Great video! FreeDOS is a great project, but specifically for retro gaming, the compatibility is not as good. I see FreeDOS more for more modern machines and when you want to play around with some of the new features like virtual CD and mounting ISO files or USB support.
Thank you! You are right and the features you mentioned require more modern hardware. It would be weird to mount a CD image that is larger than the hard disk :)
Absolutely. Modern machines should just run DosBox. DOS itself has very strong dependencies on how the hardware actually works, and will have a real hard time working on modern machines, if at all. x64? maybe. arm? forget it
I value FreeDOS for it being free/libre & open-source software (F/LOSS), because user freedom is important, so even if it takes a hit in compatibility, it's worth it for me.
You can even find FreeDOS included on some modern computers. I bought a cheap Lenovo laptop a few years ago online, chose the option to not add an OS since I could get Windows cheaper on my own, and when it arrived, it had FreeDOS preinstalled. My guess is that they just used that at the factory to ensure that all the parts were in working order.
You can boot MS-DOS 6.22 from USB too, but you need a very small drive. I've somehow managed to get it boot using really old 128 MB USB drive. I don't remember what I've did exactly, probably mounted it directly in VirtualBox as HDD and installed MS-DOS on it. Not it's visible in modern OSes as regular FAT16 drive, but it will boot to MS-DOS. Now with SBEMU.EXE I have a portable MS-DOS drive that can run on many PCs and play games with sound. I've tried same thing with larger drives, but 2 GB was the smallest I've had and it wasn't working.
FreeDos sometimes comes with Laptops that aren't pre-bundled with Windows. I haven even seen it on bootable media like USB sticks or CD images that some vendors provide so you can update firmware of network cards or BIOSes.
Yes: Linux has never used the 16bit BIOS calls, and Windows stopped using them with W95. Until UEFI came along that meant in practice you needed a DOS that was either MS DOS 6.22 or FreeDos or DR-DOS to reflash a motherboard. If FreeDOS hadn't come along the mobo costs would have had to write a cut down version instead, or pay MS or DR licence fees.
Thanks for this video! It was a good overview, but I was really missing the things that differentiate this from MS-DOS, and which actually might have changed your conclusion. There's USB, LFN support, FAT32 support and so on... whoch actually makes this DOS better to work with when it comes to modern things like larger drives, exchanging data with your DOS system and non-crippled filenames (e.g. Norton Commander 5.5 supports them as well). Maybe that's something for your follow-up video when you try it on a newer system...
Very nostalgic. My first personal computer was a Xerox 820 with dual 8" 360k floppies that ran CP/M. It was given to me in the early 80s by a friend of the family who was a software engineer. I loved that machine.
Every time I work with old computer hardware I suddenly remember that it was not "easy" back in the days. XMS, EMS, Base memory, DOS=HIGH, UMB, resource conflicts, the card works in a slot but not in another! :) Fun times (not). I only heard about FreeDOS when making a bootable stick, Rufus has that option. But I never considered installing FreeDOS on a vintage machine to be honest. Nice video and... nice board! (PS I checked the BIOS string and indeed mine is identical! I made a community post on my channel and linked your video as well).
And think about: no internet, no documentation, no nothing, you kind of had to figure out all of these things by yourself or have a friend who knows this stuff to learn from.
@@pgtmr2713 Books back then were rubbish - there was not real computer language convention. You were better off copying system-sys and autoexec-bat from someone and adopting it to your needs.
This video is reminding me of the stack of boot disks we had next to the family computer. Because so many games had incompatible configuration requirements, we just made boot disks - one for XMS, one for EMS, one for SoundBlaster compatibility... good times
It's easy to forget how much of a nightmare using DOS was back then. The rapid development of the x86 architecture, and hardware in general, made things so difficult. Struggling with memory managers, config.sys and autoexec.bat, just to get enough free conventional memory to run a program, was a pain. Getting all your hardware drivers to work properly, altering IRQ and DMA settings, extremely rudimentary "multitasking" and the overall stability of a one legged giraffe just made things worse. It was a miracle anyone used DOS and Windows before Win95 appeared, and it wasn't until 2K and XP that some kind of sanity was restored.😵💫
FreeDos was also used for a long time to install upgrades to BIOS -- that is too reflash the ROM. They needed to do that because after MS DOS 6.22 the versions of DOS you could income from Windows became incompatible with the low level access needed to reflash the mobo. So the mobo manufacturers could either pay MS to licence 6.22, or use FreeDos. Equally Linux has never had those low level hooks, like Win 95 it uses 32 bit drivers that don't bother with the low level BIOS calls at all. So without FreeDos we'd have had to use an MS product...
The port to 8086 was called CP/M-86. I had worked with the original CP/M, as well as Richard Conn's ZCPR. I was hoping to at some point try the'86 version, once my CPU advanced to the 16 bit level. But then the Windows took over and I ended up skipping the CP/M-86. As a funny detail, I wrote a couple of operation/service manuals on CP/M ED before getting actual text (document) editors like WordStar... I still try to locate one OrCad schematic from the DOS era. It looks like my attempt to preserve all my designs through all the upgrades may have missed that one. The Tango PCB layout was still intact, but the corresponding schematic is not -- only the next revision, with revised component numberings and other changes. Oh, i still miss the DOS!
@@asanjuas AFAIK it is not compatible, different binary opcodes. However there is a really big similarity. This allowed to automatically translate man 8080-CP/M software to 8088/MS-DOS on the binary level, without even recompiling. Or at least translation of assembly source code.
@@InssiAjatonCP/M-86 evolved into DR-DOS, the only real competitor to MS-DOS 4 through 6 . DR-DOS went through some company takeovers since 1993, at one point being owned by Novell, the company that made the NetWare server OS and bought UNIX .
@@asanjuasOnly similarity between 8085 and 8088 was that 8088 was specifically designed to reuse 8080/8085 peripherals such as the 8259 interrupt controller . Which is exactly what IBM did in their first PC .
Phil Katz would have been proud that his ZIP file format lives on. He was just a man stuck in the past and never could move forward. I sometimes wonder what he would have done if he could move forward. He would have enjoyed FreeDOS and added a lot to it.
Back in the day, I always left Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11 and the like when I wanted to run Dos programs. I remember I had a start menu for either running Win 3.x or just plain Dos with start parameters for specific apps. Running Dos apps from inside Windows did show sometimes weird side effects or they did not start at all because of memory restrictions or graphics issues and so on.
I only had 6 launch parameters. These were enough to find one that was sufficient for each software. They were: 1. DOS with EMS 2. DOS without EMS but with XMS 3. DOS with EMS and CD-ROM drivers 4. DOS without EMS but with XMS and with CD-ROM drivers 5. Windows 3.1 without EMS. 6. Windows 3.1 without EMS and with CD-Rom drivers. Usually for Windows option 6 was good enough for nearly everything, but sometimes i wanted that little extra RAM and didn't need a CD-ROM, thus i had option 5 for that.
It was even worse with Win95 onwards. You could go into two modes where DOS was running as effectively part of Windows, either in a widow in the GUI, or as the whole machine; or a third option was different again where you actually rebooted not into windows at all. Each of these three versions of "DOS" behaved differently and presented variant compatibility issues, due to the different drivers being used in each mode. That's why for years I kept MS-DOS 6.22 as a separate boot option: I knew where I was with that. Downside is that strategy is that I had to keep a partition that was readable from 6.22 (W95 could cope with larger partitions than 6.22). I only stopped having a bootable 6.22 when I totally abandoned Windows for Linux, but that's a different story...
@@trueriver1950 What you did wasn't required. Windows 95 and 98 both allowed to create boot menus like in MS-DOS 6.x. Thus it was very easy to boot directly into DOS 7 without having to load Windows. So there was no need for a separate DOS 6.22 installation. Only in WinME this was no more possible.
@@trueriver1950I disagree, Win95 made life much easier in so many ways. Yes, loading a DOS prompt from within Windows 95 was different to just booting directly into DOS, but so many problems disappeared when Win95 came along. Having owned an Amiga, I knew how much better and user friendly an OS could be compared to pre '95 MSDOS and Windows. MS knew the Win NT kernel was their future for PCs, but it took years to release Win2K and XP, long after their other failed OS projects. 🙄
I was always a Digital Research DR-DOS user (until MS went out of its way to sabotage it). My experience with FreeDOS has been ....spotty.... some Motherboard BIOSes have choked on it while DR & MS DOSes ran fine. Since everyone else has abandoned the DOS environment, I applaud and encourage their continued efforts to keep the platform alive and relevant - however niche.
@@johndododoe1411 Not quite. Microsoft had licensed DOS from Seattle Computer Products. IBM's need for an OS on their PC range meant they licensed it from MS. It wasn't an upgraded version of MSDOS, just a renamed version of that OS, and without IBM's involvement, MSDOS wouldn't have been more than a footnote in history.
I'm messing around with C/C++ dev in DOS, and FreeDOS is perfect for that. There's a C++ development environment right there in the package manager, with a Borland-clone IDE and everything. It's a very complete and polished product, and (the CD version at least) packs in a LOT of quality tools and utilities that you would need to get from a third party on a pure MS-DOS system. I'd be as bold as to say Windows 3.x compatibility, and "authenticity" value aside, there isn't much reason NOT to use FreeDOS these days!
I have used FreeDOS in the past to do BIOS updates. And I had the exact same "find the right config" thing going on then. It is a little galling when the BIOS updater tells you that you don't have enough memory on a system with multiple GB of RAM.
What I like to do on these old machines is use the XTIDE bios, enabling me to use the full capacity of random, often still factory sealed 40gb and 80gb pata drives commonly available. Then you throw System Commander on it and you can boot MS-DOS, PC-DOS, FreeDOS, OS/2, NT, 95, 98, Linux, UNIX, QNX, DR, Novell, and/or whatever else, actually utilizing the entire drive and letting the multiboot thing work the way it never really could back in the day due to small drive sizes. That being said, if FreeDOS could run 386 enhanced mode win31(1) out of the box, there would be much less practical reason to even bother with all that... FAT16 is very restrictive.
I'll have to try this, not interested in windows 3.1 etc, just straight DOS with maybe the odd 640K type games. The main thing I want over regular dos is to be able to transfer files too and from a modern NAS. Back in the day I used a Novell netware server, worked well leaving plenty of ram to run my software, unlike the Microsoft stack that seemed to take everything leaving nothing ram wise - so kind of useless. These days I can still network dos boxes via an ancient Netware setup, however Windows 10 does not want to know about it, so all the DOS boxes have to live in their own island - not good.
I don't remember trying to run DOS games from within Windows 3.0 or 3.1. As a matter of fact, often the 640k barrier was tough enough to manage without having that white elephant loaded for no reason. The only reason to load it was to use actual Windows GUI applications like Word for Windows, Excel, or the (few and far in between) Windows games like the mighty Sid Meier's Civilization II or the games in Microsoft games collection, like Minesweeper, Ski Free or Chip's Challenge.
There was no need to load Windows for anything other than Windows apps. In a work environment using DOS and Windows programs regularly, swapping between them was a pain. At home, for games etc, it wasn't an issue.
FreeDOS seems to be geared more towards business uses where you need to get old DOS software running on modern hardware that MSDOS just can't run on. Gamers have a very different set of requirements, they need a stub loader that can get DOS4GW or CWSDPMI to run and not much else as everything that made DOS gaming great was down to accessing hardware raw and there's very little FreeDOS can do about the fact that you can't put an ISA soundblaster in a Ryzen motherboard. I never had much luck getting the SB Live TSRs to run in FreeDOS either. Given that DOS and the programs that run on it are not multi-core aware, what I think would be incredible is an offshoot of FreeDOS that provides as close to 1:1 MS DOS compatibility running natively on the CPU on one core, but an emulation layer running on your other cores that provides a hardware interface for soundblaster support on Realtek chipsets for instance. In theory it's completely doable. Linux based hypervisor that runs freedos and uses some TSR shim to gather reads and writes to memory mapped IO and ports and translate it to your modern linux sound driver, usb gamepads, network cards, etc. The benefit over traditional virtualisation would be that DOS would be getting close to 100% of the cpu and not being pre-empted all the time the way it happens in VMware. But of course, it's easy for me to say all this, for all I know there's so much work involved that the benefit over DOSBox just wouldn't be worth it.
Cannot disagree with the conclusion. FreeDOS is nice, legal, opensourced and still patched, but for retro-fans its not DOS; it showed up after DOS had been laid to rest. However, DR-DOS did exist during Microsoft heyday and I used it all the time. The original version was a cut down version of Digital Research's CP/M based system ironically converted to be compatible with MS-DOS 3.x. I think I used it starting at version 5. DR-DOS 6 was quite good and was the first DOS to include UMB support. It was widely used by gamers as it gave you more memory out of the box. Years ago I worked on a project for a bank and we used it for the teller systems to give more memory to the applications. Novell bought it and released Novell DOS 7, which included 386-protected mode multitasking builtin. Eventually, Caldera bought it from Novell and made it publicly available.
FreeDOS is OK for most MS-DOS programs and games, I'm only aware of a couple of incompatibilities: Windows 3.1/3.11 in extended mode and some utility to update the BIOS of Promise RAID controllers. But there isn't a "FreeWIN 3.x" so who cares, many Windows 3.x programs will run fine under x64 Windows 10/11 using *winevdm* and I guess in Linux you can do the same even easier with Wine
Wine seems to be it's own complicated PITA. However, I use Twister OS which has it all kind of setup with dosbox and wine to just work. Makes playing the old dos games easy, plus it has retropie on the desktop. Can emulate all the old machines and consoles. A person can use it and never use the console, just operate from the gui.
That's not the things and the point for years the developers relies on things which the devs are called undocumented, but reality is not only is documented on ralf Brown interrupt list but also the aard code is documented by Andrew shulmam and geoff chappel. Ten years ago It was documented and today is documented i'm blaming on to all fd kernel devs(excepto Jeremy David) to no program the int2f calls for Windows based on the rbil ones and put the excuses on the magically undocumented things. And yed for sure imaging dr-dos back then already be incompatible with Windows. For the freedos is the same if is MS/PC/DR-DOS Clone is a must to RUN Windows 3.1. People seems to not remember.
@@asanjuas I meant that most potential users would have nowhere to get a licensed copy of Windows 3.x and if they go the abandonware route they can also get MS-DOS the same way, for me the only thing that justifies the existence of FreeDOS is having a free software alternative to MS-DOS
@@asanjuas I do, I don't consider it ethical to make illegal copies of commercial software that someone still owns the copyright rights, although it is simply a *personal preference* and *I do NOT blame others if they decide to do that*
DOS i associate with norton / volkov commander rather than windows which I only ran since Win95. Maybe it would be worth exploring something like lotus 123 for this era of computing as part of compatibility?
space limit is governed by the 'address space' just look at the number of bits in the address bus (remember, this is before virtual memory) 8 bit wide memory channel can only address 2^8 bytes ...16 bit 2^16 is 64KB or 64*1024 ...virtualization changed everything! speaking of virtualization, that's pretty much where i have decided to focus my retro-adventures. i'm running freedos in virtualbox so far, i'm impressed but, haven't loaded games only just started getting bbs software running,
DR-DOS was different and It was compatible with Windows. That is not an excuse. Today is now semi-compatible but the problem remains onto the kernel mantainers.
Windows 3.1 was never made to run DOS games from it. Windows 3.1 requires protected mode and so does the DOS extender DOS4G/W which is used by DOOM, that's a conflict! When i played games in MS-DOS in the old days, i always shut down Windows 3.1.
Exactly, most MS-DOS games didn't work or had problems on Windows 3.1, plus most computers at the time had those multiple boot options for compatibility for old and not so old games that needed EMS memory.
Old CAD software that is designed for Windows 9x, requires a Windows9x. And Windows 9x already ships its own DOS version, so there is no need for FreeDOS in that aspect. The thing would look different, if your CAD software was designed to run on DOS. Then FreeDOS might be helpful.
@@OpenGL4ever It was designed for Windows 98. It's a PE executable (Windows EXE file), and runs full screen. But since it runs full screen, it looks exactly the same in FreeDOS. I use the HX DOS extender to allow the Windows software to run in DOS. And as I said - it runs better in FreeDOS. If you can't accept that, that's a you problem ;)
I have more old Retro PCs than MS-DOS licenses. So yes, i would use FreeDOS. The tools that ship with FreeDOS are often also much more powerful than the MS-DOS counterpart. For DOS Gaming, i don't need Windows 3.1. I'm pretty good at the command line, but if you need a graphical file manager, FreeDOS comes with a lot of file managers, and they're better than the ones in Windows 3.1. There is even a Norton Commander clone. FreeDOS does have one more big advantage, it runs better on more modern hardware than MS-DOS.
i don't think the authenticity is an issue. there were always multiple dos choices. i use to run digital research DOS all the time back in the day and it was fine
DR-DOS 3.x was my first DOS, but i replaced it later with MS-DOS when the games required EMS and XMS memory. The compatibility of the early DR-DOS versions were also not the best or many software vendors just didn't care for DR-DOS. Thus this was another reason for me to switch to MS-DOS. In retrospect on the other side, i now know, that DR-DOS, especially the later versions was better in many aspects.
i promote FreeDOS -where ever i can - i know some shops that still used DOS for their POS-software base FreeDOS makes it possible to implement better hardware with all the improvements possible.. like more memory, storage support and connectivity.
In most cases I end up with some weird hode podge hybrid. With MS-DOS 6.22 or 7.10 as base, added with some FreeDOS and 3rd party tools. Like 4dos, the FreeDOS keyboard driver and ctmouse
13:10 ish... "In a court filing related to its private antitrust suit against Microsoft, Caldera alleged that the software giant planted error messages in a Windows 3.1 beta in order to scare off users of a competing operating system." --> 'article from wired: " Caldera: MS Cheated in DOS War" '
Back in the day FreeDOS always caused trouble and things never worked properly. The few computers that did come with it we made sure to format with anything else. No one ran freeDOS. I don't know what its like now, but I'm traumatized from the past, so I'd never install this on anything unless absolutely required.
My next project will be a Thin Client in a custom case with a mechanical Keyboard integrated. Planed OS is FreeDOS + OpenGEM and Windows 95 OSR2. I never liked Windows 3.x, because I came from Atari and Windows feels just bad and ugly at that time and was kind of needless. Games run in DOS not Windows. Most people I know used Norton Commander for easier file handling, even later with windows 95/98.
I used to install free DOS on older PCs used as rest equipment. I just didn’t want to hassle with purchasing MS DOs and you couldn’t even tell the difference
Yeah, I think it's a matter of use case. If your intent is to run games and other software designed for MS-DOS on period hardware, and you either have a license or don't want to bother with licensing issues, then yes, go with what works. FreeDOS I don't think is trying to muscle in on that territory. FreeDOS has several other use cases for which it's much more suited and targeted, where MS-DOS would be inappropriate.
I played around with it for a bit, but to be honest it still had a lot of issues with its basic setups. There is no write caching for hard drives or decent disk repair tool. Its version of CHKDSK is just awful. So is its defragmentation program. Not so many issues if one uses flash i guess, but for platter drives its not so good. TICKLE + LBA cache are rather lousy. I also disliked that 80% of the space it uses is licensing documentation. With no option to not install that at the start. It seems extremely bloated because of that. I also suggested that the next time its packaged to consider using a lower compression level for the disk version so older computers dont take 2 hours to install it. Overall I don't want to say it sucks, but its not a very good thing to run for a retro project.
Does dosbox run freedos?? Years ago I had a legitimate use of dosbox. I used to control a bunch of pbx's accessed via modem, and the software would only work on dos, though I did get it to work ok windows 98 but was a poor experience. It meant I could not easily remotely access this console so I installed on an XP computer accessing the serial based modem, and 'just worked'. It was one of the few WOW moments of my life.
FreeDOS for almost 10 or 20 years was not compatible with windows 3.1 only with windows 3.0. And, of course my disappointing and my thinking is never will be compatible with windows 3.1 or 3.11 , even an included memory managers.
only jeremy davis is working on to make windows 3.1 to run on freedos. He made a video on your youtube channel about running freedos with windows 3.1 in enhanced mode and i repeat this is the only one developer making this possible, no James Tabor no Tom Elhert no Bart Oldeman and the others arguing that the documentation to run windows 3.1 is not available which in fact is in rail, for years must be tell.
@@asanjuas The problem is that most of the older programmers who are able to write old assembler code for DOS and know the DOS API and its internals are becoming rarer every year. Please note that these had their heyday between about 1982 and 1990 and then came Windows 3.0 and later Windows NT 3.1 and no one programmed for DOS anymore. Windows 3.0 applications no longer call DOS functions directly, but use the WinAPI. If you are rich and you want Windows 3.1 enhanced mode support as soon as possible in FreeDOS, then it would make the most sense to pay one of the old programmers full time to implement that feature before they die.
@@OpenGL4ever As a said the Windows internals are documented on rbil and including pcmos are documented on rbil. There is no need to pay for example Thomas Rolander, is needed to pay , but Jeremy David. I don't know if Thomas Rolander would prefer to work on FreeDOS.
If you hate MS-DOS, or Windows 9x, FreeDOS is for you. Otherwise, MS-DOS does the job just fine at being "MS-DOS compatible". If FreeDOS was Nintendo Entertainment System, it wouldn't be able to play Super Mario Bros.
Well, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to run Windows 3.x programs is to install Windows 9x. Windows 9x is simply much more developed than Windows 3.1 and runs more stable. In addition, not every graphics driver has to implement all the GDI functions itself, since this is abstracted in Windows 9x. Also, Windows 9x can run Windows applications in preemptive multitasking mode, while Windows 3.1 still uses cooperative multitasking. Then Windows 9x has a TCP/IP stack, which would have to be installed in Windows 3.1 with 3rd party tools such as Trumpet Winsock. Finally, Windows 9x has a task bar and a much better file manager. There is therefore no reason to use Windows 3.1, unless the computer has so little RAM that Windows 9x does not run properly on it.
Not directly. It is meant to run IT. I mean INSTEAD of Windows. And FreeDOS, unlike MS-DOS, does work even on the latest CPUs, as long as they are x86 compatible (aka no ARM).
FreeDOS appears very janky and unprofessional. Combine that with the fact that it's a hacked together distribution of varying quality, and I will absolutely continue using Microsoft, Caldera or IBM DOS. They work.
