I wasn't aware there were such severe compatibility problems. I'd rather like to know more about these problems you experienced.

Could you post the specs of your test computer?

Asus P2-99 with latest bios
Pentium II 350@233MHz
128MB SDRAM
Matrox G200 AGP
Voodoo2 12MB
Matrox m3D
Yamaha OPL3-SAx
1GB Compactflash as HDD

Operating systems are FreeDOS 1.0 and Windows 98SE.

Details on problems:
Descent will install, but the end result is corrupt. (won't run or patch)
It installs perfectly under win98 and runs perfectly under FreeDOS after installation.

DOTT Will run fine until you click on say, look and select an object.
Bernard will begin to talk and then the game will freeze, some HDD activity which later stops. Music keeps playing.

There is no problem with DOTT running under Windows 98.
I guess I can try rebuilding the latest FreeDOS kernel and see if that fixes anything.

or you could just use the little MS-DOS that comes with Windows 98. 😜

Any specific reason for using FreeDOS over MS-DOS for gaming? I've never heard of any real advantages of doing so. OF course my question is in the matter for serious playing rather than intense regression testing.

I do not own a copy of MS DOS 6, though I'm wondering now if I should just buy it and set up a triple boot.
Everything else about FreeDOS works perfectly, if I knew x86 assembly and DOS programming experience I'd have tried to debug it myself 😀

TheLazy1 wrote:

I do not own a copy of MS DOS 6

You don't have to. Windows 98SE comes with its own mini MS-DOS 7 (found in and loaded from C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND). It's not the full set of DOS tools which makes some older more arcane game installation programs break (Software Toolworks specifically) but it does have a much higher game compatibility rate. 😀

Also, compact flash for a HDD? Isn't that writecycle burn frenzy?

I'm not sure if wear leveling is done at the hardware level or OS level, either way not many DOS apps write frantically to the HD.
Worst case, it refuses to write anymore and I pick up another dirt cheap card 😀

I'm not sure if wear leveling is done at the hardware level or OS level, either way not many DOS apps write frantically to the HD.

It's at the hardware level. But I don't know if CF cards do much as far as wear levelling... they don't tend to have very advanced controllers inside 'em. But you're right, it doesn't matter so much in DOS. Windows is where it'd really become an issue.

Of course, you could always go with a card built around SLC flash. They cost a few bucks more, but tend to be faster and have a lot higher durability in write cycles.... along the lines of 100K or even 1M, versus ~10K on MLC flash.

Frankly I think the write cycle issue is way overblown. The device will be quite obsolete and uninteresting by the time it fails. I've thrown away CF cards because they were just not worth keeping around anymore because they were too small and slow.

I'm still waiting for my first flash device failure. Even my 2.5 year old EeePC with its cheap-n-slow 4GB SSD that I've reinstalled OSs on many many times is still working fine.

I think the write cycle issue would be worth more consideration if you were choosing flash for certain applications that do massive amounts of writes.

I'm still waiting for my first flash device failure. Even my 2.5 year old EeePC with its cheap-n-slow 4GB SSD that I've reinstalled OSs on many many times is still working fine.

The 4GB drive in the eeePC is SLC, though. As are most older flash devices. I wouldn't judge the reliability of the newer MLC crap based on those experiences... it's an entirely different animal.

I turned off swap under Windows, haven't done much with it but so far it hasn't been an issue.
Though I should look into putting a real hard drive in there.

FreeDOS comes with an insane amount of utilities and features, it's a real nice alternative if it weren't for those weird bugs.
I especially like the boot menu where I can select things like loading emm386/no drivers/whatever, I even added an option to boot with USB support.

Very flexible, it's just a shame I have no idea how I can help find and fix it.

[Edit]
A nice disk cache would cut down on writes/wear as well.

I think I've tried every variation of DOS over the last 20 years and nothing is as compatible as MSDOS. I ruled out FreeDOS awhile ago.

Were you having similar issues?
What about dr. dos?

I've been trying to get FreeDOS to work with Virtual PC recently with no luck. I get a virtual hard drive formatted, get FreeDOS installed, reboot and get Invalid Operating System error

TheLazy1 wrote:

Were you having similar issues?
What about dr. dos?

I didn't say I tried them all recently. 🤣

Can't remember specifics, but crashes, memory issues, 3rd party disk caching & memory manager problems, etc. General incompatibility issues. MSDOS 5-6.x always worked.

IIRC There may have been something with the MBR, try restoring it using the utilities on the CD.

Have a look at my preliminary Freedos trial run : FreeDos - A Closer Look :

Has anyone tried the IBM 'PC Dos' (7) for gaming?

Any insights to compatability issues etc would be of interest.

bestemor wrote:

Has anyone tried the IBM 'PC Dos' (7) for gaming?

Any insights to compatability issues etc would be of interest.

I'm using it exclusively on my 286-486 rigs

It's 100% compatible and isn't a conventional memory hog as M$-DOS is