garrynichol wrote on 2020-09-30, 21:02:

I'm using a simple text editor that requires ansi.sys loaded in config.sys.

Is it possible to get ansi.sys working as in a normal dos Config.sys file?

I am not sure if I understand your question correctly .

The normal way to load ansi.sys is through a device= statement in config.sys .

For example

device=c:\dos\ansi.sys

This is just an example . The exact syntax will depend on where your copy of ansi.sys is located on your disk .

If your question was about loading ansi.sys from the command line, without having it loaded by using config.sys, see this thread How to load DOS device drivers from the command line?

Also note that there are many, many replacements for ansi.sys around.
Just browse old FTP servers or shareware collections (simtel, night owl etc)..

I think I tried this a few years ago and had forgotten that I was using Ansisysplus ( I should check ) so maybe that is the problem.

I think I will just write a new routine that uses Autolisp, a script and a standard editor to do the task inside the Autocad/dos Dosbox that returns the edited text back to the Autocad editor in the same place and other parameters.

I'll do that tomorrow.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for the help and advice.

Oh I forgot.

This would be handy to know anyway.

Where does one put the device statements in Dosbox?

I have the "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.74-3\DOSBox 0.74-3 Options.bat" but do not see any config.sys staements.

garrynichol wrote on 2020-10-01, 01:24:

Oh I forgot. […]
Show full quote

Oh I forgot.

This would be handy to know anyway.

Where does one put the device statements in Dosbox?

I have the "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.74-3\DOSBox 0.74-3 Options.bat" but do not see any config.sys staements.

AFAIK, Dosbox supports ANSI natively, so you don't to do it in DOSBox .

Yeah, it became obvious it's a DOSBOX question just posted in the wrong forum. 😀

The question is - is it possible to run some stubborn programs that insist on looking for a particular device driver in RAM, even though it is not actually needed because DOSBOX already provides said functionality.

The general answer is - DOSBOX is not for such programs, but for games, but sometimes workarounds exist.

Moved to DOSBox General.

It's possible to use utilities (devlod etc.) to load device drivers under DOSBox but they may not work correctly depending on how programs attempt to communicate with them; trying to open the driver using file I/O and performing ioctls won't work, but calling hooked interrupt vectors will. This is a limitation of the emulated DOS that DOSBox provides, if you boot into real MSDOS (with an actual config.sys file) it's not a problem.

I managed to write a different Autocad 10 text string editor.
I wrote two lisp programs.
The first one lets the user pick the text to edit.
Then it saves the text entity data to global variables and writes the text string into a temporary file.
Then It writes a script file and runs it. (you can't stay in a lisp routine and run a script file so the script file has to be the last ting the lisp program does )
The script file runs the standard dos editor with the the contents of the temporary file.
After the editor is exited the script file continues and runs the second lisp program to read in the temporary edited file contents and re-insert the edited text in the same location with the same text entity parameters such as rotation, justification,color, size, and style etc.
Works seemlessly with no visible delay.
Great for editing long text strings in Autocad 10 as the only other option is to retype the entire string with mods.