SHOW MOUSE POINTER IN MSDOS MODE
This tips is to display the mouse cursor in MSDOS command prompt. Just follow the below steps

1. Open a command windows by simply typing the "cmd" in start->Run window
Start->Run->Type "cmd"

2. Make the command windows as full screen by simply pressing Alt+Enter

3. Type the following command in the command prompt

debug
-a
0B37:0100 mov ax,1
0B37:0103 int 33
0B37:0105 int 21
0B37:0107
-g

Program terminated normally
-

Now you can see the mouse cursor by moving your mouse

to quit from the debug window, just press "q" and enter

-q

thanks

__________________
Karpagarajan. R
Necessity is the mother of invention

Device drivers are the programs that control the functioning of
peripherals like keyboard, printer, etc. More specifically, they are the modules of an operating system.

MS DOS device drivers are with .SYS extensions. Since drivers drive peripheral devices, they get loaded into the memory when we bootup the system. So obviously, they remain resident in memory, but they are not considered as normal TSRs.

As drivers are the modules of an Operating System, one has to modify the OS whenever he adds new device to his system. Fortunately the installable device drivers technology available with MS DOS gives more flexibility to the user. It avoids direct operations or modifications of Operating System. The user can simply install a new device in a system, copy the driver files to boot disk and edit the system configuration file. Thus it clearly avoids complexity.

Types of MS DOS device drivers

1. Character device drivers
2. Block device drivers

Character device drivers

Character device drivers correspond to single byte. That is, these device drivers controls peripheral devices that perform input and output one character (i.e., one byte) at a time. The example for such devices are terminal, printer etc.

Block device drivers

Block device drivers correspond to block rather than byte. Even though they can be used with other devices, they are usually written to control random access storage devices such as floppy drives.

Writing our own device driver

Writing device driver is not a tough job as one may think. But nowadays device driver programming is not needed as the peripheral device vendors provide powerful drivers along with their products. So I avoid indepth explanation about the device driver programming. In a nutshell, device drivers are the COM (BIN) files with .SYS as their extensions. Our new device driver
should be added with CONFIG.SYS file. Drivers also have headers. MS DOS 5+ versions support EXE file (renamed to .SYS extension) as drivers too. But it is a good practice to have COM file as drivers.

In the above section I have told about the basic knowledge of the Device Driver Programming. We will continue this thread for discussing only about the Device Driver Programming

thanks

__________________
Karpagarajan. R
Necessity is the mother of invention

You can create a nice 3D effect for your windows
1. Start Regedit
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Colors
3. Make sure the following setting are there:
• ButtonHilight=128 128 128
• ButtonShadow=255 255 255
Restart or relogin

thanks

__________________
Karpagarajan. R
Necessity is the mother of invention