For a closet pile they sure are nice. Welcome!

Love your rigs. I had the same case for my first PC in the early 90's, although only a minitower (they look like mid towers?)

I use MS-DOS on my 386 and 486.
I haven't actually used FreeDOS before but I am quite happy to stick with MS-DOS.

I have seen some suggestions to use the CDROM drivers and mouse drivers from FreeDOS as they have more configuration options, and take up less conventional memory when loaded, compared to the MS-DOS versions. I believe the FreeDOS alternative to MSCDEX was SHSUCDEX and while it did take up less memory, I had compatibility problems with certain games, so I stuck with MSCDEX.
I am currently using the FreeDOS mouse driover, CTMOUSE. It works well, has a small memory footprint and has a few options such as sensitivity.

But apart from that I haven't done much with FreeDOS.

pewpewpew wrote:

For casual retrogaming, is there any advantage to FreeDOS over MS-DOS 6? […]
Show full quote

For casual retrogaming, is there any advantage to FreeDOS over MS-DOS 6?

The zombie pair in need of brains:

Pentium Pro 150 @ 166
Asus P6NP5
98mb - 2x32 2x16 EDO SIMM
3.2gig Seagate
S3 Virge DX
Soundblaster Pro 2

Pentium MMX 200
ECS P5TX-Bpro
256mb - 2x128 DIMM
1.6gig Seagate
ATI Mach64 GX
Soundblaster 16

I've still got MS-DOS and WfWG in storage. I'm using FreeDOS because it looks nicely updated and has a spiff liveCD.

And I actually can't get FreeDOS to install. Everything goes fine but the drive won't boot. I've rechecked BIOS, made sure I remembered the "/s" switch, etc etc, twice. I've reached that charmed point where I'm sure the final revelation will be embarrassing. I'm about to install plain old DOS as a sanity check, but then had to wonder, Why not use it? Just what is the difference for gaming anyway?

The Vogons would know.

Gentlemen! Thank you for your splendid website. I've spent happy hours in this library of Great Stuff already. I'm delighted to sign-in, and I'll try to ask something more interesting next time.

The quick intro: I'm not a proper DOS gamer. Sorry. I'm old enough, having started with the PET, and played tic-tac-toe against a PDP-11. But I didn't get into the DOS era games much, so I'm missing the crucial nostalgia.

It's more like I'm working backwards from a late interest in 90s gaming. PSX, PS2, and W98SE gamebox. Right now I'm looking over the horizon into the DOS era, and I see a few titles that are rather interesting.

Hence "the twins". They're in matching 18" towers, stuffed with whatever may come in handy some day. It's the better bits from the closet pile that finally went to recycling.

My indefensible bias: E1M1 on SB Pro2. The Korg version is just a nice tribute.

Welcome to Vogons! And your 2 cases...me wantz them!! 😁 😁 😁

I feel jealous L O L!
Lol, seriously, I think your 2 cases look AWESOME!!!

And don't feel "bad" or anything about missing out the DOS nostalgia, the very first computer I ever owned was a P2-350, but here I am talking about 486's! 😉
I had a time where I went "back in time" myself. Actually, the second rig I ever build myself was in fact a 486! Ok, it sure crashed a lot, but for me the point was in actually building one myself, on the way learning to understand what makes them tick 😀

Your 2 cases look quite yellow, but I think the design of your cases (when it comes to the 'vintage' looks) are as near as perfection as you can get!

I'm not much of a DOS guru myself, though I feel perfectly at home using batch files (which are a string of DOS commands in a text file basically).

The only 2 comments I can think of in these early hours are:
1)Just be aware that the TX chipset (unless your board is using a TXPro, then I don't know) can't cache more then 64MB of memory
2)No pics of the insides of your twin icons of baby-AT retro-goodness 😉 😉 😉

Welcome aboard! And enjoy your stay 😉

ECS P5TX-Bpro - I have the same board, the one with the white ISA slots, right? As Tetrium said, it can't cache more than 64MB of ram. I've got 64MB, a p233mmx and a matrox mystique on mine, and it runs W98 great.

Thank you, I feel welcome.

Yup, "mid towers" - 18" is one of a couple sizes that was roughly midway between mini and full tower.

Had the mini version as well. Quite despised that one. You had to shift the PSU to change memory, but the PSU is in a bizarrely unnecessary socket, so you had to remove the IDE devices in front of it then slide it forward and out. I left blood in that case a few times. Only sorry to recycle it because I'd been looking forward to heaving it violently into a skip. Board access was through the removable bottom plate.

Funny note about the design -- those two 18" aren't identical, see the lower edge bevel for instance. Even though they had identical 486 guts, and the same local supplier's sticker, and were sold to the same customer, the cases didn't come out of the same molds. The tinwork is all but one notch identical, and the rear of one is painted to match the sides, a treatment I've never seen on another AT tower.

That's hideous trivia, but this is Vogons so I thought I'd point out that one of the common designs of the era had at least two producers. I wonder if the different case styles were ever listed in a supplier's sales catalog with quaint non-descriptive names, like we see for house paints. I've also got a full tower in that style, though not quite as close a match. (It's not being recycled. Who could part with fullsize towers?)

Happily they're not yellow like the photo makes out. Nor is the variation in CD drives nearly that bad in real life. They actually look like duller-grey beige when alongside new cases. Not even the warm-tan of early yellowing yet, unlike some of the stuff here.

But they do need a paint job. They're chipped and scratched so I'm going to use that as an excuse to do some fancy painting later on. Looking forward to it.

Inside shots -- um, no, sorry. The camera is fighting me. It shouldn't need charge already so I guess that just got shifted up the bench queue. But the insides are nothing special - plain fans and lazy cabling. I made sure I had airflow and got on with it. The bits are as listed plus a pair of ethernet in each.

The P5TX-Bpro is actually acting slightly flakey, hence the better parts are on the lesser PentiumPro board. Not sure what's up yet - just consistently fails to load some utilities from liveCDs, but without useful error messages, or anything showing up in the diagnostics that do run. Have swapped every bit of hardware and RAM but no change, so definitely the board. All the caps look good. I'm tempted to scrub it for possible tin whiskers. Thinking I may also just install DOS with some games first to see if they run fine regardless. The problem is that slight. It's very odd.

Incidentally, why run 98 on a P1 board? I mean 98 runs fine right up to nearly the last AGP boards -- does running it on slower boards offer anything beyond having ISA slots? And yup, white ISAs on the the P5TX. It's a rev2.0a, and my notes say with SIMMs I could overclock 3x75 and 2.9v for 225Mhz, but no other combinations. Then nothing when I went to DIMMs.

Which also tells me this must have been the board that replaced my sadly departed Shuttle, so I ran W98SE on this one and did a ton of work with Word and Photoshop before finally upgrading to Duron. Which is a long way of saying Yes, it ran 98 great for me too. It also ran Combat Flight Simulator decently at reduced settings.

The P5TX-Bpro may be flakey as it was one of those PC Chips boards. Or it might be some problem with the PSU or even the memory.

I know about AT cases being a pain to work inside of (yup, blood was spilled over here as well 😜 ), but gah...those AT cases look so darn cute! 😜

W98SE is imo the best OS for systems with 64MB RAM or less as it added stability and a couple other features compared to W95. Also W98 didn't run that much slower then W95, provided the system has enough memory.

I must say, that is quite a striking avatar you have there. (Too bad your subject line kind of sucks.)

Can you boot FreeDOS from a floppy or a CD-ROM? Perhaps you have neglected to set the "Active" flag on the partition where you installed FreeDOS? (I hate it when that happens.) Are your drives partitioned at all?

PSU... dang. I didn't swap that when I 'swapped everything'. What a foolish oversight. Good catch.

It'd be weird for that to cause a consistent glitch, though. Funky power tends to show up as instability. Still, I'll have to swap that to be complete.

Was more thorough about memory. Did memtest, swapped sticks out one at a time, and tried completely different sticks. Have been careful about memory since a Thinkpad 486 that would install 16bit OS, but not 32bit.

Avatar is a detail of a fun keyboard from a dull computer. AES Data, which was a CP/M lungfish that went nowhere.

And no, couldn't boot the FreeDOS install from LiveCD. I'm sure I double-checked the partition as active. Although it's got to be an oversight just like that, so I'm uneasy saying 'sure' now. Hence plain DOS is next -- I've done that so many times it's the proverbial bicycle. If DOS fails then I'll know this is mere senility.

Personally I wouldn't use FreeDOS for a retro machine. It doesn't even run Windows. I like Windows.

FreeDOS is useful in modern machines for technical tasks though, such as updating BIOSes and checking the health of your parties.

Tetrium wrote:

W98SE is imo the best OS for systems with 64MB RAM or less as it added stability and a couple other features compared to W95. Also W98 didn't run that much slower then W95, provided the system has enough memory.

Yup. Quite agree on W98SE as the first-choice early 32bit, unless running very low RAM. My question is more why one would run 98 on a P1 when there are so many faster old boards that are just as available. ISA would be one reason, as that gets pretty rare by P3. Are there more reasons?

leileilol wrote:

It doesn't even run Windows

Oh. I didn't realize that. I was under the impression it was much more complete.

pewpewpew wrote:

Oh. I didn't realize that. I was under the impression it was much more complete.

I am also kind of surprised that it doesn't run Windows.

I don't doubt that it is still fairly complete, though; I understand getting DOSBox to run Windows was a matter of gently massaging a bunch of obscure little compatibility niggles.

A little about that from the horse's mouth, but dated 2004

http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/newsitem/166.html

Tetrium wrote:

1)Just be aware that the TX chipset (unless your board is using a TXPro, then I don't know) can't cache more then 64MB of memory

This TX cache limit is new to me. If I'm reading right, then:

- having more than 64mb can slow you down if you're using less than 64mb, because some of what you're using may be in the slower uncached area.

- for DOS gaming, 64mb is oodles of RAM.

Is that correct?

I've got 48mb in EDO SIMMs I could use instead of the 2x128 DIMMs.

Current proposed use is DOS + Win3.11, for games like ZPC and Little Big Adventure. Any heavier games would be played on my W98SE box. So /if/ I'm reading right, it sounds like I should switch to the 48.

Jorpho wrote:

pewpewpew wrote:

Oh. I didn't realize that. I was under the impression it was much more complete.

I am also kind of surprised that it doesn't run Windows.

I don't doubt that it is still fairly complete, though; I understand getting DOSBox to run Windows was a matter of gently massaging a bunch of obscure little compatibility niggles.

Even back when you had DR-DOS still on the market, Windows was picky about running on it. MS did something to Windows that made it check that it was running ONLY on MS-DOS and not any other DOS.

pewpewpew wrote:

Yup. Quite agree on W98SE as the first-choice early 32bit, unless running very low RAM. My question is more why one would run 98 on a P1 when there are so many faster old boards that are just as available. ISA would be one reason, as that gets pretty rare by P3. Are there more reasons?

Yes, because usually people here will want to build a retro rig around some particular combination of hardware instead of around an OS.
For instance, a couple years ago I decided to build a 486 and I ended up putting W95 on there (didn't have a copy of 98SE back then).
Why I put the W95 on a 486 when you can easily put W95 on a much more common Pentium II? Because the 486 was the reason for building that rig in the first place! 😉

+1
also, with 98se you don't need many drivers. For older stuff they have almost anything. Plus you can have usb support.

Markk wrote:

For older stuff they have almost anything. Plus you can have usb support.

Aha. Hadn't thought of that angle. That makes a lot of sense.

After all these years of always needing faster hardware I'm having a hard time 'reversing' my view to see optimums.

sliderider wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

pewpewpew wrote:

Oh. I didn't realize that. I was under the impression it was much more complete.

I am also kind of surprised that it doesn't run Windows.

I don't doubt that it is still fairly complete, though; I understand getting DOSBox to run Windows was a matter of gently massaging a bunch of obscure little compatibility niggles.

Even back when you had DR-DOS still on the market, Windows was picky about running on it. MS did something to Windows that made it check that it was running ONLY on MS-DOS and not any other DOS.

No, not exactly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

pewpewpew wrote:

So if I'm reading right, it sounds like I should switch to the 48.

No, I've got that wrong. The games I'm looking at need 486 at most - any penalty for using RAM outside the cache isn't likely to be noticed under a Pentium 200.

It's a good heads-up, and thanks for it. I've added it to that machine's notes. But within my current use, it'd make more sense to leave the big RAM in for occasional liveCD use.

Just happen to be using Knoppix at the moment (familiar commands, & easy access to floppies and USB), hence thought about it a bit more.

EDIT: DOS 6.0 installed on both boxes without hesitation. I've no idea why FreeDOS wouldn't.