I don't have access to any MS DOS install media at the moment so I've been trying FreeDOS on my current build. I haven't tried it with many programs for myself, but from all I've seen it seems like it'll work fine with the majority of games and applications across a wide swath of systems. I can confirm wolfenstein 3d and oregon trail work fine though =p

From my understanding Win3.1 does not like it, though, because of microsoft's efforts to prevent people running windows on anything but an actual MS-DOS foundation. I might give it a shot myself soon and report back, although transferring files involves swapping the drive to another computer since I don't have a working floppy drive 😵

You can use both - use FreeDOS as a boot disk to try it out (and you can have a seperate folder on the hard drive with the actual OS - saves on loading time) and use MS DOS as main OS?

From my experience, FreeDOS breaks quite a few games - especially games that use all sorts of hacks and tricks to work (incidentally these were also the games that were broken the longest on DOSBOX). My IBM PCs use IBM DOS which is a variation of MS DOS (also created by MS but with a few differences) and even in IBM DOS, there's some compatibility issues which are easily solved with a boot disk formatted in a MS DOS 6.22 or MS DOS 7 environment.

Why not use FreeDOS as main OS? Because as novasilisko says, Windows 3.1 doesn't like it. AFAIK and remember, Enhanced mode refuses to work and it may have other issues.

I think the main reason you'd run FreeDOS is for FAT32, and apparently there are more than a few DOS programs that don't like it. Personally I'd stay with MS-DOS with FAT16 (2 partitions), or if you want to be cool you could try PC DOS 2K or Caldera DR-DOS. I really like DR-DOS, but mainly for my 808x and 80286 systems because of the better software memory managers.

I wold go Dos 6.22 path. Period correct and best compatibility.
If you want fat32, consider using DOS 7.1 from Windows95/Windows98. Just create bootdisk in Windows, and there will be fdisk, and sys tools, and you are ready to go. With some tricks you can also run Windows 3.11 on top of it.

Yes... You can dual boot. Personally I am all for Extended FDISK for that.

Regarding choice of operating system. Get MS-Dos 6.22, as MS Dos was defacto standard back then. You will have no issues there. Except for storage limitations, yet that is not an issue as such. Only an limitation. I am not saying that you should pirate, yet I kind of think that Microsoft would not bother making any objections. At least they should be cheap to buy, if you find them in original legit copies on some kind of online marketplace that are not eBay.

By the way... If you are running MS-Dos 6.22, then you actually don't need more storage than 2gb on each partition. Games do not take up that much space, and 4gb CF cards are cheap and on eBay. Or get an CF card/adaptor that uses SD cards for storage, and use that in a CF-to-IDE adaptor.

brostenen wrote:

By the way... If you are running MS-Dos 6.22, then you actually don't need more storage than 2gb on each partition. Games do not take up that much space, and 4gb CF cards are cheap and on eBay. Or get an CF card/adaptor that uses SD cards for storage, and use that in a CF-to-IDE adaptor.

Can't I have a bigger drive? What if I want all the gamez?

I use MS-DOS 7.1 (stripped from Win98 SE) but I've also used FreeDOS with no issues. Admittedly, I layer system utilities on top as I see fit so my compatibility might be different than a standard install, and my extensive testing probably isn't that extensive.