dinspect

A small DOS program that prints a system inventory — OS, CPU, memory, disks, video, sound, network, and more — either to the screen (with a neofetch-style ASCII logo) or as a plain-text report to a file.

This project was 100% built agentically using Claude Code.

Ported from the original leahneukirchen/dosfetch written in Turbo Pascal 8 to C, built with Open Watcom for 16-bit real-mode DOS (src/). Runs in Real-mode with no DPMI dependency, supporting the widest range of DOS-capable hardware and boot configurations.

Features

• System: DOS vendor/version, shell (COMSPEC)
• CPU: vendor, family/model/stepping, and feature flags via CPUID where available; clock speed via TSC on Pentium-class+ in true real mode, or a labeled loop-throughput estimate on earlier CPUs and under a V86 memory manager such as EMM386 (RDTSC under one has hung real hardware)
• Memory: base (conventional) and extended memory
• Disks: floppy drive count, and free/total space for every hard-disk-class drive letter from C: onward
• Video: adapter OEM string, VBE version, and video memory via VESA BIOS Extensions; chipset make/model via a PCI configuration-space scan, independent of whatever answers the VBE OEM string
• Sound: BLASTER environment variable, AdLib/OPL2/3 detection, Sound Blaster DSP version, MPU-401 presence
• PicoGUS: presence and current emulation mode (GUS/SB/AdLib/MPU/ etc.) for this RP2040-based ISA sound card, if installed
• Network: packet driver presence (by interrupt vector), and IP/ gateway configuration from mTCP's CONFIG.MTC if MTCPCFG is set
• Runtime: how long detection took, to help external tooling calibrate polling delays

Usage

dinspect [options]

  --no-logo          Do not draw the ASCII logo
  --plain            Monochrome screen output, no logo (for OCR capture)
  --no-color         Disable color output; keeps the logo and layout
  -o, --out FILE     Also write a plain-text report to FILE
  --show-undetected  Include fields that couldn't be detected (UNKNOWN,
                     not detected, etc.) instead of omitting them
  -h, --help         Show this help

With -o, the report file is truncated to zero bytes before any probing starts and written in full only once every probe has finished. An empty report therefore means the run did not complete (hang, crash, reboot), never a stale copy from an earlier run -- anything that fetches the report by name after a timed run should treat an empty file as a failed run.

Building

You need Open Watcom installed, with the WATCOM environment variable set (as its own installer normally does). Alternatively, vendor a copy under tools/watcom (gitignored, not included in the repository) and the Makefile will fall back to it automatically:

make

This produces dinspect.exe. Object files land in build/; make clean removes both.

Copying

Originally written by Leah Neukirchen leah@vuxu.org.

To the extent possible under law, the creator(s) of this work have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. See LICENSE (CC0 1.0 Universal), and THIRD-PARTY.md for where outside material was consulted (and why it doesn't affect that CC0 status).