1.0 - DOS/32 Advanced - Overview

DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender, also referred to as DOS/32A, is a 32-bit high-performance, high-speed DOS Extender which can be used as a true "Plug&Play" replacement of DOS/4G, DOS/4GW and DOS/4GW Professional DOS Extenders. That is, DOS/32 Advanced can be "plugged" into a protected mode application that is written for, and works with one of the above said DOS Extenders without any modifications required to be done to the application itself.

DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender has been designed to offer the highest performance possible at the cost of low DOS Extender executable size, well maintained compatibility, and incredible flexibility. Thus, programs written to work exclusively with DOS/4G(W) line DOS Extenders will, when run under DOS/32 Advanced gain increase in the performance. In fact, DOS/32 Advanced is capable of nearly doubling the performance of certain programs, especially those programs which extensively use disk I/O, spawn other applications or are highly dependent on the speed of the hardware/software interrupt processing (such as embedded system applications).

DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender also offers an unique capability of being manually reconfigured by the user. A special Setup utility provided with DOS/32 Advanced allows easy and quick reconfiguration of the DOS Extender, and features over thirty different options which directly or indirectly affect DOS/32 Advanced compatibility and performance.

There are probably over a billion good reasons why you would want to choose DOS/32 Advanced over all other DOS Extenders available on the market today, but here are probably the most important ones:

• Speed! DOS/32 Advanced is the fastest DOS Extender among those which are compatible with DOS/4GW. DOS/32 Advanced features lightning fast mode translation operations, extremely fast disk I/O not to forget the short startup times due to DOS/32 Advanced low size of executable and very fast processing of hardware and software interrupts which plays the essential role when accessing real mode DOS.

• Compatibility! DOS/32 Advanced features one of the best software emulations of DOS/4G(W) line DOS Extenders, and supports most of DOS/4G features, thus being compatible with a very large number of applications which are written to work with DOS/4G(W). Furthermore, DOS/32 Advanced was very carefully designed to be compatible with all major Operating Systems available on the market. In fact, DOS/32 Advanced has been tested on many different computers with the most unusual configurations and software systems installed just to prove its full compatibility with those.

• Flexibility! There are hundreds of ways of different possible configurations supported by DOS/32 Advanced. Yet, being easy to reconfigure, DOS/32 Advanced becomes a powerful tool in the hands of people who intend to use it. Each configuration option and feature can be used to fine tune the DOS Extender's performance and speed as well as to solve any possible problems.

There are four powerful utility programs and a protected mode diagnostic program provided with DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender:

• SUNSYS Bind Utility program which allows you to unbind DOS Extenders or stub programs from protected mode programs and replace them with DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender.

• SUNSYS Compress Utility program which allows compression of protected mode executables of LE- and LX-style file formats into DOS/32 Advanced natively supported Linear Compressed (LC-style) file format.

• SUNSYS Setup Utility program which allows you to manually reconfigure DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender and STUB/32C Configurable Stubs.

• SUNSYS Debugger which allows protected mode programmers to debug 16-bit and 32-bit protected mode applications under DOS/32 Advanced.

• SUNSYS Protected Mode Diagnostic Utility program which measures the speed of your computer when running under different DOS Extenders. PCTEST will recognize and run under DOS/4G, DOS/4GW, DOS/4GW Professional, Causeway, PMODE/W and of course under DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extenders.