About further reducing the size of MLD's mini98 - China DOS Union Forum

I downloaded MLD's mini98 some time ago, and only tried it out today, on VPC. It feels like this system's size can be compressed even further.
I don't have any special tricks, I just used upx to compress some of the exe files and dll files in the system, and the results were pretty good. Some others couldn't be compressed; I don't know why, maybe they were encrypted. Because of time, I didn't experiment further. Based on past experience, as long as it is an executable program file that rar can compress, upx can more or less compress it down to a similar size. There are also quite a lot of vxd files, and I still don't know whether there is any way to compress them. The biggest files are the font files. There have also been many discussions about this on the BBS; you can replace that file with smaller Chinese fonts. One more suggestion: use Pinyin Jiajia to replace Intelligent ABC. It doesn't take much space and is much more convenient to use.

OP, could you make one to share with everyone?

There are still a lot of problems with his files... the A: drive can't be used... compatibility isn't very good... some software can't be used either. There are still many places in the system folder that need to be modified...

The more problems, the better; that's the purpose of the forum.
I also made a mini98 myself, using easyboot for multi-boot. As for A: not being usable, you can try enabling the second floppy drive in the bios, which means there are two real floppy drives. One of them gets masked during the easyboot boot process.

The settings in msdos.sys on the floppy disk are directly related to whether mini98 can run smoothly, especially the settings of winbootdir and windir.

The following are the problems I ran into and the process of solving them. There are still unclear points, and I hope everyone can give some advice.
The system prompted that it could not find a certain system file in c:\mini98\system, so I tried the following:
1. Set these two to "z:\mini98"
2. Set them to "."
In case 1, the system could not boot at all. In case 2, it could run in memory (but still not from the hard disk).
Reason analysis: maybe because the system partition table was not reasonable, and the long filename path on the hard disk had errors, causing mini98 to be unable to accurately find z:\mini98 and instead look by default for mini98 on drive C:.
The problem was solved for no obvious reason: use case 2 to boot mini98 into memory, then run %cdrom%\software\ndd2001\ndd32 to repair the hard disk once, and after that the problem disappeared

Some ISO CD image making software such as EasyBoot will bring quite a few problems. You'll know later.

The following is quoted from MLD's post at 2003-10-29 14:11:31:
Some ISO CD image making software such as EasyBoot will bring quite a few problems. You'll know later.

For example?

I also really dislike EasyBoot. I'm used to using DiskEmu. Although both use DiskEmu, I always feel that EasyBoot is just taking someone else's work～～～

How many MB can mini98 be compressed down to at minimum?

Hello MLD, I downloaded your MINI98 and it feels pretty good. Direct CD boot supports long filenames, but after multi-boot it no longer supports the long filenames on the CD. Looking forward to a solution.

Floor1　wlyh	Posted 2003-10-13 00:00
初级用户　Posts 27　Credits 195
I downloaded MLD's mini98 some time ago, and only tried it out today, on VPC. It feels like this system's size can be compressed even further. I don't have any special tricks, I just used upx to compress some of the exe files and dll files in the system, and the results were pretty good. Some others couldn't be compressed; I don't know why, maybe they were encrypted. Because of time, I didn't experiment further. Based on past experience, as long as it is an executable program file that rar can compress, upx can more or less compress it down to a similar size. There are also quite a lot of vxd files, and I still don't know whether there is any way to compress them. The biggest files are the font files. There have also been many discussions about this on the BBS; you can replace that file with smaller Chinese fonts. One more suggestion: use Pinyin Jiajia to replace Intelligent ABC. It doesn't take much space and is much more convenient to use.

Floor2　qs9055	Posted 2003-10-23 00:00
初级用户　Posts 10　Credits 134
Agree!!!

Floor3　yuqianggold	Posted 2003-10-23 00:00
中级用户　Posts 63　Credits 259
OP, could you make one to share with everyone?

Floor4　如是大师	Posted 2003-10-23 00:00
元老会员　Posts 3,351　Credits 9,654　From 湖北
There are still a lot of problems with his files... the A: drive can't be used... compatibility isn't very good... some software can't be used either. There are still many places in the system folder that need to be modified...

Floor5　dos时代菜鸟	Posted 2003-10-28 00:00
初级用户　Posts 216　Credits 672
The more problems, the better; that's the purpose of the forum. I also made a mini98 myself, using easyboot for multi-boot. As for A: not being usable, you can try enabling the second floppy drive in the bios, which means there are two real floppy drives. One of them gets masked during the easyboot boot process. The settings in msdos.sys on the floppy disk are directly related to whether mini98 can run smoothly, especially the settings of winbootdir and windir. The following are the problems I ran into and the process of solving them. There are still unclear points, and I hope everyone can give some advice. The system prompted that it could not find a certain system file in c:\mini98\system, so I tried the following: 1. Set these two to "z:\mini98" 2. Set them to "." In case 1, the system could not boot at all. In case 2, it could run in memory (but still not from the hard disk). Reason analysis: maybe because the system partition table was not reasonable, and the long filename path on the hard disk had errors, causing mini98 to be unable to accurately find z:\mini98 and instead look by default for mini98 on drive C:. The problem was solved for no obvious reason: use case 2 to boot mini98 into memory, then run %cdrom%\software\ndd2001\ndd32 to repair the hard disk once, and after that the problem disappeared

Floor6　MLD	Posted 2003-10-29 00:00
高级用户　Posts 173　Credits 570
Some ISO CD image making software such as EasyBoot will bring quite a few problems. You'll know later.

Floor7　pfox	Posted 2003-10-29 00:00
银牌会员　Posts 446　Credits 1,451
*The following is quoted from MLD's post at 2003-10-29 14:11:31:* Some ISO CD image making software such as EasyBoot will bring quite a few problems. You'll know later. For example? I also really dislike EasyBoot. I'm used to using DiskEmu. Although both use DiskEmu, I always feel that EasyBoot is just taking someone else's work～～～

Floor8　warm	Posted 2003-10-29 00:00
初级用户　Posts 25　Credits 175
How many MB can mini98 be compressed down to at minimum?

Floor9　hulihutu11	Posted 2005-06-28 00:00
初级用户　Posts 1　Credits 102
Hello MLD, I downloaded your MINI98 and it feels pretty good. Direct CD boot supports long filenames, but after multi-boot it no longer supports the long filenames on the CD. Looking forward to a solution.