GWFetch

GWFetch is a screenfetch/neofetch/etc. system information tool, but it is written in GW-BASIC for use on DOS-based systems. The little tool should output some reasonably accurate information about your MS-DOS, FreeDOS, DR DOS, or PC-DOS computer with some caveats, of course. Because we're talking about MS-DOS and work-alikes, there are drastic variations in CPUs with only complicated ways of detecting them combined with the simplicity of older PCs (i.e. no "packages" per se).

Requirements

To run GWFetch, you'll need the following:

GW-BASIC

This script has been tested again GW-BASIC versions 2 and 3, nothing more. It may run under QBASIC, but it hasn't been tested.

The script will call common DOS commands, so please make sure your DOS directory is on the path.

Running

To run GWFetch, simply enter:

gwbasic gwfetch.bas

or whatever your GW-BASIC executable is named (I simplified it to gw on my computer...).

Customization

If you really want your machine to display a name, you can set an environment variable HOSTNAME to what you'd like to see displayed.

The first few lines, specifically 10-100, have two other options:

SHOWUPTIME

The script uses GW-BASIC's TIMER command to calculate uptime for the current day. MS-DOS and its cousins do not have a concept of uptime beyond one day natively. Additionally, the output of TIMER becomes even more useless if the system has a working, battery-backed clock or the user has entered the time via the DOS TIME command, in which cases TIMER just reports the time since midnight. Maybe you want to turn off displaying this potentially useless information by setting that variable to 0 (zero).

SYSTEMONEND

When set to 1 (one), the script will call SYSTEM just before END so that you're not dumped into the GW-BASIC interpreter. Maybe you prefer that.

Limitations

The CPU detection is pretty thorough except that it stops once it thinks a 386 is present. It will report 386 if you're on a 486, Pentium, K5, etc. Detecting a 486 might be possible, but that's how it works right now. Because I was mostly interested on lower-than-386 computers, I wasn't particularly interested in continuing down that road.

Furthermore, other than NEC CPUs, everything is reported as Intel. This decision is, for the most part, accurate since 286 and earlier CPUs were effectively just second-sourced Intel designs as opposed to novel designs from other chip companies. I believe detecting different manufacturers of 386s starts to become possible, but that seems a bit much.

No memory will be reported under DR DOS. Their MEM output is bananas.

How It Works

Most attempts to classify the system are achieved through calling known DOS commands, such as MEM, VER, and CHKDSK (in the absence of MEM).

CPU detection follows a winding assembly path that detects 386 and earlier CPUs based on CPU characteristics, bugs, and other hacky means. GWFetch contains the machine code to execute these checks starting around line 12000. The machine code is written to memory, modified slightly, and called. Likewise, there is a DOS version and provider section around line 12500 that relies on a DOS interrupt along with some additional hacks.

System hardware detection is pretty basic. An initial check is made to detect Digital Rainbow 100 video memory. If that fails, the BIOS system ID is read. Unless you're on a true, early IBM system (yuck) or DOSBox, your machine will be reported as an AT or compatible.

The assembly source code for the machine code routines is stored in the "asm" subdirectory. The assembly is included to build the machine code, which requires the INLINE tool, a program used to convert assembly into Pascal inline machine code. The "support" directory contains a Python script to subsequently convert the Pascal inline machine code into valid GW-BASIC DATA statements.

About

If you like the software, have comment, suggestion, patch, complaint, etc., let me know by email or at:

Thanks for looking!