The official FreeDOS channel! FreeDOS is an open source DOS-compatible operating system that you can use to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software, or develop embedded systems. Any program that works on MS-DOS should also run on FreeDOS.
Was the ansi driver built into windows or terminals like Telix or Wildcat? I used to draw login screens and such for my own bbs and to include with archives, but I don't remember loading that specific driver. I was the sysop for the Sandbox BBS in Pittsburgh in 94/95.
Not sure why, I recall 1.1 was stable. But download the much newer FreeDOS 1.3 and use that -- or see my other video from last week where I talk about the monthly test release, which is very nice!
As I mentioned in the video, we're still talking about 1.4. There's some work to do in the monthly test release before we can go to 1.4. But stay tuned! Check out the 'changes.log' file in the monthly test release directory, it has a list of all the changes since we've been making the test release. You'll find package version updates, NLS updates, removing a few packges (oZone and Seal, both from GUI) .. and larger updates like a new HTML Help, etc.
@@freedosproject Thank you, I could've been more clear. :) I was thinking about a roadmap with specific goals. It makes it easier to _guesstimate_ when a release is close, and if people can help with the remaining items. I looked at changes.log to get an idea, but that only offers commit description. The mailing list (sourceforge) has a lot of great discussions, but nothing in particular caught my attention about a potential roadmap - not sure how long back I should look.
There is a very active retro community in Germany for DOS based systems and I like FreeDOS so much it's already way better than the most known DOS variant back in the days. Thank you all for this great work and project. 🙏
Hi, 3 of my computers use a NIC that uses the E100PKT driver, could you put that back in on the main CD? Also I used to have it auto detected in other releases… I specifically remember 1.2 finding it on boot. Thanks!
The e100pkt package is on the LiveCD in both the FreeDOS 1.3 distribution and the monthly test release. You may have to edit your config and FDNET.BAT to use it.
We're limited by the codepages provided in hardware. My recollection is CP866 provides Russian, but I don't know how much Russian characters overlap with Ukrainian. You can contribute to the FreeDOS translation project at shidel.github.io/fd-nls/
I love hearing about what goes into maintaining an operating system distribution. Very cool, and pragmatic, to have SoundBlaster emulation. The FreeDOS project is amazing!
This was perhaps a bit too simple of a demonstration to exactly reproduce the older baud speeds. But I think it's close to the 300 baud Hayes modem we had.
Correct, @@SmallSpoonBrigade It's a virtual drive. I'm running QEMU on Linux, and I made that virtual disk with: qemu-img create -f qcow2 freedos.qcow2 500M
@@SmallSpoonBrigade - I had a HDD that 140MB back in the day. And when I saw my first HDD, it was a 14" platter that was 14MB, with 320 TTL Chips on the board.
Thanks! I'm planning another programming video, that will probably be the next one. (Not sure on topic though, might be about writing code with #ifdef to compile on either DOS or Linux.)
Once complete DOS compatability is achieved, where do you see the FreeDOS project going? Emulating the Win95 side of things? Or staying CLI only and just improving the code until it's feature complete?
Why go further? Sometimes there isn't really anything more to do. Once this gets to the point where you can run Win ME over the top of it, there isn't really anything more to do that wouldn't represent a complete change of scope.
You can already run 32-bit Windows programs, including some GUI based ones like DOSBox "on DOS" using the free HX DOS extender. It may seem odd to want to run DOSBox on top of DOS but it's useful to run games made for slow CPUs on modern hardware. As a fun fact there was a beta/demo/whatever version of Microsoft Office for Windows NT that was released a few months before than Windows NT itself and ran on DOS using Phar Lap's TNT DOS Extender 😅
It's on the BonusCD. We include OpenGEM, oZone, and Seal in FreeDOS 1.3 (you can see the details in the 'What's included' link on the Downloads page). We decided long ago (after 1.3) that oZone and Seal were both very buggy and not as useful, so we dropped those from the monthly test releases; the T2410 test release only has OpenGEM, and it's on the BonusCD.
I'm sure I have, somewhere in there. It's not any different to install DOS software on FreeDOS .. the challenge is copying it to your virtual machine so you can start the install. I run Linux at home, and I use 'libguestfs' (guestmount) to make my virtual hard disk image accessible from Linux so I can copy files to/from the virtual disk. It works great! That's how I install all my third party stuff like games, compilers, applications .. my favorite is AsEasyAs Spreadsheet!
Is there a way that I can get my CD/DVD drive to work on my thinkpad T430S? The installer sees the drive but after install, it doesn't see the drive at all and I can't install software from the drive. Is there other drivers I can try?
I learned DOS early and still love it! A lot of great software was written to run on DOS and it still a useful operating system. I have my own older PC that only runs DOS and it applications. DBase was the database king in the DOS days, as WordPerfect and Lotus 123.
Have you ever programmed it as a 1 player game as in against the computer? Ive just started programming with godot and was wanting to put senet in my game as a mini game.
I did something like this -- I experimented with letting the computer play itself, so I could see which approach worked better. I tried one version that played "conservatively" (tried to move the "last" piece forward first) and another that played "aggressively" (tried to move the "first" piece forward first) and couldn't decide which was better. I suspect an "alternating" approach would probably work well against a human. But I never merged that into the game. The DOS version has always been a 2-player game.
@@WalterandGaming_Music Try SBEMU or VSBHDA .. both are now included in the FreeDOS Monthly Test Release (see my other video from last week about that). I haven't tried either of them (because I run a virtual machine on my desktop, and my Pocket386 has real audio hardware) but folks say it works great.
In FreeDOS, you can give COMMAND a file argument to the /P option which tells it what BAT file to run. We do this so people can dual-boot FreeDOS and MS-DOS on the same drive. MS-DOS only looks for CONFIG.SYS, and MS-DOS COMMAND only reads AUTOEXEC.BAT. But FreeDOS will look for FDCONFIG.SYS first, then CONFIG.SYS .. so you can use FDCONFIG.SYS for your FreeDOS config and CONFIG.SYS for your MS-DOS config. And if your FDCONFIG.SYS tells FreeCOM to load FDAUTO.BAT, then you can keep your FreeDOS startup in FDAUTO.BAT and your MS-DOS startup in AUTOEXEC.BAT. It's a neat solution.
BBSing in the good old days. :) I remember when I saw the first 1200 baud modem... my friend was rich. :P Rather his dad was. It was fascinating. Man, those were the days.
I feel like the speeds demonstrated here are nearly twice as fast as I actually remember them being. Maybe the parity/stopbits/flowcontrol had something to do with it?
It might be a little off, but it's still pretty close. The original point of the demonstration program was to demonstrate different characters per second, and the easiest way to do that was to emulate a "baud" style. But I think it's close enough as a demo.
A few systems also still ran on the DEC pdp1120.Several years ago, Canada put out a call for anyone who knew how to use this computer because they were still running their Nuclear systems on a pdp1120.
What's this "120 baud" stuff about?!? The TeleType model 33 used a 7E2 110BPS connection yielding 10CPS. The model 37 used a 7E1 150BPS connection for 15CPS. The linked-to WWW site keeps dividing by 8 for some reason. TeleTypes were asynchronous 7-bit terminals. So 7 data bits plus a parity bit sandwiched between a START & STOP bit. (two STOP bits for the 33)
teletype 33 the sound of the future...love it...yea I started working with computers in 1980 and was on a teletype at 110 baud connected to a school district computer, from there I went up in speed and with each jump no matter how minor you felt gifted to get it...I remember doing pascal in college from home at 300baud and i would upload run or compile and do all modifications on my atari 1200xl in action! and reupload the whole thing each time...but yea 1200baud was very liberating when it showed up, got into bbs at that point and modem speed made a difference on ansi text based game graphics...yea running code from a bbs door...oh yes...cool video.
Yeah, when my parents met, they were working at an office where several people shared a 1200-baud link to the company's main campus, so one person getting a big terminal update would slow things down for everyone else
FYI Baud is a symbol rate, bits per symbol in FSK modulation is simply 1 so baud equals speed but only for FSK. 56k modems were still ~14,400 baud but used QAM which packed 4 bits into each symbol.
Today you've made me feel all warm and nostalgic for the "good old days" of dial-up modems and BBSes back in the early to mid-1990's. In some ways, network communications were better back then, right up to the early days of the Internet - with limited bandwidth, people had to be clever and succinct in how they communicated, it was a true network of individual people sharing their ideas. Every new BBS you dialed on to or every new web site you found was worth exploring and taking a look around... Nowadays, 40% of the Internet is bot traffic with AI generated and nonsense web pages crammed with bandwidth-leeching advertisements. Ho hum.
