Installing FreeDOS for 8086 on an IBM 5150 

You should take this as an opportunity to revise fdimples so that you can only install certain languages and omit 386 programs.

@@OpenGL4ever fdimples won't run on an 8086 anyway. Even on a 386 it runs slower than a pregnant hippo in a mud pit. It has too much overhead.

@@dschoene57 I didn't knew that. In that case a complete rewrite would be a good idea.

@@OpenGL4ever That kind of application simply doesn't run on an asthmatic processor like the 8086 as it reads its info directly from the zip files, and the processor is simply too slow to decompress the files in a reasonable time. On pre-386 systems you'll have to make do with the command line package tools.

@@dschoene57 This also explains why fdimples only knows the packages that are on the inserted CD-ROM (e.g. the bonus CD). A cross-CD search is not possible at all. The problem could be solved differently, with catalog files. One for each CD-ROM. If you put the CD-ROM into the drive and run fdimples, it could create a local copy of the catalog file on the hard drive. This means that when searching for and reinstalling programs, you could search for the corresponding programs before you have to insert the corresponding CD-ROM. In the case of the FreeDOS distribution, one could go even further and store the catalog file for the main CD as well as the bonus CD on the main CD, so that both catalog files can be installed locally for fdimples without the need to insert the BonusCD. And an 8088 would be powerful enough to also handle catalog text files.

This

Well man pages were not any more helpful when on a piece of paper, they were still the same obtuse and often hard to read collections of arguments and examples. That's just how Unix manuals always were

@@kreuner11 It's much easier to use their manuals when you can see both at once.

Yeah, I remember "bricking" (temporarily, my fathers work friend helped us get the system back running) our IBM PS/1 (model 2011 I believe) DOS install by removing "unnecessary" files - who knew those system files weren't really that unnecessary, LOL :D Still, you really could save some precious space by doing things like this, but that experience kept me away from trying to do it without proper knowledge or a way to get it back running if I removed something necessary - once I learned a bit more I was back at it :)

I remember stripping unused drivers and documentation files out of Windows 3.1 while building a master image for my highschool. I slimmed Windows to a fraction of it's "minimum install size" by manually amputating support for hardware we didnt' have. The final tested *and accepted* install (including all of the curricilum's specified CAD, drawing, animation and office suites) fit on a 80MB harddisc. (decades later) I still haven't forgiven the politically-motivated-[*] who physically destroied it when they shifted blame for their malfunctional-bloated image that deleted features from the applications instead of the 'important Windows files'.

i remember stripping down windows to run in ramdisk on a 486 so it would run faster

For sure, disk space was precious. I once wrote a program to scan for file duplicates (examine files of the same size and see if they were duplicates of the other) to make a report to help decide which copy to remove.

Deleting random stuff is a time honored tradition. I remember reading something about how when Naughty Dog were making Crash Bandicoot, they were just chainsawing out chunks of the PSX libraries to see if it crashed.

You made a pre-set image with preinstalled stuff, imaged that and put it on the dvd along with gparted to write the image into the pc's by just popping the dvd in?

That brings back memories for me too. I used Knoppix for a year back in the early aughts, even using it as just a boot CD. Every time I had to restart the system, such as for power outages, I had to type a bunch of commands at startup to get it booting back to where I had it configured.

@@lasskinn474 and it was scripted and would detect which hardware type it was to be installed to and selected the correct image for it (we had 3, desktop, nb with onboard and nb with dedicated graphics)... We tried to do the same with norton ghost at first but at the very last moment someone realized that the customer had no license for it and wouldn't pay for one. Quote of customer "here take this ghost of a promo cd from that computer mag, noone will notice!"

@@spitefulwar I remember doing that for customers with laptops in the early 2k's.. Bart-PE built XP images custom made with all the required drivers for the particular machine, and any "special request" software.. (license?.. what's that??.. not my machine.. not my problem).. autorun setup so after hitting "install" all they needed to do was provide a user name and sit back. Of course those same people would then try to run them on different hardware and complain because important things wouldn't work..... I really enjoyed the challenge back in the day.. I was the town's "go to" girl when all the shops failed them. Even the shops were my customers when somebody literally couldn't afford a new motherboard or whatever.. I could pretty much guarantee them a repair enough to "get em going" for a few months until they could save up for the new hardware. One of my old customers is still using a desktop P4 I recapped for them way back in 2006. (using caps from a destroyed P2 of all things).. The bad caps era was great fun, but not many machines from that era survive now.

Back in the days of MSWindows 3.0, I had tried it out and decided it wasn't what I wanted to use, and didn't have the disk space to waste on the installation. But I still wanted to play MSWin Solitaire. So I made a custom 2-floppy (1.2mb) setup of MSWin, replacing the system shell (progman.exe) with sol.exe. I would boot from the first floppy, which would assign half or more of the system memory (don't remember how much) as a disk cache. At some point it would need the second floppy, and would load right into a solitaire game. Your first game through would play VERY slowly, but once it had gone through that first pass, the entire environment would be in disk cache, and would be quite peppy (this was a '386sx). Disk prices have gone down far enough I can keep a VM of MSWin10 on my system (Fedora, of course) for those rare occasions I'd need it.

Yeah, it's fine. I still remember buying a game box, and opening it to find 10+ diskettes in there for some of the bigger adventure games. 880K diskettes no less, since it was the Amiga. But it would probably be a good idea for Free-DOS to come with a scripted tool that let's you choose what you want/need in your installation. Very few people will need more than one language, and most people will probably gladly look for documentation on their mobile phone instead of searching for the help texts on their classic computer itself.

Absolutely a great username. No questions asked.

Makes me wonder how difficult it would be to compile your own distribution of it from source. I don't know what build system they use, but it would definitely be cool to get a self-hosting installer.

The CD does not boot the Linux kernel, but DOES use the SYSLINUX bootloader. All the different boot methods use the SYSLINUX bootloader so they don't have to rewrite the program multiple times to work with any boot method that the CD supports (ElTorito and emufloppy and I think one more)

@@nathanielbarragan882 ----"(ElTorito and emufloppy and I think one more)" romeo..

@@anon_y_mousse I am looking at seeing if i can compile the kernal and command to use a little less ram.

part of that reason is thats its time consuming, and to do the language appropriate installer & test the install is not something a single person can do, which again make it more time consuming. I believe the real reason for the single "package" and not better suited smaller install setups is to _not_ make it too easy for comercial use, which dont contribute to the project. If it was packaged in more convinient was it would have been used on more than just the 1000 odd device models it already has been used on, of which not a single donation has been made, nor contribution to the project - well thats always been my take on it anyway

nope they only care about money nothing more nothing less.

@@Bewefau money?

@@MurderMostFowl my guess is salt about donations

@@MurderMostFowl yes someone is getting paid for it.

I guess that since FreeDOS development started long after these machines were obsolete but DOS itself was still widely used they never gave much thought about the early PCs and instead chose to leverage contemporary hardware (486, early Pentiums).

How'd it work?

How did it work?

sadly EFI systems will kill that tho, as DOS can only support BIOS.

@@Vlad-1986 It's the other way. DOS and most DOS programs require the BIOS, they won't work without it. So as long as your UEFI firmware doesn't have a BIOS legacy compatibility mode, you're out of luck. And since the Intel Haswell CPU, the Intel CPUs no longer support the A20 Gate.

@@Vlad-1986 Legacy Mode is still a thing

Even as late as just a few years ago, the Dell Optiplex machines work would order came with a FreeDos CDROM instead of Windows installed, since we had a site license for Microsoft software already.

​@@Vlad-1986Feh. They just need to use a chain loader with an EFI capable kernel to kickstart the DOS system. It's already long since been a thing.

an xt with a 3.5inch drive can still install the 720k version. It only took me 2 hours.

@@wishusknight3009 That's not bad at all. Definitely feels like a lot was compromised with the install process just because of size.

Yes, you are on a roll, but ... despite the zip format becoming universal i.e. integrated into Java and windows, there was another file format that has better compression. ( yes, and as much as I hated using it, it did have better compression. ) Its the ARJ format: But that is not all: This is something that was used by people with really small disks. ( I had 2x20MBs, RLLed to 32.5 ) but my friend had 2 10Mb disks, the second of which had a bad area giving him only 15Mb, and he wanted to run DOS 5: What did he do? Executable compression. A program that compressed executables. The problem with this is that you cannot compress something twice... so you either used ARJ, and compressed afterwards, or you compressed first, and used ARJ just to split, and place ( i.e. it put stuff back in its proper directories. ) The UARTs of which you speak is the 16550N. The real ones. Have a 16 byte FIFO First in, first out, that combined with the ZModem protical, allow you to send a character, with only 8 bits, as it streams, and strips the 1 char start, 1 char stop, and does not use parity. Its a smart enough protical to resend packets that have errors. With good UARTs, you can bring the stream rates up to 38,400, and the DTE to DCE rates to 57,600. Necessary when using modems, but not very useful for DTE to DTE. ( The rate change, not the raw speed ). Hardware wise-you can get a 640k backfill card for really cheap. 630k free with DOS 6.22 Exepack is a program to compress and decompress 16-bit DOS executables with EXEPACK, a format for self-extracting executables. ARJ is currently on version 2.86 for MS-DOS and 3.20 for Microsoft Windows and supports 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit Intel architectures. It is unknown what version works with FreeDos. And lastly, the command processor only executes 1 line at a time, so leave your comments in a TXT file, and only have a single line in the beginning with the name, and the version number. My personal recommendation for the install? Have a ram disk that takes up 1/2 the ram, arj the files to the ram disk, then exepack them there, then write to disk or better, exepack them on the host, and then arj/store them, and just unstore & place them. Arj also has options for fastest uncompression, which would speed up the delivery side.

@@joeturner7959 I also preferred ARJ in the early days. Because it was easier to use, the help and program parameters were easier to learn, it offered self-extracting archive files, and supported splitting the archive across multiple disks. The compression rate was also good and the license terms were more free for private usage. Eventually I realized that it's not a good idea to use self-extracting archive files. Because they needed more space, were more susceptible to viruses and could only be run under DOS. That was the time for me to switch to pure archive files. And when the Windows Millennium supported ZIP files out of the box, I switched to ZIP files entirely. Also, I've found that zip files do better with a bitflip, while ARJ dropped out here.

You can try Ontrack DDO (Dynamic Drive Overlay) to use large drives in older systems, but it is not compatible with FreeDOS.

@@alexandrecouture2462 Well as said, any OS i tried so far did detect the full drive just fine, no special programs needed. Only the BIOS setup doesn´t recognize the full capacity which is actually based on windows 3.11 installed onto the hdd as it was common for compaq machines from this era. So it´s actually only a overlay that controls the BIOS, not sure what the BIOS will actually see as it´s not accessible by its own

Is this with kernel86.sys?

Commander Keen runs out of memory :(

I just re-found Svarog by chance just a few minutes ago and was delighted to see this. It's progressed a lot since I last used it, very cool.

SvarDOS is only a distribution using a FreeDOS kernel. Thus you will not save RAM. And FreeDOS programs are usually much more powerful than their MS-DOS or DR-DOS counterparts. In addition, one should better compare FreeDOS with the last standalone retail MS-DOS and DR-DOS versions, an MS-DOS 6.x or DR-DOS 7.x is also not lightweight for such old 8088 computers.

@@OpenGL4everHere is the amount of available memory reported by MEM on a 8086 PC with 256K of RAM: with SvarDOS: 186K with FreeDOS: 117K Looks like RAM saving to me. Another thing is that FreeDOS installation requires 11x 720K floppies, while SvarDOS fits on 3. Of course, that's because FreeDOS comes with lots of good stuff, but most of these goodies are not so useful on a 4.77 MHz machine.

What's the advantage using MAME over VirtualBox or PCem ?

@@stchanx3 He probably didn't know there were better emulators. He could take BOCHS or QEMU, which also run on non-x86 processors such as ARM and can then emulate a Pentium or better, allowing him to use 32-bit protected mode DOS programs.

When the DOS is SUS

The desk the printer is on, is a lot more functional and comfortable. I had one. It was made by Sullivan. The other desk,I think is Ikea, no the closest I can find is a design called a 'Mantis desk'

It had a name, and the name was actually the name of the cable ... Laplink which became interlink.

What's wrong with it? I must say I prefer the ZX80 though (although with nmi-generator added, for ZX81 mode), because it is built entirely out of standard components that are still made. So no hot "ULA" (gate array), that can go bad and which is hard to find.

@@herrbonk3635 It's just dead to the world, probably the regulator. I've as couple of microdrives i'd like to take a go at first!

alias?

@@mycosys Interesting. Apparently that's a FreeDOS extension command. Does this work for providing a new path and not just another command name?

Modern compilers do much better job at assembly generation than humans.

8086 doesn't support any kind of memory expansion except the EMS hardware.

The most valuable thing about the first IBM PCs is that they are left in their original state as far as possible and that the expansion is limited to being easy to restore to their original state.

Same here. Had a laplink cable first and then bought an ISA Ethernet NIC for my 486DX.

TRSDOS and LDOS are related to CPM/80 so they share that heritage but other then that no. What allowed so many clones was the IBM PC was made with off the shelf part except for the BIOS where other machines tended to have more custom parts.

GZIP requires 32 bit protected mode and thus a 386 CPU. It will not run on a 16 bit 8088 processor.

@@OpenGL4ever the current binary is (possibly) built for 32bit protected mode, but GZIP itself is available on MSX (Z80) which is 8bit CPU and AtariST (68000) which is 16bit CPU - so I can't see the problem

@@paulwratt In this case you might be right. I just took a quick look at the source code and it appears to be C code. So it might also be possible to compile it for 16 bit x86 CPUs. This assumes, however, that no inline assembler instructions are included that use instructions from the 386 or later. I didn't look after that.

I wanted to avoid confusion for people and since the kernel version of FreeDOS is called "8086" I decided to just stick with that for the whole video.