** The reason I was interested in looking at this was that I wanted to see how nicely FreeDOS played with other OSes etc. So far, I suspect that most of the problems I've seen were down to misinterpreted sector addresses, i.e. LBA vs non-LBA partition table entries, [...]
More problems than that gives trying to use a GPT partitioned vs. a traditional one, and since most hardware now comes GPT-partitioned ... Though I'm not quite as up-to-date as I used to be in FreeDOS; we just use v1.2 in old (or "make-up to look old") hardware when we need to install a new one; maybe the new 1.3 to-be is better in this respect.
Of course one solution, as you've discovered, is to use GRUB (or similar) to boot, though you might also find some problems with that in some configurations. That's probably one of the reason why most so-called "FreeDOS" (meaning "non-OS") computers actually have some kind of small Linux (like EndlessOS).
Leaving everything else aside, I can confirm that FPC 3.2.0 on Go32V2 running directly on i386 hardware (Sony Miaow laptop) renders all characters and character positions correctly, in particular the menu that you showed in your posting.
So I'd put my money on this being a problem in a library or BIOS facility used by multiple x86 emulators. ****
That's actually quite interesting ... and rather baffling, since the IDE has been working quite well till now
and the only piece I can think of having to bear with this would be the Bosch (virtual) VGA BIOS, and that's a really mature and optimized piece of software. The other thing it might be would be the VGA emulation, but those are also rather mature and well understood. I would love to have the time to investigate this more fully, sounds interesting; unfortunately I haven't got it
Recent
