China DOS Union

Recently, the author read several articles in some newspapers and periodicals about making Chinese boot disks, and then personally made a Chinese boot disk. At the beginning, it was indeed successful. The Chinese platform could be used in DOS after booting with a floppy disk, and the effect was good. But after upgrading the operating system to Windows XP, the Chinese boot disk malfunctioned. After finding the reason, it was found that the files Pdos.def in the root directory of drive C in the master boot record and the files Chs16.fon, Pbios.exe, Lx.tbl, Ctrlpan.exe, Font16.exe, etc., in the C:\windows\command directory were missing. Through research, it was found that these files on the boot disk did not play a big role, but only played the role of referring to paths. Imagine, if there were no files supporting the Chinese platform on the boot disk, and directly running the Pdos95.bat file in the C:\windows\command directory, would the effect be the same as using the boot disk? The answer is yes. Then, is there a Chinese boot disk that can be used without the support of hard disk files? Yes. The following method to make a universal CD-ROM Chinese boot disk can not only use the universal CD-ROM but also use the universal Chinese platform. The specific production method is as follows:

### Making a universal Pdos.def file
Because the Chinese platform run by Pdos95.bat needs to read the Pdos.def file in the root directory of drive C in the master boot record. This file defines the paths of files such as Chs16.fon, Pbios.exe, Lx.tbl, Ctrlpan.exe, Font16.exe, as well as the definitions of some shortcuts, input methods, and dictionaries.

First, use Notepad (other file editors can also be used) to open the Pdos.def file in the root directory of drive C in the master boot record where Windows 9x operating system is installed, replace C:\windows\command in the file with C:, and then save it as Pdos.c (remove the read-only attribute before modification). Then use the above method to replace C:\windows\command with D: and save it as Pdos.d. By analogy, finally, 24 files such as Pdos.c, Pdos.d, Pdos.e... Pdos.z are generated. These files are small (only more than 2KB) and will not occupy too much disk space.

### Selecting files used by the Chinese platform
Because a floppy disk has a space of 1.44MB, we try to reduce the used files. First, select the files necessary for the Chinese platform: Chs16.fon, Ctrlpan.exe, Font16.exe, Hzkbd.exe, Hzvio95.exe, Instdict.exe, Lx.tbl, Pbios.exe, Pdos95.bat. For the input method files, we only select the pinyin input method, that is, Pinyin.tbl. Finally, Quit.exe. Put these files and the 24 generated files above into a newly created folder EBD for later use.

### Editing the Pdos95.bat file
In order to make this Chinese boot disk really "universal", it is necessary to modify the Pdos95.bat file. The specific content after modification is as follows:

```batch
@ECHO OFF
IF EXIST C:\PDOS.DEF GOTO REN
ECHO.
:REN
REN C:\PDOS.DEF PDOS.BAK >NUL
ECHO.
COPY %RAMD%:\PDOS.%RAMD% C:\PDOS.DEF /Y >NUL
@ECHO ON
pbios
font16
hzvio95
hzkbd
instdict pinyin
ctrlpan
@ECHO OFF
IF EXIST C:\PDOS.BAK GOTO DISPLAY
ECHO.
ISPLAY
ECHO //When booting the system from the hard disk, rename Pdos.bak to Pdos.def...
ECHO.
```

### Making the EBD.cab compressed package
In order to make this boot disk have the boot function of the universal CD-ROM and use some common DOS commands, a Windows 98 boot disk must be made. The specific method will not be described in detail here.

Insert the just-built Windows 98 boot disk into the floppy drive, use the decompression software to open it, then decompress EBD.cab to the above-mentioned newly created folder EBD. In order to save space, delete the less useful Scandisk.exe and Scandisk.ini files. Finally, use Cabinet Manager to compress all the files in the EBD folder into an EBD.cab file. In order to save floppy disk space, set the compression ratio to the highest in the options of Cabinet Manager before compression (do not compress the entire EBD folder together, only compress the files in its directory). The Cabinet Manager software can be downloaded on major software download websites.

### Testing the universal CD-ROM Chinese boot disk
Before testing, copy the newly generated Ebd.cab file to the just-made Windows 98 boot disk (directly overwrite), and then write-protect this universal CD-ROM Chinese boot disk. A floppy disk space of 1.34MB is used to make such a boot disk.

In order to verify the "universal" characteristics of this boot disk, we first choose to conduct an experiment without hanging any hard disk. Use this boot disk to successfully boot the computer, execute Pdos95.bat, and the Chinese platform under the DOS system will appear. The input method can be opened by using "Ctrl+Space". It can also be successfully used on the Windows XP operating system. This "universal CD-ROM Chinese boot disk" is suitable for all operating systems with FAT or FAT32 partitions such as DOS, Windows 3.1/9x/2000/XP.

Users of Windows 9x need to note: After using the Chinese platform of the boot disk (that is, after booting Windows 9x from the hard disk), manually rename C:\Pdos.bak to C:\Pdos.def, and at the same time delete the original Pdos.def.

In this way, we can use the "universal CD-ROM Chinese boot disk" with confidence. These are some experiences of the author in making Chinese boot disks, and I hope to help friends.

This kind of Chinese boot disk is far worse than the one I made.

First of all, PDOS95 is definitely not a good choice. One input method alone takes up 200-300K, and plus the font library and management modules and such, there is no space on the floppy disk to put some useful tools.

If you just want to display Chinese and only use Pinyin input, Pocket Dragon Chinese characters are the best choice, totaling only more than 80K.

If you want to use Pinyin, Wubi, DOS prompt information Chinese localization, and have beautiful display, then the best Chinese character system is the compressed Tianhui Chinese character system 3.1 + Kingsoft 5.1 input method. It's only about more than 400K in total. All the tools in the original WIN98 boot disk can all be saved, and some can be appropriately increased.

Yes, my feeling is just so-so.

Because I once also racked my brains for running PDOS95 on a machine without PDOS95, I posted this article when I saw it. But now I'm also using Tianhui Chinese Input System 3.1, and I think Tianhui Chinese Input System is good. Also, may I ask Teacher Mo, is there any Wubi input method that occupies less memory?

I don't know what the input method of Kingsoft 5.1 is, but I think the best combination should be:
1. The above-mentioned Pocket Dragon + Pocket Dragon Pinyin input.
2. Tianhui 3.1 (some say version 3.2, which is an improved version of 3.1) + wb.com (or wbx.com) + py.com
The latter two input methods only have pure two files, not like some input methods that hang the input method font library.
Byte count: 1. xzl.com: 56426 xzlpy.com: 12493
2. tw.exe: 234404　wb.com: 43637 wbx.com: 47695 py.com: 55238
And you can choose one between wb.com and wbx.com, I put them together just to give you more choices. I don't know which is better, but in terms of byte count, wb.com has the upper hand. Don't expect too much from the typing effect of the two, generally such ones have no联想function and no prompt function for each code. This requires that your五笔foundation be solid!

The Tianhui Chinese character system also has its own Pinyin input method, but there are three files for the Pinyin input method alone: twabc.cwd twabc.exe twabc.ovl, with byte counts: 286528 + 53118 + 76960, and the first file alone is larger than the main program tw.exe! Then the compact advantage of Tianhui is all gone!
To say an ugly Chinese character platform, there is another one, of course, it is also small, called Guanghui Chinese character platform. ghos.exe I had it before, now I don't know how to get it lost, ask Teacher MYS if he has it! I seemed to have sent one to him before.

If you want to make a Chinese boot disk, it is recommended to use Pocket Dragon!!!
Not only compact, but also can prevent overloading, and when exiting Pocket Dragon, it will release the memory occupied by the Pinyin input method at the same time! These three advantages make it the first choice without hesitation!!!

The above software can all be found in my FTP site. (Except ghos.exe)
In mysoft\dostool, there are tw.zip and xzl.zip
In mysoft\dostool\ccdos\, there are twabc.*

TW.EXE, when compressed with UPX, is only 204K. The TW system on my bootable disk is compressed, which can be said to have reached the minimum volume at present. If the DOS information localization is removed, it is only a little more than 300K.

The Guanghui input platform I still have, but it has no own font library. Adding a 16-dot matrix font library (256K) makes it larger than TW, and it has no input method. Basically useless.

If you want a smaller volume with both Wubi and Pinyin input methods, it seems that version 1.5 of Tianhui supports a 64K single-line compressed font library, but I'm too lazy to do it.

The Pocket Dragon is indeed very small and is a very good collectible item. But its compatibility is also average. It crashes as soon as you run HD-COPY. This is also a problem that most Chinese character systems have. Only Tianhui and CCDOS97 won't crash. I don't know if there are others. Although the display effect of Pocket Dragon is poor, it's not very important. I heard that Pocket Dragon also has the Wubi input method, but you need to contact its author. I don't know if Mr. Li Xiaodong will send it to us? (Mr. Li Xiaodong's homepage: http://www.hitone.net/zz03.asp)

HD-COPY doesn't work because the Chinese character system occupies the system clock interrupt. The Chinese character systems that can support HD-COPY seem to only be Tianhui (CCDOS97) and Chaoxiang. UCDOS doesn't support HD-COPY.

There should also be smaller input methods. There is a TW-WPS (using a single-line compressed character font, which can realize WPS simulated printing) that uses the input method of Kingsoft 4.0. But I tried it a long time ago and it seemed not to work in TW.