China DOS Union

Many thanks to Wengier for his hard work. He put a lot of effort into making GDOSUCS, and it really is very good. After downloading it today, I also tested it several times with vpc myself, and I think it is excellent. It is good indeed, but after thinking about it for a long time I still don't know how to modify it (maybe it's just that my aptitude is too poor). After extracting the img file, there are 19 files in total inside. Among them there is only one bat file, plus VIDE-CDD.sys, ECHO.SYS, and EDIT.COM; aside from that they are all exe files. This is very different from the boot files we usually see. There is no config.sys, no autoexec.bat, and no boot files like command, and these files don't seem to have much that can be modified. The result I got when testing it with vpc was like this:


It can be seen that this boot method is different from the usual one.

And here it looks just like the Windows 3.X interface.

These effects are really done very well, but for newbies like us it is something both pleasing and troublesome, because we don't know how to make modifications. So I hope Wengier can put in a bit more effort for us and post the method for modifying this file for everyone, okay? For example, methods for 《modifying/adding/deleting》 the selectable boot options and 《modifying/adding/deleting》 items in picture DOS, and so on.

Alright... I'll explain it in detail in a little while...

Bump

Alright, I'll explain it now...

This GDOSUCS boot disk is made up of three parts, namely the GRUB part, the various DOS boot part, and the UCSHELL loading part.

1: GRUB part: GNU GRUB is free software, a famous multi-system manager, and it is very suitable for booting various DOS systems. It supports loading all kinds of boot information such as boot sectors and floppy disk images (somewhat like the feel of DiskEmu on CDs). Among them, the /boot/grub/grub.conf file is the configuration file, and it contains the various configuration information that will be displayed in the boot menu at startup;

2: Various DOS part: After selecting an item in GRUB, it will automatically boot into the selected item, for example MS-DOS 7.10. I put this part into an IMG compressed with GZip (that is, IMZ format), so the system can very quickly boot into DOS from this virtual floppy disk. Then it automatically calls the shared LOADER.BAT file on the actual floppy disk to load more drivers;

3: UCSHELL part: First it will automatically load the UCDOS 7.0 streamlined edition I made, and then enter the UCSHELL 6.0 main interface; at this point it is the graphical GUI interface. You can build the UCSHELL interface environment you need by modifying shortcuts. When UCSHELL exits, it will usually automatically save the modified settings. However, if you want to fix the settings so that the modified settings can also be used on future boots, then you need to save them to the floppy disk. The method is to repackage UCSHELL from the memory virtual disk with ACE and put it onto the floppy disk.

Your explanation is very detailed and gave me a basic understanding of it. Now I understand it a bit more deeply, and at the same time my question has come again. Please explain a bit more for me: what exactly is the GRUB boot part like? In other words, what is its boot process? Our DOS boot process is to first execute the boot loader, then load command.com, msdos.sys, io.sys, etc. But how does GRUB boot? And if we want to make a multi-boot setup with GRUB, how should we do it?

As for GRUB, actually the best way is to modify it directly on the basis of this boot disk, and make it into a boot disk that suits yourself better. Because the locations of the files in GRUB are very important and cannot be moved, otherwise it will not boot. To configure GRUB booting, just modify the A:\BOOT\GRUB\grub.conf file. This is a text configuration file, so simple modifications are enough.