DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender - Technical Information
DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender is aimed at application developers working with 32-bit protected mode DOS software. The DOS Extender includes a built-in Advanced DOS Protected Mode Interface server supporting v0.9 of the DPMI specification and comes with a set of tools needed to create 32-bit protected mode applications. System requirements and technical specifications are listed below:
System Requirements:
- IBM PC compatible computer
- 80386 processor or better
- 1 MB of memory (no extended memory is required by the DOS Extender itself)
- DOS version 4.0 or better
- VGA compatible graphics card
Technical Specifications:
- built-in DPMI server based on specification v0.9
- compatible with Clean (INT 15h), XMS, VCPI and DPMI systems
- supports loading of LE-, LX- and LC-style executable file formats
- protected mode executable compression using a special LC-style file format
- no extended memory is required to load and run a protected mode application
- allocation of up to 2 GB of extended memory under INT 15h and XMS systems
- extension of Windows 95/98 (DOS 7.x) Long File Name functions 71xxh
- extension of VESA VBE 2.0 Video BIOS functions
- Null-Pointer Protection traps down writes to the first 16 bytes of memory at run-time
- support for checking of the integrity of Extended Memory Blocks at run-time
- exclusive warning system to inform the user of modified (corrupted) real mode interrupts
- Verbose Mode to allow the users to see verbose information about loaded application
- low latency hardware interrupt (IRQ) handling
- protected mode applications run at CPL 0
- allocated descriptors reside in the GDT
- vendor-specific API extensions (DPMI function 0A00h), performance counters, direct access to IDT, GDT, PageTables etc.
For more information about DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender and its features refer to the provided documentation manual.