Mike's PCjr Page

Does anybody run program menu systems on their Jr's? I used to make batch file menus for all my floppies and am fixing to do the same on the JrIDE. I saw the topic has been brought up here a couple times and also found this Info World article from 1988 that does a write up on 9 different menu systems. I might try some of them out if I can find them . Starts on page 39 link below. Great article, quite a blast from the past.

Anyway Just thought I would share the article and put the topic out here to see if anyone has feedback. Cheers!

https://books.google.com/books?id=5D4EA ... &q&f=false

Thought I would post about the menu system I decided to use: FDO or Fixed Disk Organizer is some IBM software I stumbled across on Ebay which was quite a struggle to get working but after figuring it out I was really impressed with how clever it's operation is. The biggest hurdle was the software is not Y2K compliant so after the date and time gets synced with the JrIDE the software won't let you pass it's date and time screen. Fortunately I found a patch here: http://www.dirkschouten.nl/ibm-fdo.htm

The next hurdle was figuring out exactly how the fool thing works. I did not trust the installation batch files it came with as it insisted on renaming and replacing my autoexec.bat. I spent quite a while trying to run it independently of autoexec and it would just drop out to DOS regardless of how I configured the menu options. After more reading and digging I figured out why: The way this thing works is by using a loop inside autoexec to start itself back up after launching whatever program is selected. It seems to modify autoexec with the DOS commands you configure on the fly and then loops back to restart itself after you exit the program. How clever is that! Well I was impressed anyway...

Kablamabam wrote: ↑Sun Dec 05, 2021 10:31 am Thought I would post about the menu system I decided to use: FDO or Fixed Disk Organizer is some IBM software I stumbled across on Ebay which was quite a struggle to get working but after figuring it out I was really impressed with how clever it's operation is. The biggest hurdle was the software is not Y2K compliant so after the date and time gets synced with the JrIDE the software won't let you pass it's date and time screen. Fortunately I found a patch here: http://www.dirkschouten.nl/ibm-fdo.htm

Can you go into some more detail about this? I actually picked up a NIB copy of FDO a few years ago but never really looked into how it worked. I ended up making my own (messy) batch file menu system but it's kind of slow and a pain to update.

Can you go into some more detail about this? I actually picked up a NIB copy of FDO a few years ago but never really looked into how it worked. I ended up making my own (messy) batch file menu system but it's kind of slow and a pain to update.

Sure. So after it installs there is a DOS Commands menu that allows you to run basic dos commands like DIR, COPY, etc. You can "edit" these to see how the menu options are configured. So using DIR as an example, when that option is selected it will prompt you to enter the drive and directory you want to list. I think It actually displays the DOS command being built as you go through the prompts. So when you run the menu option the the menu system exits and runs whatever command was put together. How it seems to work is it actually adds the command to the end of your AUTOEXEC.BAT along with a GOTO command to loop back to launch the menu system again.

So basically if you try to run FDO outside of your AUTOEXEC.BAT file it doesn't really work

Interesting. I guess I'll have to play around with it sometime and see if it will work for me.