1.0 - DOS/32 Advanced - Introduction

DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender is a powerful tool for protected mode programmers to create 16-bit and 32-bit protected mode applications. DOS/32 Advanced has been designed to be the fastest, most flexible and efficient, as well as highly compatible with other software DOS Extender.

DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender is fully compatible with WATCOM C/C++ development package and provides a software emulation of the industry standard DOS/4GW DOS Extender. DOS/32 Advanced supports Clean (also known as "Raw" or "INT 15h"), XMS, VCPI and DPMI system softwares. It has a built-in DPMI server v0.9 which can be configured by an external setup program included with the DOS Extender. DOS/32 Advanced extends most of DOS functions (available through INT 21h) that are used in WATCOM C/C++ libraries, many of Mouse functions (available through INT 33h) and all of VESA VBE 2.0 functions (available through INT 10h) which are widely used by protected mode programmers in games and applications that use SuperVGA video modes.

Thanks to its design, DOS/32 Advanced can be configured to take up as little as 40KB of conventional (DOS) memory and require no Extended memory to be present when run. A protected mode application can be loaded into DOS memory, into Extended memory, or into both at the same time. Four different schemes on how the Objects (parts of a protected mode program) are loaded into memory supported. Furthermore, DOS/32 Advanced requires no extended memory for its proper operation, thus being capable of running protected mode programs in environments with no, or very little extended memory available.

DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender has been written entirely in the assembly language, and that is why it is working so fast, supports and extends so many functions and at the same time is so small in size. Furthermore, after initialization of the protected mode, DOS/32 Advanced will discard some of its parts that are no longer needed, additionally freeing some of conventional memory.