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Speed up DIRectory listings in DOS v4.0+ with FREESP by ChartreuseK

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Retro Erick presents in video the FreeSP utility by ChartreuseK (link to github or local download) which is useful to accelerate disk reading (with the DIR command) under FAT16 with msdos 4.0 and more. It's not useful with a FAT12 disk and/or msdos 3.x as DIR then doesnt calculate free space and msdos 3 keeps more informations in memory). But with FAT16 disks the DIR commandand (msdos or 4dos) is slowly calculating the free space, so the two following utilities will do the trick :

  • freesp (not TSR : Terminate and Stay Resident) : put the command freesp c: (drive A to Z) in your autoexec.bat and forget it (one disk only)
  • freespt (TSR) : it intercepts msdos interruptions msdos 21h/36h and can manage up to 18 disks, put the command freesp cdef in your autoexec.bat to manage drives C, D E and F (in my case the C: disk by the PicoMem and my ZIP drive as D:)



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