boot loader tutorial. *Thinks he may need a news page*
25th September - DF-DOS version 0.03b completed. (Not uploaded as only minor changes)
17th September - DF-DOS version 0.03 released, now with read and execute FAT12 driver.
13th September - DF-DOS FAT12 driver loaded a simple MS-DOS hello world program successfully :D (Expect a FAT12 release of the kernel soon)
10th September - Version 0.02 of the DF-DOS kernel released.
4th September - Version 0.5 of the bootloader released.
26th August - Made the DF-DOS project page.
26th August - #OSDevelopment website down, reason unknown but it is being sorted out.
24th August - DF-DOS version 0.01 released.
14th August - Version 0.4 of the bootloader released.
8th August - Added a couple more links to the links page
8th August - Wrote and added a couple of tutorials at last
7th August - My boot loader succesfully loaded the xoa-dos kernel!