My DOS utility toolbox
These are the main DOS utility programs that I consider part of my toolkit to have access to when setting up and managing DOS based computers and emulator images.
X-Tree over the years since I was first introduced to it back in the 1980’s has remained my go-to file management utility.
Over the years its helped me organise, copy and edit many computer setups and disk layouts and is often one of the first tools I reach for as part of setting up any DOS based system.
Norton Commander should received a honourable mention as the number two equivalent to X-Tree as it seems to be able to cope better with some emulator disk access methods if X-Tree struggles with the abstraction layer.
XTree Gold 3.01 is the last official DOS version as listed on the XTree fan page with a link to a article by Tom Ruben that explains how the binaries were changed to make it appear there was a later version 4.0 for DOS.
A recent addition to my toolkit has been this utility which provides an almost equivalent utility to Robocopy on the DOS platform.
For quick ‘cloning’ of the contents of a DOS/Windows 3.x system this command line utility is hard to beat for its functionality.
As probably the grand-daddy of DOS based compression utilities this still remains the most common compression utility for helping to pack files into convient and space saving files.
I remember how almost every update and increase in the performance of the compression algorithms brought much excitement when they were released.
Over the years other formats such as LHA and ARC gained favour and popularity but zip files remain the most ubiquitous format even on todays platforms.
Probably the most used System Diagnostic and configuration tool for the DOS platform.
PC-Tools and Norton Utilities have been part of the toolkit over the years as well but Check IT remains the best diagnostic tool for delving into the hardware configurations and settings of real PC hardware even today.
Another recent addition to the DOS toolkit after watching another excellent YouTube video from Adrian’s Digital Basement particularly this episode was ImageDisk.
This utility having a number of different uses, but as Adrian shows in his video its also as really useful tool for checking old floppy drives for errors.
mTCP and NetDrive
mTCP has been a useful lightweight way of getting a basic TCP stack working and often provides a quick way of standing up a FTP server or client to copy files onto and off DOS computers at faster speeds than Laplink cables or disk based transfers.
With the recent addition of the NetDrive utility from the same author I have found this a really useful way of being able to quick transfer files back and forth from hardware with a network card across my home network.
BIOSDUMP
A useful utility for creating dumps of main board BIOS or Video card BIOS’s etc. Can be driven from the command line to support a starting address and the offset address to capture anything that is not a standard size of BIOS. A little easier than relying on using debug,
MSD is useful for figuring out the starting address and offsets to use.
Example command line:
biosdump -o c0000 -s 8000 vgadump.bin
This would capture a BIOS from a video card starting at address C800 which would be 32k in size. Address C8000 0000 represented as C8000 on the command line.
