A Quick Overview of Different Versions for 8-bit BBG-DOS (Famicom Clone)

BBGDOS (as described here) is a 8-bit DOS-like operating system for famicom clone: BBG-1 and BBG-98.

It has released five versions, 0.9, 1.0, 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0. The version 1.0 is the bug fixes for 0.9 and the version 2.1 is the bug fixes for 2.0. Therefore, the following will focus on version 1.0, 2.1 and 3.0.

The BBGDOS v1.0 can only be found in early floppy disk (e.g. demo software). The DOS prompt is A> instead of A:\> in the later versions. It has 17 internal commands (the commands available in command.cmd, so you can use them without loading them from the disks). attrib (used to set different file attributes) is a internal command in v1.0. The list of commands in v1.0 is: attrib, cd, cls, copy, del (alias of erase), date, time, dir, exit, md, rem, rd, ren, type, ver, ? (list of internal commands)

BBGDOS v1.0 in fact does support directories but you won’t be able to use cd, rd, md even though the keywords are reserved.

BBGDOS v2.1 has 6 more commands, which are vol, rename (alias of ren), mkdir (alias of md), rmdir (alias of rd) and echo. However, the command attrib becomes the external program so it has to be present when you want to use it.

For dir command, the version 2.1 supports more command line options: /S and /O which include subdirectories and list in sorted order respectively.

The copy command is also enhanced in v2.1. It supports the such usage: copy A+B C so that file A and B are concatenated and copied to file C.

The echo is useful in batch file *.bat where you can print customise message and use @echo off to turn off showing commands.

The BBGDOS v3.0 only adds one command, which is screen.

The screen is used to switch between the bbgdos (English) and bbgcdos (Chinese), as shown below with larger font and less rows and columns shown in a screen (a Chinese character is 2 ASCII bytes):

Before v3.0 you have to use bbgcdos /u to unload the entire program in order to return to bbgdos, if you frequently switch between modes, you have to load & unload which is slow, now at v3.0 you can just use screen 0 and screen 1 to switch between modes without unloading program. However, if bbgcdos is not loaded, screen 1 yields a error message: error screen mode input.

BBGDOS v3.0 was developed and shipped the same time when BBG-98 was on sale. BBG-98 comes with a 2M internal ROM (C:\>) and the DOS version is 3.0. However, BBGDOS 3.0 can still be used on previous machine i.e. BBG-1.

When you are loaded with a version of BBGDOS, you can’t switch to another by running command.cmd, which is not supported. Otherwise, a errormessage ‘dos version error’ will show up. On PC, you can have multiple command.com and use exit to return to last shell.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —