Submitted by No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you – we have actually have not one, but two news items on hobby/small operating systems on the same day! You thought the day would never come again, but hey, here we are. You’re welcome. Now, what are we talking about? FreeDOS – a test release has been, uh, released for FreeDOS 1.1.
It’s been a while since we saw a FreeDOS release – version 1.0, released in 2006, to be exact. So, we’re looking at 5 years ago, but then, this is essentially DOS we’re talking about, and since this project is not aiming at moving DOS beyond what DOS is supposed to do, development doesn’t need to include flashy animations and other nonsense.
“FreeDOS is a free DOS-compatible operating system for IBM-PC compatible systems. FreeDOS is made of up many different, separate programs that act as “packages” to the overall FreeDOS Project,” the project states, “Right now the main use is running old games and software, but you might encounter it on some freshly sold computers, motherboard setup CDs, BIOS flashing diskettes, embedded hardware and other uses.”
Yes, FreeDOS is indeed not ‘just’ a small hobby project; it is used by many large OEMs as optional installations, and is also used by some BIOS update tools. Most people, however, probably use it for running older games.
So, what has changed since 2006’s version 1.0? Other than the usual performance improvements and bugfixes, it comes with the initial work on USB controller support, a newer kernel version with bugfixes, some limited USB flash disk support, and several other things.
The team advises to only use this test release in a virtual machine. You can get it from their website.
After weeks of the same old shit, boring news, and right after I post complaining about it… news of FreeDOS 1.1. This is truly good news, I’ve been wondering when the project would put out a new version. Thank you FreeDOS, for finally breaking the cycle… not that I expect it to last very long at the current rate.
I recall plenty of updated packages that, unfortunately, had to be installed manually in 1.0–it’s really been showing its age. Something as basic as the defrag program, for example: The version in FreeDOS 1.0 could not handle FAT32 partitions, though there has been a version of the program capable of this for a long time now.
Edited 2011-07-05 22:09 UTC
I have to agree this is GREAT news, and not just for those that like to play with funky and offbeat OSes as freeDOS is used in several commercial applications. One that wasn’t listed in TFA is the excellent Spinrite, which allows you to bypass the OS on a damaged or failing drive thanks to FreeDOS and often recover the data.
I can’t count how mant times at the shop I’d have a drive that was supposedly DOA when in reality for one reason or another Windows simply refused to mark a handful of bad sectors as such and would instead dump OS data on them, thus causing crashes. Thanks to freeDOS and Spinrite I was able to let Spinrite mark those few sectors as bad and now those drives make reliable portadrives in cheap USB enclosures. Thanks FreeDOS!
a new drive with bad sectors (visible to the OS and not dealed with by the drives firmware) is DOA .
Actually I’d say you are wrong, and here is why: All drives are designed to deal with a few bad sectors, that is why there is extra space on the drive you can’t access. it is there to replace a failed sector or two.
Now what I have found is that for some reason on certain drives (cough cough Seagate cough) you seem to be more likely to get those few failed sectors towards the front of the drive and for some reason Windows simply refuses to mark them as bad. With Spinrite marking those sectors as bad the drive works fine, SMART checks out, all is green. In fact when my nephews HDD died I gave him one of those drives with a couple of bad sectors as a temp until I could get him another drive. That was two years ago and the drive is still running like a champ.
So we aren’t talking about a drive with Gbs of space marked bad, we are talking a couple of Kb at most. I’ve found with SMART you’ll get plenty of warning if the drive really starts to fail but with a few bad sectors they can go for years and years just humming along. As I said I use cheap USB enclosures with most of those that are of any decent size with that problem that comes into my shop and so far they are transferring files and running on relative’s Nboxes just as sweet as sweet can be, YMMV of course.
the problem is that when the os sees bad sectors, the drive already ran out of backup-sectors
so the platters are either of low production-quality or got damaged later on
both are inacceptable for a new disk
and don’t put too much trust into smart
i’ve seen several disks die with perfect smart-values
Actually I’ve found with certain drives (Seagate and Maxtor) if there are even a couple of bad sectors in the front? They will NOT be exchanged and Windows won’t see them as bad. As I said I’ve been using several as USB drives for several years now, scanning them often, not a single error since Spinrite.
Of course I’d say Spinrite probably has a lot to do with that as if I am handed a bad sector drive I run a level 4 scan, which does 4 separate write/read and error tests before it calls it. If a sector fails even once? It is marked as bad. Sure it takes awhile to run that deep a scan but that is why I have an old 233MHz that was given to me that makes a perfect box for such tasks. Just sit it in the corner loaded with FreeDOS and Spinrite and let it do its thing.
But I’ve been doing this since Spinrite was at V3 and knock on plastic the only drives I’ve had die were head crashes which I got plenty of warning about. If it survives a spinrite pounding and comes out green? I’d have NO problem using that on a machine.
I love free dos. It was unfortunate that I failed to convince my superiors to use it instead of the commercial Data light ROM DOS. It was so so better. But they had already paid for Data light. I think I was just a couple of years late. But, I always maintained a version of our product on Free DOS to use whenever we ran into a data light bug. That was a real help.
I also used it to replace parts of win 98. Their command.com was much better, supporting history and autocomplete.
Now? I have to admit I have no real * practical* use.. other than the grid 286 laptop I have for running ancient games on. Its the one platform I have that’s incapable of a linux install.
I had FreeDOS installed on a Lenovo T400, and it was surprising to see what amounts to a 20 year old operating system and applications running on 2 year old hardware. (To my knowledge, FreeDOS itself doesn’t make any allowances for modern hardware though various applications, extenders, and device drivers do.)
The main problem though is getting software onto it. Most of the good applications were commercial back then, and almost everything was distributed on 3.5″ or 5.25″ floppy diskette. Well, maybe when I get adventuresome again.
Yeah, I still have a couple boxes of 3.5 floppies, and a modern box with a drive hooked up.
You’re lucky, then! Most people would have to resort to USB floppy drive (like me). 🙂
If you have a suitable network card and packet driver, you can try various tools, e.g. mTCP:
http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/
Heh, I’m surprised no one nagged you to try ELKS (or even Minix 2.0.2). But even a lot of DOS software needs 386+ these days. It’s somewhat painful trying to find useful, working 16-bit only software. Be sure to join the mailing list if you need any help.
Yeah, tried both. Elks and Minix didn’t work.
Used FreeDOS the other day to update a PCI card Bios. Was hoping USB storage support was there so I didn’t have to master a CD with the BIOS file.
Yes, it’s a very handy OS to have around. It’s amazing how many products still have a DOS based tool to update firmware, so I’m glad to hear this product is still supported/developed.
Edited 2011-07-06 03:50 UTC
I have managed to install FreeDOS 1.0 from a USB drive, though my recollection of the process is incomplete because it was so convoluted. It may also depend upon your computer’s BIOS, since it seems as though every BIOS vendor has a different way of managing booting from USB drives.
I just purchased complete Doom package from Steam (total of 7 games/addons for 8€) and am having difficulties running Ultimate doom on DosBOX on W7. Can FreeDOS fix the “problem”
Doom2 works better on DosBOX and is nicely playable.
I can’t see why it wouldn’t.
Install FreeDOS to VM (VirtualBox or VMWare should do nicely) and try from there.
VirtualBox didn’t support SB sound (last I checked) though QEMU did.
Edited 2011-07-06 18:04 UTC
I think installing Doomsday is a better solution in your case than FreeDOS:
http://dengine.net/
On topic: great to read that FreeDOS 1.1 is finally here.
Edited 2011-07-06 09:33 UTC
What exactly isn’t working? You could try replacing the .EXE itself with a “newer” “port” [sic] and see if that helps, e.g. Eternity:
http://eternity.mancubus.net/ee-old/ee331b7-dos.zip
EDIT: Obligatory related links:
http://www.nongnu.org/freedoom
http://uhexen2.sourceforge.net/
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/
Note that sound is a huge lack in real DOS these days since SB-compatible hardware hasn’t been bundled in ages. So I’m not sure you’ll want to play on real hardware (thus DOSBox is a good alternative). I can’t remember offhand what this build of Eternity supports, I think it’s only Allegro 3, but I (barely, in the past) was able to recompile with Allegro 3.12 for slightly better functionality (patches.dat, VBE/AF), if that helps you any (doubt it).
Downloaded ZDoom and got all my Doom’s running perfectly at 1920×1200
As I mentioned, the purpose was to get the Steam Doom pack to work, but their config was with DosBox and Ultimate Doom lagggeed massively and basically just crashed.
Well, I assume they tested it, but dunno, would have to check closer. By default DOSBox usually comes setup only for 16 MB of RAM (max. 64), which is sometimes too low. But I can’t imagine DOS4GW swapping like mad or anything, so who knows. cycles=max or core=dynamic or whatever may or may not improve the situation. (Search on DOSBox’s forum.)
One of the most important and indispensable tools in the eComStation and OS/2 community is the “multiplatform disk and filesystem maintenance and recovery utility” DFSee (-> dfsee.com ) which uses FreeDOS to boot in case the HDD won’t.
We do appreciate valuable old things
In my country branded computers from HP and the like are often sold with FreeDOS installed instead of Windows. Why you might ask? Well piracy is so rampant here that branded manufacturers just can’t compete on price if they include Windows. So they install FreeDOS instead. They should be installing Linux but I guess they don’t want to offend Redmond. Doesn’t matter though. The local vendor will just replace it with pirated Windows.
Edited 2011-07-06 07:37 UTC
FreeDOS is probably much easier to support than Linux, and as OEM they are required to give end-user support for whatever OS is preinstalled. I don’t think anyone is seriously considering using FreeDOS on those machines anyway.
When I bought my Dell Dimension e520n in 2007, it came with a bare hard drive and a installable copy of FreeDOS.
I appreciate the work done on FreeDOS, but I am disappointed that the community hasn’t given us a way to run DOS games on modern OSes, without having to take the DOSBox speed penalty.
See, DOSBox aims to run even on non-x86 systems, so a complete emulation is needed, which is slow for 3D DOS games, even for Core/Phenom processors.
I was hoping for a DOS execution layer (for x86 systems), so that we can run DOS games the way we did on Windows 9x (disclaimer: i am not saying windows 9x was good). Make it Windows-only if needed, just make it!
Edited 2011-07-06 17:18 UTC
If you have Linux installed, you could try DosEMU ( /usr/bin/xdosemu )
. It run 10 times faster than DosBOX. You could run Blood, Shadow Warrior , System Shock or Duke Nukem 3d with no slowdown at 800×600 , even at 1024×768 .
They did, way back in 1986 with the introduction of the 386: V86 mode! That’s why NTVDM worked at all. Unfortunately, MS didn’t keep it up or fix bugs, so it’s basically (half) dead these days. And AMD64 just gave them a reason to completely drop it. (And before you ask, no, 64-bit doesn’t compensate for the huge speed loss of using a full emulator.)
Yes, it’s slow, basically “fast” 486 speed, at best. You need 1+ Ghz just for that! But it works pretty good for sound and graphics (unlike NTVDM).
Actually, check your dosbox-0.74.conf file, you should be able to (sometimes) enable dynamic core for a partial speedup. Or adjust your fixed cycles. Unfortunately, I was told that a 64-bit compile of DOSBox was even slower (ugh).
BTW, DOSEMU under Linux uses V86 and is fast (and LFNs!) but not nearly as good for games as DOSBox. DOSBox is “officially” only for games, not other DOS stuff (e.g. compiling). Unfortunately, DOSEMU x64 has to jump through hoops just to work half as good as 32-bit (and still fails on lots of stuff, sadly).
Your only hope these days is virtualization (VT-X), e.g. paged real mode (AMD’s SVM) or unrestricted guest execution (Intel, 32nm Westmere). I’ve not really tested, but various tools (Xen, VirtualBox) claim to support these now.
EDIT: Obligatory DOS (video) gaming reviews link (often with DOSBox setup tips):
http://www.pixelships.com/adg/
DosBOX is ideal for old DOS games until 1995-1996 , and XDosEMU runs very intensive games like Fallout or Blood .
It emulates a Sound Blaster , a GUS and a Midi synth , and , for graphics , a VGA or a Vesa card, and ¡¡¡¡ you could map REAL hardware devices, PCI devices, even access your video card !!!!
As I said, if you have a little Linux setup, you should have both . My Core Duo is not fast enough with DosBox running these Pentium 2 / DOS era games .
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but in all my recent Linux attempts, sound doesn’t work at all in DOSEMU, and I have no idea why. (I’m not savvy enough to understand how to fix it either, meh.) I’ve just always found DOSEMU sound support buggy or incomplete whereas DOSBox always works. But yeah, if speed is important, DOSBox ain’t for you!
P.S. Check this out (Java):
http://jdosbox.sf.net/
http://www.classicdosgames.com/online.html
Did you check your IRQs in config file and , did you run the “setup” tool which comes with any game in order to set up the Sound Blaster’s IRQS, DMA, and such ?
A tip : IRQ 5, DMA 1, otherstuffIdontremembernow , 5 .
DosBOX uses IRQ 7, I think . I am not sure .
But why would you go through all that trouble when old boxes are practically (or even) free? I don’t know how it is there but here in the USA one can find plenty of give away 700MHz and less which are just perfect for DOS gaming. You can get a 2 port KVM for less than $20 and more importantly for DOS you can pick up an old school Soundblaster card for a couple of bucks. Finish up with a cheap early Nvidia or Voodoo card (The one I have for mine is an old Riva TNT2 which I got for 25c out of a pile at Goodwill) and you have the ultimate Win9x/DOS gaming machine!
So while I’m grateful for FreeDOS and wish them nothing but luck for really old games one can’t beat Win9x installed on actual hardware.
More clutter, which I don’t need. But yeah, real hardware always beats emulation.
I need to get one sometime soon for other reasons (but first reconfig my router, meh).
Win9x chokes when you have gigs of RAM anyways. There are hacks to use 2 GB (and the rest for a big RAM disk), but that’s not ideal either. Even though Win9x is better than WinNT for DOS stuff, even it doesn’t run everything that plain DOS does (and its DPMI leaves some things to be desired). Anyways, you can use up to 4 GB of RAM in DOS with the appropriate DPMI server (CWSDPMI r7 or HDPMI32), though I think RAM disks typically are only <= 2 GB (and even FreeDOS still has the 2 GB file limitation, even for FAT32, oh well).
The main advantage to FreeDOS is … it’s free! (“BASE” is GPL, not that Debian or Fedora agree [re: DOSEMU] … “uses non-free tools”, ugh, only because OpenWatcom [OSI] offends them.) In other words, you don’t need a proprietary OS to run or develop DOS apps, which is an advantage, esp. when Windows (mostly) doesn’t support DOS anymore.
Actually the funny part? You CAN still get DOS 5 and Win3.11 from MSFT by having an MSDN. Yeah i know, I was amazed myself but I asked a bud who checked and said yep, the .ISOs are still there for the taking, they just don’t offer any support past the KBs that are still around.
And why would you need to reconfig your router for a KVM switch? Unless you are trying to keep boxes on different floors it is easier to just get a standard KVM, most of which come with cables. I prefer the Trendnet KVMs myself. they are nothing fancy but they get the job done and more importantly seem to be able to take quite a lot of abuse.
And finally as for clutter? Here is what you need…look online for the “Compaq Deskpro En SFF” which I have seen the 1Ghz version going for $35 and the 733MHz for around $20. It is a VERY small phonebook style desktop designed to be sat under a monitor, the classic ugly beige but a can of black high gloss and a little masking tape fixes that real quick. More importantly while it doesn’t have AGP slots it DOES have full height PCI slots which are just the perfect thing for older GPUs like the MX4000 or Riva cards. It also holds 3x128Mb sticks which is just about perfect for DOS and Win9x, and since it is trivial to boot straight into DOS from Win98 you have the best of both worlds, both Wingaming classics and DOS games to boot!
So really it couldn’t be easier to have real hardware DOS gaming for the ultra cheap. A small box, a cheapo KVM, and a GPU one can pick up at any yardsale or Goodwill and you are good to go!
How about ZDOS? It is more than 10x faster, minimum than other competitors. An 100MHz pc with ZDOS is faster than 1GHz pc with windows or linux. The ZBIOS boots in 0.055 secs, when a 166MHz Pentium does the same thing in 1.55 secs. (i believe)
Totally written in assembler. It is a 32 bit extension of MS-DOS.
http://www.zebor.com/products.html
FreeDOS is high-quality stuff – don’t confuse it with “hobbyist OS”‘s like Haiku (whose codebase is a laugh).
The main problem with real DOS operating systems like FreeDOS/ZDOS is that running them on a modern laptop (or even desktop) can be pretty messy. Not as messy as MS-DOS but still, no way to use the keyboard volume buttons, view the battery level, view your instant message alerts etc.
The problem about getting an old PC and fitting it with Win9x is that you ‘ll have a 15 year old box (filled with someone else’s crud) in your bedroom, taking as much space as a modern desktop pc but being used only when you feel nostalgic. Plus, I don’t expect those 15 year old capacitors to have much life left in them.
As another member said, the only real solution is to run DOS games in modern OSes using VT-x etc (since V86 is no more). Which software should i use? (soundblaster emulation a must). Preferably for Windows 7 or Mac OS X.
I would try QEMU, but i couldn’t find the download link for the Windows 7 or OS X versions.
Edited 2011-07-07 14:42 UTC
Its a shame, in a way.
It seems that most OS choices that have been developed offer two (yes, with grey areas) paths… use an outdated, unsupported version or suffer vast amounts of what I will call “bloat.” I put that in quotes, because I don’t mean bloat in the usual or even negative sense. I use the word in this case to denote features that were not required before, and without which plenty of work was done with computers.
To get back to the point, when I install an older operating system on new hardware (which I almost always do before installing the intended target OS, just to see) if I can get it to run than it SCREAMS. Click and go – literally. No hourglass. But that’s if it will run at all. And of course most of the new hardware is not supported. In the end, the outdated nature of the system and drivers, and NOT the missing features and bling, are what ruins the experience.
In short, I would love to see an OS crop up that stuck with older design (like FreeDOS) but updated that design to support new hardware and newer processors and components. Kind of like how I would love to see a mfg come out with a 0 latency system. No bottlenecks whatsoever. It would be fun to use and play with.
Just daydreaming out loud, I guess. Thanks for reading 🙂
Every system will have bottlenecks. It depends entirely on what is being done with it.
You could design a system without any bottlenecks but only if it only did one single thing, like operate a robot arm.
A robot arm realtime control system has no bottlenecks. The computer operates exactly as fast as the arm motors and sensors support.
A car’s engine control computer or its anti-lock brake or dynamic stability control has no bottlenecks. It works just exactly as fast as it can.
But when you introduce a programmable system, the bottlenecks appear and change depending on what program is being run.
If you are downloading network files, a lot of CPU and RAM is being wasted while the network is the bottleneck.
If you’re playing an arcade game, the RAM and network is going to waste while the CPU or GPU is at 100% use.
If you are processing giant databases in random access, the CPU is being wasted while the RAM or storage system is maxed out.