You’ve made some excellent tools that have become the standard for the retro gaming community, especially DOSBENCH which you see in a lot of retro gaming videos from across the creator space. Thank you, Phil.
There's also "MTRRLFBE ver. 1.6" from 2021, your pack comes with 1.3 from 2011 @@philscomputerlab and there are still files you can delete, like the "Thumbs.db" you accidentally added to the SPEEDSYS folder in the latest version. Cheers.
Je*us, Phil! You reminded me about my school age and lessons of computer science we had. We used to practice DOS commands and were using the floppy disks also. Once, I remember, I've copied Win 3.11 from a school computer to several floppys and later I've installed it at my private PC at home. My teatcher had to loose a few minutes of her brake waiting for me to steal... oh I'm sorry, to finish copying files. That s mid-nineties in Poland. Great times:)
Dear Phil, I live in the Netherlands and I have been following you for a long time. I am also a fan of old MS-Dos computers. I loved the MS-Dos diskette you designed with the quick way to set up an old PC. Because I use the Dutch version of MS-Dos, I converted the diskette to Dutch. I hope you don't find this a problem. If I (sporadically) meet someone who also has this hobby, I hope you will not mind giving him a copy. I will always mention you as the source. Kind regards, Gerard vd Crommenacker.
I have a similar go-to boot disk for setting up new (to me) drives for dos/win 3x. Super handy for the toolkit, though mine is a little more 'bare bones'. When I set it up originally a couple years ago I had to remember / double check all those steps you put in that readme...so that was a thoughtful inclusion!
I love these kinds of videos. Helping people get up and running quickly with DOS and the like to get people less versed or a bit rusty up and going. Thanks for the excellent content as usual Phil!
Very nice and useful for somebody like me who is an oldbie but is now into mid to late '90s to mid '00s retro PCs. A tool like this DOS boot disk among the many you have provided here and in your page are really useful and convenient. And very nice to see a CRT is making an appearance in this channel, not sure if you have featured them already in your older videos.
I had one of these myself in pre-XP days. Full of tools like XCOPY32 and stuff too. Somehow it's stayed with me through all sorts of hard drive failures, loss of computer, accidental deletions. It still comes in useful from time to time.
Personaly i like to use the 16 bit BIG real mode (like himem.sys with Intel/AMD 80386+). Default segment size of 16 bit Real address mode (DOS) is 64 kb for all segment like code, stack, data. Undocumented 16 bit BIG real mode segment size of 4 gb for data segment, but 64 kb for code and stack.
EMS = Expanded memory with use of a 16 kB window in the upper memoy area using bank switching XMS = eXtended Memory, this uses the memory beyond the first megabyte of RAM directly, but it's more difficult to programming software to utilise that memory. Before emm386, EMS was mostly provided through memory expander cards, like the intel above board, but these solutions didn't follow the LIM (Lotus, IBM, Microsoft) EMS standard, and each card has needed it's own drivers and the Software needs to support that driver, else you'll stick with the conventional memory. Emm386.exe uses an emulation layer to provide an amount of extended memory as EMS memory, but it needs at least a 386 CPU. But there were some motherboards with the famous NEAT chipset around, which was able to map some higher memory to the EMS memory space. It has needed some special drivers, which were available for 286 or 386 CPUs.
Thank you for your tools, Phil! A few years ago, you made videos showing how to set up DOS drivers for SoundBlaster cards (vibra, 16, awe32 etc.). I remember that the process was a bit tedious, since you have to extract and copy files from multiple sources, create specific folders. Maybe you could put together a similar, easy to use package for those Creative sound cards as well, if you get the chance? Unless Unisound is perfectly fine and has all the features, like sound mixer, echo/reverb control for AWE etc.
Oh man, this is great! I have a '95 box with a P200 in it that is becoming increasingly redundant (I mainly use it for DOS games as I have a more powerful '98 box for Windows games). Due to weird compatibility issues with a bunch of DOS games in Windows '95, I have been thinking about just turning it into a pure DOS machine for a while now. However, I've never done that and so was confused on things like drivers and whatnot. I think this boot disk will help tremendously and I'll likely give it a try soon. Thanks!
@@philscomputerlab Oh, there's a ton. But some off the top of my head include Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Virtuoso, Shockwave, etc. I generally prefer to run from Windows for ease of use, but lately I've tried booting straight into DOS and I have the same issues.
This is a great resource and as always THANK YOU Phil for all your content on this hobby. Every video is a treat. Also I think shutter speed on some cameras can be adjusted when filming old CRT monitors to get it to sync up with the refresh rate to avoid the flickering / out of sync visual noice.
It's difficult for most cameras, to set the correct shutter speed on non-60-Hz frequency screens. For that problem there exists a TSR program VGA240.EXE, which forces the text mode to 60 Hz, which is compatible to the most cameras, which are unable to set their framerate to fractional refresh rates like 70 Hz text mode.
That's awesome, I'm taking it you're not loading your drivers into the upper memory block for compatibility reasons but it triggers my OCD seeing drivers casually loaded into conventional memory! I know it's a pretty barebones system with minimal drivers but some (in my opinion badly written) mouse drivers can use up to 100k so sticking it in the umb really helps for games that want 520k or more conventional memory.
Had a MS-DOS bootdisk with CD-ROM drivers and a CD-ROM that contained a fully installed MS-DOS with drivers, autoexec.bat and config.sys with bootmenu. Booted from the bootdisk, "fdisked" and formatted the the new HDD/cf card and just copied all files from the CD-ROM over to the now partitioned and formatted disk/card. A fully running system after less then 10 minutes. :)
Cool, jetzt mit CRT Monitor, klasse ! Habe auch noch zwei Monochrome Geräte im Keller. Eins mit MDA für einen 286 mit 8 MHz und dann einen Camping CRT mit SVGA Schnittstelle aber halt Schwarz Weiß und mini klein. Ansonsten habe ich aber keine mehr hier, haben mir zuviel Platz weg genommen.
Ich habe schon seit 10+ Jahren keinen CRT mehr gesehen. Also in Geschäften, Büros, Schulen u.s.w. Ich habe nur diesen und wenn der eingeht, dann wirds teuer 😐
Had a boot disk and I made one every time I installed 98 lol. Always had some flavor of windows running and never had any real major issues. Figured out the sound compatibility by just telling every game it was a sound blaster compatible. Though some games I'd configure it to gravis for midi music and seemed to work
A perfect video Phil! Now if you are ever up for it, it would be really cool to see the exact same thing, except with sbemu instead of unisound, so you could do this also for modern pcs.
@@philscomputerlab that’s a shame but totally understandable as I had to try 3 different memory managers before I could get a stable result 😅 himemx was the winner
Great video man! I really love these videos about retro pc. UNISOUND has to be started with /vcXX command (for ex. /vc50). Default will mute the audio cd.
I have something similar like this setup for my 386SX notebook. Mainly to get as much conventional memory but also to switch video modes for the Cyrus Logic chip. In Windows I preferred the default "light mode" and in DOS I preferred the "dark mode". This was because it had an LCD display. But LCD meant something different in 1992. It meant Liquid Crystal Display. Or monochrome essentially reversed. Still have the old notebook! The MS MOUSE.EXE driver is great, but if you don't need scroll or fancy office things, the regular mouse driver works ok and uses a bit less memory.
Love this! I have been working on something similar, but using Windows 98SE DOS and SBEMU. My attempts have been more focused on more modern PCs and dual booting with Windows XP. XP detects Windows 98SE DOS, but not DOS 6.22 in my experience. I also added gcdrom.sys for SATA CD-Roms. And it's a bootable USB/HDD Install Image. But I don't have the boot menu or the optional mouse drivers. Unisound as an alternative is also interesting.
@@philscomputerlab You need to go all @miketech1024 on this problem and buy a job lot of Windows XP/7 PCs and do a full SBEMU test! 😆 But more seriously, I am a bit surprised it's worked so poorly for you. But maybe I just have way to many PCs from that era to test on 😛
This is a timely comment for me - would you mind posting your exact lines in the config and autoexec files for loading gcdrom? I was trying just yesterday to initialize drivers for a SATA cd drom in DOS and am having no luck thus far.
@@retro-computing-gaming Here are the relevant parts for the CD-ROM drivers from each file. ### AUTOEXEC.BAT ### rem Windows 98SE CD-Rom Driver LH C:\CDROM\MSCDEX.EXE /D:oemcd001 /D:GCDROM /L:D set CDROM=FOO23 C:\CDROM\FINDCD.EXE echo. rem Populate PATHS path=C:\ rem Add CD-ROM to PATH if detectable if NOT "%CDROM%"=="FOO23" path=%path%;%CDROM%\ ################### ### CONFIG.SYS ### rem Windows 98SE CD-ROM Driver device=C:\CDROM\oakcdrom.sys /D:oemcd001 device=C:\CDROM\btdosm.sys device=C:\CDROM\flashpt.sys device=C:\CDROM\btcdrom.sys /D:oemcd001 device=C:\CDROM\aspi2dos.sys device=C:\CDROM\aspi8dos.sys device=C:\CDROM\aspi4dos.sys device=C:\CDROM\aspi8u2.sys device=C:\CDROM\aspicd.sys /D:oemcd001 rem SATA CD-ROM Driver DEVICE=C:\CDROM\GCDROM.SYS /D:GCDROM ###################
I did this for myself a couple of years ago. The only difference is that the install on mine pulls DOS6.22 from a CD and also installs Windows 3.1 right afterwards. This is cool. To fit enough of MS-DOS on the floppy, did you create an archive to save space? Really curious. I went the CD route so I could make sure I didn't leave out any important files for DOS. Also, does the UNISound work with Aztech soundcards? Most of the sound cards I use with my old DOS systems are not plug and play at all. I have zero experience with UNIsound as I generally use the original driver disks for the cards I have.
What is your experience between unisound and sbemu in terms of functionality? Do you find one more compatible than the other? Have you considered using sbemu as a sound option? Thanks as always for your awesome retro gaming tools!
The most powerfull DOS command is Debug. Debug from MS DOS provide 16 bit instructions, but there is an other Debug version that works similar and it provides 16 bit and additional 32 bit instructions for 80386+ CPU in DOS. The only one difference between 32 bit and 16 bit on 80386+ is the usage of instructions with or without address size and operand size prefixe. That means in 16 bit protected mode on 80386+ we can address 4 gb of memory with using instructions with an address size prefix. In the 16 bit Real address mode(of MS DOS) we can use 32 bit operands with instructions and an operand size prefix. But the segment size is 64 kb for all segments.
I was just thinking in my head if Phil has ever tried out DR-DOS or made a comparison of it to the IBM DOS. I've always like DR-DOS, but have not been dedicated to any particular flavor of DOS personally.
You mean probably ViewMAX, this was a crippled version of GEM, just for file management, it cannot run GEM apps, it was only designed to run DOS applications, but in a more convenient way like Norton Commander, the much better tool for file management and launching DOS apps.
Hey Phil, this is very good. Would like to ultimately do what you did. If I download Rufus and then copy my copy of msdos 6.2 onto a flash drive, do you think it will work?
This is awesome! I would love to re-create this disk in german language, using MS DOS 6.22 german. Is that fine for you? I simply need to replace the files in the DOS folder and correct the keyboard layout, correct?
one of these years i need to find the dos boot disk i made specifically for recovery and initial setup of older machines. it spent years as part of my main kit. should be someplace with my first gen dell usb floppy drive. oh well. i have a spare floppy, so i'll dump this one to hard copy. i don't feel like trying to rebuild my old one. cheers.
Every time I watch a video in which someone utilize fdisk I remember that I want to learn how to automate it but always give up before finding out how it is done 😂 For my life I can't remember where the heck I watch that thing go full auto.
@@philscomputerlab I can't recall some details, like if there was any utility hidden detecting the size of the hard drive, the thing is that your approach looks like the perfect balance between manual input and automation, at least to set up and test my small collection of parts So another must have utility added to the collection, thanks again Phil!
That's a good way of putting it, I want the heavy lifting to be done with a few touches by hand to adjust to whatever computer you're working with!@@RetroTinkerer
I made something like this, but with two floppies and for windows 95 98 computers for customers. once booted on it's own, xcopy cab files over to install fro hard disk. this way is customer makes changes like add/remove or networking ones the cab files are there without digging for a cd. ... still have those floppies, lol! looks like I gotta update them with newer drivers ...
Hi Phil, please what is the website where you upload undocumented BIOS-es or images of HDD-s of rare computers.? I have a Dauphin DTR-1 with some aps i would like to wipe after and what app do you use for making a image of HDD-s. Also have many MB-s .Thanks
Oh man this is awesome! is there a limit to what kind of machine to install this to? Like say 5150, 5160, 5170 etc or its clones? or is 386/486 being the limiit
@@philscomputerlab ah i wasn't sure. I have a 5170 and portable 2 that's 286 and 6.22 works on them but having a streamlined dos install with mouse support sounds amazing lol
@@philscomputerlab oh right.... I vaguely remember that when I was researching while restoring the AT... Anything above 640k would be extended not expanded...
How can 1 floppy contain the whole MS DOS Operating System? If I recall correctly DOS 5.0 came on 3 disks, DOS 6.22 even had 4 discs. Which version of DOS did you include in your image?
