Freeware Utilities

Programming

Freeware Utilities

  There follows a short list of simple DOS utilities and programs that I have written and which you might find useful. They are completely free to use, the only conditions being that you accept that there is no warranty or support and that you use the programs at your own risk.

  Please report any bugs you find in the above programs, they were written quickly and if the truth be told, without too much thought. I suppose they were partly a learning exercise for me, and partly to solve problems I needed to solve along the way. Each of them has proved useful to me however, so I present them here in case anyone else could benefit from them too.

  Batch file utilities

WAITFOR.COM  Pauses a batch file for X seconds.

SETKEY.COM  Waits for a key, then outputs a batch file which can be used to set an environment variable.

PT.COM  Checks the status of an attached printer.

TESTFLOP.COM  A tiny program which tests whether you have floppy disks in your floppy disk drives. Supplies result as errorlevel for batch files.

SCREEN$.COM  A utility for batch files which reads characters from the screen and returns them as errorlevel values.

FIND$.COM  Find$ checks the current screen for the specified sting and reports a 1 errorlevel if it finds it. Must be run from a batch file with echo off, or it will detect its own command line!

Communications utilities

FPORTS.COM  Displays COM port details from BIOS.

FMODEM.COM  Directly programs serial UARTs to find COM port information, (avoids bugs in the BIOS of some PCs), then tests each port in turn for the presence of a modem. Returns COM number, Base Address and IRQ of the port with the modem.

WATTIP.COM  Places an IP address from the screen in to the WATTCP.CFG file used by many DOS internet connections. (See also my DOS email page at this site).

Sound utilities

TESTBLAS.COM Checks to see whether a BLASTER environment variable has been set for your sound card. If one has been set, it tries to initialize the sound card using it.

SETBLAST.COM Checks for a BLASTER environment variable, and if not found makes one by scanning the system.

General utilities

BV.COM Displays true colour BMP pictures. (up 640*480 max uncompressed).

Full applications

QUICKPOP.COM A simple, yet remarkably flexible program which allows you to create pop up menus from DOS batch files. Type QUICKPOP /B to create a demo batch file called README.BAT

FILEMAN.EXE A file management program, written in BASIC! It was the one of the first utilities I ever wrote, but I still use it occasionally.

A page from James David Chapman's website. Located at: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jchap/ Site mirrored here at: http://www.j.chap.btinternet.co.uk
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