“FreeDOS is a project which aims to recreate the magic of DOS and bring a truly free GPLed DOS encompassing all the characteristics of MS-DOS with lots of improvements thrown in. A couple of weeks back, FreeDOS developers released ver 1.0 of their OS. I downloaded the full CD ISO of FreeDOS from their website which was around 153 MB in size. Since I have been using Linux as my operating system, I decided to install and use FreeDOS inside Linux by means of an emulator. In the past, I have used Qemu to run Damn Small Linux on my Ubuntu machine. And I was pleased with its performance. So I decided to use Qemu to run FreeDOS as well.”
another possibility would be dosemu:
http://www.dosemu.org/
although i don’t know what is more stable and/or faster
and kudo’s for the author, the article is very detailed!
This was a well layed out guide. More than likely I’ll go home tonight and get freedos and install it pretty much like he did. Just one tip for people who want to use qemu, you can download the kqemu accelerator to speed things up. Not that you would really need it for freedos, but for testing live cd iso’s it helps tremendously.
Bummer is those DOS games don’t look and play quite as hot as I remember them.
INFIDEL!
Come on… Warlords I beats anything!
Whooooaahhh… hold on there now..
Those games are immortal, even the bad ones!
I don’t know what it is, but games these days don’t seem to have the excitement of the old days, even with all their advanced technologies!
As for your comments… offensive! :p
Sorry to offend, those games should be ported to linux and belong on my gp2x. For some strange reason I fondly remember all those wonderful games in glorious 32 bit color but when I drag them out and resurrect them they are only 8 and the advances in display technology, well, let’s just say that samsung magic-brite does not help conceal the flaws that once passed for charm.
Edited 2006-09-28 14:06
I know what you mean, but the graphics are irrelevant.
It’s all about Game Play
Ah, a purist.
“FreeDOS is a project which aims to recreate the magic of DOS”…
The magic of DOS? What would that be, the ability to restrict your 4MB machine to 640K of memory? The single-tasking, command-line interface that screamed technical inferiority to pretty much anything else available at the time? There’s a reason people explained that MS-DOS stood for “Maybe SomeDay an Operating System”; the only magic in MS-DOS was CTRL-ALT-DEL.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no beef with FreeDOS. But reading “the magic of DOS” is enough to give me heartburn.
ROTFL. I had a good laugh at that one – mostly because I agree!
You just don’t get it. It’s nostalgy!
I believe magic refers to the simplicity of DOS. And it was simple. And quite limited.
It could also be that the magic refers to 4DOS or some such
DOS was indeed magickal. My first pc was an Amstrad with 512k ram, K not megs, and a single 360k floppy drive. Furthermore out of that 512k the C: drive was a ramdisk in memory. And we’re not talking a command line, it ran Digital Research’s GEM operating system on top of the DOS like Win 3.1, complete with mouse, icons, the works, with -no- harddrive. I had fun making up special all-in-one boot disks with all the modem/BBS software etc on one disk. The monitor was only a CGA, but they used some hardware trick to make it display more colours than IBM stuff was capable of. The power supply was in the monitor so that the main unit didn’t need a cooling fan. It was a simply brilliant example of efficiency in engineering and I still miss it, and in many ways I miss BBS’s.
LOL! All so true.
Although FreeDOS is a way better “dos” than MS-DOS, it’s going some when a project like this is 10 times more stable than the real thing. Hehe, just goes to show that MS is crap.
Loved all your comment, BTW; especially the part about heartburn.
Yes, but can you run Java on it?
Can’t you people take a joke?
Apparently MikeKim is so fond with Java that he posts about this language in every topic, even if they don’t match at all.
Actually yes.
Well, it’s not Java, it’s Kaffe. But yes. Java-applications can to some extent run on FreeDOS.
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/87
You know this game? It was simple but great
I tried not to name a machine that was truly magical, but you brought it up!
From the webpage: This is an old Amiga game…
😛
I had an old 350mhz AMD Compaq machine that I turned into a MAME machine for the kids using freedos. The little runts can’t get enough of Frogger and PacMan (I can’t, either, to be honest), and it keeps them from screwing up my machine.
The MAME ROMS ran slower than molasses under Windows, but they run without a hitch under FreeDOS. New life for old hardware, old games for (relatively) new kids!!
PS The Advmame live CD wouldn’t run on the old Compaq, because (as far as I can tell) the Linux kernel on the CD is for i686 only, and the AMD’s of that speed were only considered i586.
You might try some ancient MAME release if it’s Frogger and Pacman you want to run, they are much faster. Or maybe try some specialised emulators, MAME with its all-in-one approach is not a very good performer.
for running DSL inside Ubuntu? Is there something DSL can do that an Ubuntu install can’t?
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DOS – an OS without multitasking, without process isolation (it worked in flat 16-bit real mode by default) and OS functions were called usually by executing interrupt
Programs had realtime execution on CPU, so that code normally wasn’t interrupted (except maybe by TSR programs which had their IRQ INT vectors set up). But PIC even could be masked, so you could be sure nothing interrupts your code.
DOS “API” was there alongside those from BIOS (and also Video BIOS) in form of interrupt calls and it was convenient to use them for e.g. accessing file system, allocating memory in first 640k, setting video mode, getting input etc.
Of course, some programs bypassed most of it and played with hardware directly. It was perfectly possible to erase all traces of DOS from memory and continue running your nice 64k demo
Of course this is what turned it into early gaming platform (alongside Amiga). Making a game for DOS was a hard job, but almost guaranteed that you could get maximum out of hardware. Operating systems at that time didn’t have anything like DirectX or OpenGL though and only after Windows95 devs slowly started to migrate.
Fortunately this era isn’t lost in time for people with new machines, as Dosbox, Dosemu and other x86 emulators run that system well. And it’s still possible to run it natively on x86 hardware.
No multitasking, but you could fake it.
I used to do that by running Invisible Link (a nice TSR comm progran with VT102/ANSI terminal emulation and 9600bps Xmodem) in the background, allowing for the dialing of BBSes and the transferring of files in the background on a 286 running plain Vanilla MS-DOS 3.3.
Later on, I discovered Winfred Hu’s Telemate, and that had its own multithreaded kernel, text editor, and DOS prompt emulator, and I could use it in the foreground and do batch file transfers at 28.8kbps using Zmodem (and even interrupt the transfers for minutes at a time to do quickie shells to other DOS applications).
Of course, in time I became sane and moved to a better OS with virtual DOS machines. It was fun to see what a vanilla DOS setup was capable of, though.