Tech talk, cold comfort.

Have you thought of adding "restore DOS boot" support ?

I have been looking at it and finally found the best way to go at it :

Grab IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM from some CABs on the Win ME OEM CD
Those will allow F8 startup menu and full parse of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, full functionality and no patching needed on them !
But there is a problem :
REGENV32.EXE overwrites AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files every boot. All restore tools I found patch this program to look for different files instead.
All other tools also use IO.SYS from the boot floppy and that one has only "normal" boot menu option available, the one on CD has all options like 98 and 95 do

I am going to write an automated windows based tool to do this patch business in not so far future.
I am also considering making ME my primary use OS, there's so many improvements to it, especially around networking. I know there's 98SE2ME but I never got it to work on any of my hardware without errors popping up and putting files in wrong places and it seems to be discontinued too.

Removing the .X in the title should give you room for the 4

it should read Unofficial Windows Millennium Edition Service Pack 3 Beta 4 and not Unofficial Windows Millennium Edition Service Pack 3.x Beta.

OH! MISSED THE REMOVED ".X"! haha... sorry about that.

TmEE wrote:Have you thought of adding "restore DOS boot" support ?

I have been looking at it and finally found the best way to go at it :

Grab IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM from some CABs on the Win ME OEM CD
Those will allow F8 startup menu and full parse of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, full functionality and no patching needed on them !
But there is a problem :
REGENV32.EXE overwrites AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files every boot. All restore tools I found patch this program to look for different files instead.
All other tools also use IO.SYS from the boot floppy and that one has only "normal" boot menu option available, the one on CD has all options like 98 and 95 do

I am going to write an automated windows based tool to do this patch business in not so far future.
I am also considering making ME my primary use OS, there's so many improvements to it, especially around networking. I know there's 98SE2ME but I never got it to work on any of my hardware without errors popping up and putting files in wrong places and it seems to be discontinued too.

Yes, I was and was going to add options for removing system restore etc....I also figured out the bug you mention and it is cause by VPN client. The VPN client must be installed separately. The same bug is in the Win98 version. So I will update both versions over the weekend. By any chance you want to help me with the System Restore project since you are going to be using WinME?

Thanks mods for the updated post.

I'm all in for testing. I have a fresh installation and backup of it ready

I have finished the beef of my REGENV32 patcher. I just tested the results and all is good - original AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files are untouched, and instead AUTOEXEC.WIN and CONFIG.WIN files are generated/restored every startup. System file checker does not seem to mind the patched EXE either

Will it be open source? ...and released in here?

Of course he will must.

yes...must...post...source....

You need to compile the source with older than 0.9x versions of FreeBASIC or the file will not run on something as old as Pentium 1 MMX.
I attached a compiled EXE that is Pentium1 compatible. I'll have to see if this new CPU requirement is mentioned anywhere, even the new compiler does not run on such old CPU.