DOS and/or WIN-OS/2 Sessions Problems on ArcaOS

Arca Noae has comment on their website that this is a common issue running ArcaOS (OS/2) on modern hardware. . It says "Generally, this is due to an incompatibility in the BIOS of the system with the DOS VDM code in ArcaOS (inherited from IBM’s OS/2 Warp 4)."

DOS window mode shows wrongly
This is a problem found on a Thinkpad L420. DOS and Win-OS2 works fine in fullscreen, Win-OS2 also works fine on window mode, but DOS on window mode shows wrong/group/superimposed characters on the command line.

Like this image:



Commands on the DOS will work, like for example "exit" will close the window, but the characters just don't look right.

It was suggested to use: DEVICE=X:\OS2\MDOS\VSVGA.SYS /int10textgrfxsafe But on this case /int10textgrfxsafe does not solve the problem.


 * Workarround
 * Arca Noae offers this workaround "Another option, when full screen sessions work but windowed ones do not, is to open a full screen session first, and then press Alt-Home to switch it to a windowed session (this only works for DOS sessions, not OS/2 full screen and windowed sessions)."


 * That is a good tricked that worked on the Thinkpad L420.