OrCad for MSDOS

[pcprogrammer]

Your hair dresser sounds like fun.... but I am condused now... why do you speak English with hair dresser to begin with ?! 
... or does that mean you don't leave in Dutch-land but rather some English speaking country ?!

Sorry can't help you with dosbox

I speak French with my hairdresser, because I live in France. But since I don't understand it that well she tries to say things in English, but fails together with her daughter. I can manage to explain how I want my hair cut and understand some pointers when she needs me to tilt my head, but a conversation about much more then the weather is of the table. My wife is way better at it.

[Vince]

Oh you live here ! 

OK makes sense now.... so where are you ? Have long have been you here ? How long do you plan on staying here ?

I am in Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast.

[Ed.Kloonk]

DOSBOX : I did try it briefly before trying VirtualBox, however I was not impressed and had to give up after a few seconds... I can't even use the keyboard, it uses a QWERTY layout but I need AZERTY here.  I don't know how to load a floppy image either.

Ah yes, that is true you froggies have these silly keyboards

That is why I have to buy my computers abroad 

P.S. I have to respond to what you wrote elsewhere about the French not speaking English, and I have to acknowledge this. I was at the hairdresser last Thursday and I just speak a little bit of French and understand way less. At some point it came up that I'm not English but Dutch, but I do speak English. Then the daughter of the woman cutting my hair chimed in with some English. Could not understand what she was saying. "blu dri" it sounded like. Eventually she looked it up on her phone and spelled it. (b l o double v d r y) "blow dry". Hilarious

Good moaning.

[Black Phoenix]

"You stupid woman..."

OFFTOPIC
How I miss this kind of older British humor.

Although the "The IT Crowd" filled my needs for a while. And so accurate, as someone who is education is IT related. The "Did you turn if off and on again?" it's so true and the solution for tons of problems.

[pcprogrammer]

Oh you live here ! 

OK makes sense now.... so where are you ? Have long have been you here ? How long do you plan on staying here ?

I am in Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast.

I'm in the Correze near Brive. For 14 years already and plan to die here after hopefully still many years

Very quiet and peaceful and the people are very kind. A big difference from the Netherlands. Also a long drive from where you are Last year we came close when we took our cat to "dierenparadijs-anjou" in 49220 Erdre en Anjou.

I thought you lived near Toulouse since you wrote about working for Airbus

[pcprogrammer]

Good moaning.

Yes very funny indeed, but the French don't really know this, and if it has been broadcasted on TV here it would have been dubbed into French, and you can imagine how that would not work

"You stupid woman..."

OFFTOPIC
How I miss this kind of older British humor.

Although the "The IT Crowd" filled my needs for a while. And so accurate, as someone who is education is IT related. The "Did you turn if off and on again?" it's so true and the solution for tons of problems.

Indeed nothing to do with OrCAD for MSDOS, but as long as no one complains I'm ok with it. It is not as if this thread gets high attention

Never seen or heard about "The IT Crowd". Have to google it.

A lot of the new stuff being on TV lacks good humor to my opinion. Did like "The big bang theory" up to it became a bit lame after season 9 or so.

[Vince]

Oh you live here  ! 

OK makes sense now.... so where are you ? Have long have been you here ? How long do you plan on staying here ?
I am in Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast.

I'm in the Correze near Brive. For 14 years already and plan to die here after hopefully still many years

Oh, well we can say you are French then ! 
14years here, and you still don't speak French ?! 
Hurry up, get a grammar book and a dictionary quick ! 

Very quiet and peaceful

I bet it's quiet, it's a desert ! 
A nice kind of desert though, as you said. Wish I could live in that kind of place but the jobs are in the bigger cities... the Center of France isn't the best place to find a job and make a career... unless you can work from home of course...

Also a long drive from where you are Last year we came close when we took our cat to "dierenparadijs-anjou" in 49220 Erdre en Anjou.

Oh ! That's close to Angers, where I grew up ! It's the "big" town in the #49 Department / "Maine et Loire". My dad still lives there in the ex-familiy house.

I thought you lived near Toulouse since you wrote about working for Airbus

Nope !

I did spend a year in Toulouse to do my one year training in aviation / aerostructure, but then I got recruited there, and the job I got offered was in Saint-Nazaire where there is a big Airbus plant, so I moved there, then they moved me to Nantes the big town only 65kms from Saint-Nazaire, where there is another Airbus plant, then a year later they moved me back to Saint-Nazaire, where I just built my first house, so now I am here to STAY !     Done and fed up with moving all the time... I deserve some stability....

Airbus has many plants across France and other European countries (Spain, Germany, England, the USA, and China, mainly).

In France there are 4 main sites / plants : in Toulouse, the main plant / HQ,  they assemble the Aircraft from big sub-assemblies, that are made in the other plants.
Other sites in France are Méaulte in the North of France, then on Atlantic coast there is a plant in Rochefort, another in Saint-Nazaire where I am, and also one in Nantes close to Saint-Nazaire.

In Toulouse, the " Final Assembly Line " / FAL as we call it, they build nothing, they only "stitch" together all the big Aircraft chunks that are made in all the other sites.

For example in Saint-Nazaire here, we make the front part of the fuselage and the center section as well.
In England, they make the wings. In Spain I think the make the rear cone complete with its control surfaces.

It's team work ! ;-)

I think my post will get moderated ! 

Back to ORCAD... stupid me : there is no point figuring out how to mount floppy images kn DOSBOX.... until I figure out how to make these images in the first place !

I guess it might be quicker to just try to install VMware so I can use the FLP images PA0PBZ made....

[PA0PBZ]

I guess it might be quicker to just try to install VMware so I can use the FLP images PA0PBZ made....

See if you can get it working with the install disk, if so I'll pack the others together and put them somewhere you can get them. I guess I'm not going to post the link here so that will be a PM.

Oh by the way, I like the small sidetracks, that's what I miss since the TEA thread got 'corrected'.

[pcprogrammer]

Oh, well we can say you are French then ! 
14years here, and you still don't speak French ?! 
Hurry up, get a grammar book and a dictionary quick ! 

I don't work here, so we live in our own bubble so to speak. Talking to the farmers does not go beyond cows and the weather so not a lot of help there in learning French. I speak it better then I can understand it, so a text book is not going to help with that. 

And we moved here to get away from people

I bet it's quiet, it's a desert ! 
A nice kind of desert though, as you said. Wish I could live in that kind of place but the jobs are in the bigger cities... the Center of France isn't the best place to find a job and make a career... unless you can work from home of course...

If you mean desert in the sense of not a lot of people, yes absolutely. But if you mean desert like a lot of sand, nah. It is one of the greenest areas in France. Even now with the driest summer since 2003 it is still green

I knew about the airbus being build in different locations, but google only showed Toulouse when I first searched for it. Learned a bit more about it today then

I think my post will get moderated ! 

Only when someone complains about it, and we that participate here don't seem to mind. Hell I'm prolonging it myself

But keep up the good work with OrCAD. Like to see you get it to work.

[nctnico]

P.S. I have to respond to what you wrote elsewhere about the French not speaking English, and I have to acknowledge this. I was at the hairdresser last Thursday and I just speak a little bit of French and understand way less.

Same here. I was in Paris for a few days when a new lockdown was announced in the NL. So I went to find a hairdresser because my hair needed cutting and I didn't want to cut my own hair -again-. The 4th one wasn't on a lunch break but the lady didn't understand any English and the French lessons I followed in school didn't cover having your hair cut. I just sat down and told her 'coupee' while making sissor movements with my fingers and went ahead under the basic assumptions hair dressers don't let you walk away looking like a complete idiot. It went well.

[Halcyon]

Although the "The IT Crowd" filled my needs for a while. And so accurate, as someone who is education is IT related. The "Did you turn if off and on again?" it's so true and the solution for tons of problems.

Especially nowadays with Windows 10/11. It's no secret that I hate modern Windows with a passion now, but I've experienced first-hand some weird and wonderful problems with no explanation as to the root cause, but a reboot fixes them. Seems to happen more these days than it ever did in the Windows 9x/XP/7 era.

[pcprogrammer]

  Even a moderator is doing off topic  (Sorry could not resist)

But weird reboot requiring behavior is not exclusive to Windows. I run Ubuntu and Linux Mint, and on occasion have had to reboot because no other action would restore to normal working. Just because it did not see the keyboard or mouse anymore.

The days of simple and robust software are long behind us. That was the beauty of just having less then 64KB of memory to work with. No room for errors. 

[50ShadesOfDirt]

Late to the thread (didn't read it all the way thru), but you want to use dosbox-x, which does have a menu bar across the top. Install, run, and get a "dos box", which has the "z" drive in it. "mount" a local folder on your PC as the "C" drive.

On the floppies you have for an ORCAD application, they aren't os/bootable, so one trick is to copy all contents of all floppies to a single folder, and run install from that. Or, continue to review dosbox-x, and get your "A" diskette drive setup the way orcad needs it. Another is to see if the setup program is a "batch" file of commands, and just pick it apart and do what the batch file was trying to do from a bunch of floppies.

If these *are* still dos diskettes, you'll want to find one of the old dos imaging programs, and preserve copies of each diskette into img format, and work from those. These old programs have tons of mirror sites on the 'net, and you can still find all the old dos utilities.

Hope this helps ...

[Vince]

Thanks for that.

I looked in Ubuntu repositories but I can't find dosbox-x, only dosbox vanilla.

For now I am trying to get VMware player to work on my Linux box, Ubuntu 16.04.

Found these instructions :

https://manjaro.site/install-vmware-player-12-5-6-ubuntu-16-04/


I downloaded it, it installed fine, however when I started it for the first time, it wants / needs as  usual to compile a few kernel modules (though somehow this vital step is not mentioned in the above tutorial..), and that's where things go wrong. ITt fails to do load these modules/drivers. The installer is kind enough to provide a log file of what happened, so I looked in that log file and not much clue as to what happened... it did find the compiler and kernel header files, it seems happy with that, but at the end of the log file when it tries to actually run the compiler to build these modules.... it fails, no details given 

So it's not looking good.

That's why I prefer VirtualBox... simply because it is avaiiable in the Ubuntu repositories so the devs have already checked that's it "just works" : you just click "Install"....you wait a few seconds and off you go, you can start the program right away and it just works.... no messing around, no modules to compile.... it's all already done and tested for you.


I will persevere, I will persevere............

[50ShadesOfDirt]

Missed the post that said you were working only on linux ... when I checked the dosbox-x site directly, they do have linux versions (flatpak's, rpm's), so more poking around is needed to sort out the repository/update part (shirley there is a command & switch for that

Once you get it working, then your dos imaging utilities & such should be available to you as well.

https://dosbox-x.com/

You may not want to release your dos diskette images, but if you do decide that's an option, there are "history" sites that will take the diskettes in, do all the magic, and make the old releases available to all. One would still have to sort out licensing, but at least the old diskette format wouldn't be the showstopper. These sites offer loads of old applications (and OS's), to keep the history more accessible.

[Vince]

I do use Linux however now I think of it... I do have a Windows XP virtual machine within VirtualBox, so I guess I could investigate that path.... maybe under Windows I can find a little user friendly utility that can make floppy images from files and folders.... worth a shot. Stay tuned !

[Vince]

OK, been working on the thing all evening long.... now soon 22h30, I am super tired and will go to bed as soon as I am done typing the present message....

So what I did :

Seeing as I was going nowhere trying to install VMware  on Linux, I gave up.
Instead I tried to install it inside my WinXp VM... yes, a VM inside a VM... because when you are completely desperate, you are willing to try ANYTHING !!! 
That didn't work because I could not find an old version of VMware that would run on WinXP. Every time Google pretended it found one and I followed the links it gave me.... I always ended up being served, in reality, the very latest VMware release, somehow.

So I went back to basics... seeing all the time I wasted trying to get VMware to work so I can use PA0PBZ's FLP floppy images.... I thought hell it's only fair that I spend at least as much time trying to make images on Linux using the command line. The tutorial I found earlier seemed super complicated and convoluted and complex, a bit scary, and I couldn't even understand if it would actually do what I wanted to do.... but well, I decided to give it at least a try.  Glad I did because it worked just fine, I can now make my floppy images, from random files stored on my hard drive, just with basic command line tools that are already installed by default in any Linux setup one might have.

So here is what you do : you create a virtual floppy disk image, then you format it for MS-DOS, then create a virtual floppy drive, then you stick your virtual floppy in your virtual drive then.... you can use that virtual floppy like a real one. I could just copy, to start with, the contents of the ORCAD Install disk, onto the virtual floppy.

In case anyone is curious, here are the details :

Create the virtual floppy disk :
$ dd bs=512 count=2880 if=/dev/zero of=imagefile.img

Format it for MSDOS files:
$ mkfs.msdos imagefile.img

Create the virtual floppy drive to go with it (mount point)

$ sudo mkdir /media/floppy1/

Insert / mount the disk into the drive :

$ sudo mount -o loop floppy.img /media/floppy1/

Then I could just copy the ORCAD files from the first / Install disk, onto the virtual floppy :

$cp /orcad/install/disk/*.* /media/floppy1

Then I eject the floppy :

$ sudo umount /media/floppy1/

That's it, the image is ready... then rinse and repeat 24 times to do create all the ORCAD disk images (if you want to install every module / component)... which will take some time.... so definitely not now ! I am going to BED !!!

So I tried that first hand crafted, cherished floppy image inside my VirtualBox VM and.... it failed miserably, in exactly the same way that the FLP image did before : you can read the contents of the disk just fine, but as soon as you load the ORCAD install program, screen goes black and VM becomes unresponsive. So I guess that means there is nothing wrong with the FLP image, or my own.... and it's just somehow VirtualBox that doesn't like the ORCAD install executable....

So, as a quick sanity check, I loaded my image inside my Windows XP Virtualbox VM.... opened an MS-DOS prompt window, navigated to the floppy disc, loaded the install.bat file and... VOILA ! Look at that ! It works now !!! 

So the problem is not Virtualbox at large... only the MSDOS VM is affected.

So, great, now I know how to make my own floppy images from the Linux command line, and I know they work fine ! So tomorrow after work I will spend 2 hours creating all the images !!! 

Stay tuned !!

[pcprogrammer]

Hi Vince,

even though I could not cite the commands from the top of my head, they do look familiar and are very basic linux commands.

Good job, and success with the rest of the images.

[PA0PBZ]

So it was as I thought, my .FLP was fine and it is VirtualBox that is the problem here. It's probably simple to correct if we just had an idea what the problem is, I will try to do it on my VirtualBox and see what happens. The better way to create all the images is create one , format it and then copy it as many times as you need changing the destination name each time. That way you only have to create and format one. Even faster would be to just use my images, try the install.flp on your XP VM and see if it works, if it does I will upload all the images I created.

[PA0PBZ]

Since I didn't have an active MS-DOS VM in VirtualBox I downloaded the HD Image "MS-DOS 6.22 with WIN 3.0" from here http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html and assigned it as the drive. Then I linked the A: drive to the install.flp file and started install.bat:



So at least the install works for me, I didn't change any settings in VirtualBox but of course this one is running in Windows 10, not Linux. 

[Vince]

Thanks for the link, I did the same as you, and under that Win3.1 VM my home made image file works just fine !
Weird... so that gave me an idea... When you tell VB what kind of OS and version you want to create for a new VM... for this Win3.1 VM I naturally chose "Windows" category, then " Win 3.1 " version.

And for my MSDOS VM I chose "Other", because MSDOS was not listed upfront, then in "Version", DOS was available, so I chose that. It was the only choice at my disposal that made sense.

However, I thought.... Win3.1 is basically still an MSDOS machine isn't it !

So...I modified my MSDOS VM settings to instead declare it as a Windows 3.1 VM ! And hey presto it works now !!! 

So then, I created all 24 disk images at the command line, it was much quicker than I thought.... was pleased with the result.

Then I could run the installer and feed it all the disks.

It didn't go smoothly at all, messy, buggy, especially the "PLD" component.. that's an understatement.
Overall it's a huge mess even once installed, buggy... I think there might be some corrupted files somewhere....

At least I managed to load the main menu, and from there the schematic capture component, and place a few symbols....
But when I tried to switch to the PCB to lay some tracks, didn't work. Looked very sick.
The mouse doesn't work, which doesn't help ! Moving the pointer with the cursor keys works but sooooo slow.
I guess I need to load a mouse driver in config.sys or autoexec.bat....

Not sure why the PCB thing doesn't work. Now I think of it it can't be corrupted files since I am using the same files that PA0PBZ used to create his FLP images... 

Not sure if I want to leave it at that, or if I want to spent a couple more hours trying to improve the situation....

At any rate it was an interesting exercise, making floppy images in Linux at the command line. It's a useful skill that will no doubt serve me in the future, given how much I like vintage computing...

[PA0PBZ]

Hi Vince,

Yeah, I didn't do anything with it since the install, it's the ride, not the destination I'm not sure why your PCB editor doesn't work... I did set the VM to Other - MS-DOS even while it was a Windows 3.0 image because I only needed the DOS part of it anyway. Windows works, I played some Reversi games
For the mouse download this floppy image and copy the contents  to a folder on the C drive, then put VBmouse.exe in the autoexec.bat: https://depot.javispedro.com/vbox/vbados/vbados.flp

[Vince]

Thank you very much for that ! It worked, I now have a working mouse !!! 

.. however the mouse pointer moves wayyyy too FAST, I can barely control it !

Switched from way too slow to way too fast ! I have rich people's problems I think !


I will see if maybe one can pass "VBmouse.exe" some parameters to configure how the mouse behaves...

[PA0PBZ]

.. however the mouse pointer moves wayyyy too FAST, I can barely control it !

It's very fast here too, but workable and I could not find any parameters to control it and I wasn't planning to do my next design in Orcad anyway so I didn't bother. But if you find something let me know!

[Vince]

I just tried my chance and ran "VBmouse /help " at the command line, and yeah, it does give me a help screen ! 

... but unfortunately none of the avaiialble parameters have to do with adjusting the sensitivity of the mouse !


Oh well...

I think I will leave it at that for now ! Thanks people for your help, was fun !!! 

I will now move on to other activities, plenty of stuff to do, I don't want to waste my entire week-end just on ORCAD...


I will give it another try later on, on a real DOS machine, once I get round to reviving my vintage computer. It's in storage now as I don't have space to install it in a permanent fashion, for now.
Once that computer gets his own permanent spot somewhere, in a few months hopefully, hence I can actually start playing with it at will..... then I will write ORCAD images onto real floppy disks and install it on that old computer. Will probably be an overall smoother experience.... using real period H/W.