MS-DOS on the Amiga  

When I was in university I spent an entire evening printing out a handful of EZPlot graphs using PC Task on my stock A1200. It worked but excruciatingly slowly. I think that was the day I realised I needed a PC and my Amigas weren't going to cut it any more.

@5:11 , sees "Read Me First" file and actually opens to read =) Sir, you are a dying breed

Good video, all the best in 2023.

18:10 It is compared to IBM PC/AT, so a 286 class system, but emulated CPU is NEC V20, co a IBM PC/XT class system (with 8-bit system bus). That is why 8 MHz 8088 CPU is roughly an equivalent to 4 MHz 80286 CPU. The 8-bit system bus is also the reason, why you can have a maximum of 1 MB RAM.

Thanks for the tip about TSGUI. I've been using a commandline image writing utility, and while it works just fine, it's a bit of a faff using. Going to pop TSGUI on my A1200 once I've finished installing it into it's new tower case.

Pretty impressive that it was even done. Back in the day I tried this on my 1200 but got nowhere

I would run PC Task 4 on my Amiga 1200/030 and it ran MSDOS 5 software quite well. Also used it as a Macintosh with Shapeshifter and a Commodore 64 with Frodo.

An 8M RAM 8086? Wow... That would have been impressive back in the day... ;-) Nice vid... I had both my Amiga and PC (cobbled together from other people's old parts after helping them with upgrades) back then, so I never used PC Task. And my Amiga then was a plain 1200 with no RAM/CPU card.

i would like to see you try the 4.0 emu for dos

I'm wondering if PC Task uses WriteChunkyPixel to address the screen, if it does it should be able to be sped up with patches like FBlit and BlazeWCP which uses the MMU to speed up Chunky-to-Planar conversion, so it could make the games run a little bit faster. I guess I'll try it on my own A1200 later if I can get some PC games onto it.

Used PSpice (circuit simulation software) via PC Task on my mates (now mine for the last 20 odd years...) Blizzard 1230. Was a bit slow, but was good enough, and prevented the need to queue for one of the Uni PC's. Also used to use the Mac version of Word via Shapeshifter on my 1200. The queue for the uni Macs was never as long, so I used to just nip into the computer lab with my Mac disk, fire up a Mac and hit print! Never tried games in PC Task, but I have seen someone on RU-vid running Tomb Raider via PCTask 4 on an 060 Amiga - actually looks okay, albeit a tad slow!

do u know if mediafire?? has an hdf full of Amiga programs?? thanks.... (plus Amiga os 4.1??)

Back in 91 I had an Amiga 500 1 meg memory. There was a doll simulator that I used to run on it it came on one floppy disk and booted up but I cannot remember what it was called you just stuck the disc in the drive booted up and you had to then put in ms dos disk and you was in dos world.

Back in the day I had a 386SX Bridgeboard in my A3000 , (I had had an A1500 prior to that) and it was pretty good, I think it stopped working when I added an 060 Card and CV 64/3D. Then PC Task came into its own, it emulated a 486 quite well. I am currently back in UK clearing my loft and I'm hoping to find my A3000 and an A1200/030 with a Micronioks Tower conversion with GVP A1230+ (4MB) with Zorro 2 board, Fingers crossed, so far I have found my Atari 800XL, cassette drive, 5 1/4 floppy with Silent Service (not working :( ) and lots of cassettes and a couple of cartridges (Star Raiders and Fight Night ) . A

Great video! Any reason you used PC-Task 3.1 instead of the latest 4.4, which has a JIT-compiler and supports the 486? As to 'bad' floppies. Maybe try re-formatting them on the Amiga before trashing them :)

Heya wondering what monitor is that exactly? The benq one. Thanks

8088 CPUs could only address 1MB so no extended RAM possible. XTs used expanded RAM which was paged into a 64K window in 4 16KB pages.

I had pc tasks running with Windows 3.1 on my 1200 with an 030 gvp 25mhz accelerator back in the day. It ran but was painful.

Love allycat. The one cga palette does look odd do for it.

Imagine a modern X86 card for an Amiga. Like the older existing ones, but much newer processor. They already created newer Vampire cards.

Just to try. I've managed to "resurrect" some old Amiga floppy in a not readable state using a soft heat method. Simply left those take some heat just below my A1200 (w a Blizzard 1230 IV) chassis. After some hours they turned readable. I suppose it has to do with humidity and the internal soft cloth protection of the disk. Avoid, however, those disks that produce too much "rattle" noises, as sometimes it could be harmful for the drive. Cheers, M

okay thanks - how do i run microsoft windows 95 on winuae? using pc-task 4.4?? thanks........... i tried to run it but it says that obtain a genuine version i dont quite understand it though??? thanks............

The reason that you only had about 30mb available instead of the full 40 allocated may be that dos 3.3 only supported a maximum partition size of 32mb.

Kinda surprised you used actual floppies and not RAD: (which we used back in the day to test software from DMS-images) Anyway, nice video, and shows nicely that it is indeed possible :)

For fun you should try Transformer, the original software IBM PC emulator that Commodore released when the A1000 launched in 1985. (They also released the A1060 Sidecar, essentially an early bridgeboard that used the A1000's sidecar/Zorro I slot). Transformer was slow, poorly-compatible, but it *worked*, which was amazing by itself in 1985.

The one thing I loved about the Amiga was shift + delete to delete the whole line. Great to remove long file paths.

PC Task - there's some nostalgia. Alley Cat is the best game on a DOS PC from that time, but not sure why the image is flat and not in standard PC 4:3. Your display is working in full screen at 15.48, so not sure what happened there. Did you play the games on a widescreen monitor? Perhaps PC task needs NTSC to run full screen?

Hi, just watched the video with excitement. Can anyone provide with the link to download Amiga PC TASK 3.1?

10:20 - AMiga can read and write MS-Dos disks (PC0: , PC1: ,... device - look in storage devs)

Do you know were to found a ADF for freeDOS or MS-DOS?

Does it run well on a stock A1200 or A500?

is your Amiga brand new it looks new??

Extended memory under PC was available only from 286 onwards. Under 8086 and 8088 the only additional (above 640Kb) memory possible to have was the Expanded memory, that this emulator doesn't seem to support.

Can it run Wolfenstein 3D?

What if: You emulate Amiga on a PC with WinUAE and THEN, emulate DOS on that same emulated Amiga? =O ^.^

Yayy alley cat 😸

It was great to see a Miggy running MS-DOS! I recently sold my A1200 + ACA 1233/40 so do all my Amiga stuff on a MiSTer FPGA now.

DOS 3 had a maximum size of 32 megs in a partition... it wasn't until DOS 4 that that limit was lifted.

Try "/u" on the format of your old disks

Right Amiga - DEL to quit the emulator, or use PCTQUIT.EXE (read the on screen note in PC Task)

I just watch a video of a2000 bridgeboards an 8086 and 286 running on an 030 - the emulated x86 mchines in this video were better and faster than the bridgeboard ones, although the 286 board speed was about 90+% the speed of a 8mhz 286 which is what it was. but the video performance was terrible

DOS 3.30 only supports 32 MB partitions.

The reason Black Cauldron looked so weird when you first started it is it was trying to use NTSC composite artifacting to generate colors (like on the Apple 2). CGA composite artifacting graphics could actually be pretty nice.

a fellow retro nighthawk

Wow so fast for an 8086 ;) i have a Original 286 PC with 20 MB MFM HDD and that is so slow. Okay, i have Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.0 with just 640K of Ram.

I remember trying to order a copy of PCTask from my local tiny Amiga retailer. They didn't bother ordering it and they went under. That's when I knew the Amiga was doomed and moved on.

A Little disappointed Planet X3 game was not in game list for a test

Just to clarify a couple of problems. Dos 3.3 only allowed a maximum partition size of 32 Meg, and the 8086 didn't support extended memory. Old gits like me who used really old PCs come in useful sometimes.

I think MS-DOS 5 usually came on 720K disks. I actually have PC DOS 5 on 720K disks.

There are other games that could be interesting to try on PC-Task. PC-Man, a PacMan clone, had it's own internal clock, and was really fast even on 8088 machines. Some spanish games from the XT era could be interesting either, La Abadia del Crimen, Soviet, Stardust, Freddy Hardest, Mutan Zone, PC Rally, Rescate en el Golfo, Risky Woods, La Espada Sagrada... There are several ones. You can check them on the Computer Emuzone site, it's licensed. If you want to find more titles that could work properly under a 8088-spec emulated PC, you could try ti find titles of french manufacture, from Loriciels and such, they used to work well on XT computers... Sapiens, Mach 3, Bob Morane... Etc. All these titles were programmed with the slow 8088 CGA video and processing power at mind. So, as long as they're not fast-paced games, could perform decently under the slow video speed of the Amiga. Hope Cammy will come out with some improvement on this side. I don't have the chance to test them myself since i have my A1200 being recapped. But these titles are a good start. The only bad point about all this is that i fear the 030 40 falls a bit short for the task. A 50mhz CPU would achieve it. Apogee games like the Commander Keen series, or early Accolade games like The Cycles or Grand Prix Circuit would probably run OK. Ah, DON'T FORGET, to try the "8088 MPH" demo. It would be nice to see how PC-Task handles that little piece of art. I'll be waiting for a new video from you. Thank you very much for the time.

8086 can’t access more than 640kb of RAM(well with sw tricks you can get up to 712kb). Also that’d be 8191bytes for 8K.

The V20 was an 8088 clone and the V30 was an 8086 clone, afaik.

Yes but can it run Crysis? :D

The reason you didn't get the full 40 meg when formatting the C drive is because of the MS-DOS version. 3.3 could only address about 33 meg, it wasn't until MS-DOS 4.01 or later that could use a whopping 40 meg drive or bigger. More specifically it's the FAT (File Allocation Table) in use by the version of DOS.

prince of persia?

I used to run Win 3.11 on my 1200 040 + 32 Meg --- it was slow but just about usable. It was more of a novelty than a real use thing. DOS 6.22 was fine, but I usually ran a single disk version of 5.0. Never ran games on it though --- just SuperCalc and the likes...

I wish someone would try running MSDOS within a cascade emulation, something like PC Linux / W.I.N.E. -> WinUAE -> Basilisk II -> SoftPC -> MSDOS. Looks like perfect #DOScember entry! Someone?

Could never afford to buy it. 😊

turn your Amiga into a terrible PC, lol - good effort though.