The new 286 PC Emulator for Fruit Jam provides many interesting possibilities and a lot of fun.

This Playground Note will provide information that may not be evident or may otherwise help others.

Initial Impressions

Having wide emulation through the 80286 is helpful, through it wasn't until the '386 that memory handling got better.

I was really excited about all the display modes. But trying to get to them in DOS or QBASIC was impossible. Maybe they'll work in games but I'd like a high resolution DOS screen too.

Disk Images

The disk images that come with the emulator are as follows:

• fdd0.img is a MS-DOS 5.0 boot floppy
• hdd.img has MS-DOS 6.22 on it but it is not bootable 
• fdd1.img contains the two games and COMMAND.COM, bootability not tested

I has a MS-DOS 6.22 boot floppy (1.2MB) image and it was compatible with the hdd.img DOS directory files. I suggest you use this disk, which has MAPDRIVE on it also, instead of the provided DOS 5 disk. The downside is it takes up a bit more memory. Or better use the MS-DOS 6.22 hard drive image below.

If you boot into MS-DOS 5 from the original floppy, the MS-DOS 6.22 files on the hdd.img image won't work, throwing a version mismatch error (common for trying to run DOS commands from one version on the command processor of another DOS version).

Note if you use a second hard disk image, it must be named hdd2.img. Different from the floppy numbering.

Recommended Image

I have made a bootable hard drive image with the original hdd image but stripped of all the compilers, assemblers, and other items. It has a bootable MS-DOS 6.22 and autoexec.bat and config.sys are tailored to use this as a boot disk without a bootable floppy. It has DOS and the original GAMES directory and the MAPDRIVE utility.

You can still have the provided image ad a secondary hard drive D: by renaming the file on your micro SD card to hdd2.img.

If you put a bootable floppy image as fdd0.img, the system will boot off that and not the hard drive. So if you use the fdd0.img which is a MS-DOS 5.0 boot floppy, the DOS version will be 5.0 and the DOS programs on C:\DOS will not match. And likely due to autoexec.bat and config.sys differences there could be issues with MAPDRIVE and other issues.

So if you use the new disk image above, don't boot from floppy. Booting from a hard drive is always more satisfying, anyway.

What are Disk Images?

Good question, I've written a whole Playground Note just on images.

MAPDRIVE.COM

The guide and Pico-286 documentation discuss MAPDRIVE, a way to use part of the SD card to hold files "loose" (not in an image). The file, as far as I see, was only on the DOS 5 floppy image so I extracted it separately if you need it.

When you follow the instructions you'll get a new drive H: (or whatever letter you choose above D:).

NOTE: This acts like a network drive to DOS. This means the drive, in my testing, is read only. It sometimes doesn't give accurate results to a DIR directory command. But I have launched a game from it ok. Exiting the game there was an error that could be dismissed (at top of this guide).

This might be something that needs further work.

If you're interested in Network Drives, see my Playground Note on Accessing Remote Disks on MS-DOS via TCP.