Hello.
I am looking for a version of DR-DOS that does FAT16. And I have a little bit to ask about DR-DOS. Is this a better DOS OS for Windows 3.1 and 3.11, And can this run DOS games better even on a pentium processor?
I would like to know, please.
Do you mean FAT16 or FAT32? FAT16 is fairly standard for DOS (according to wikipedia, DR-DOS included FAT16 support since 3.31), but FAT32 is only supported in OpenDOS (DR-DOS became Novell DOS, and then Caldera OpenDOS).
Also, keep in mind that some versions of Windows are designed to not run well on non-Microsoft DOS (see this article). It seems that public releases don't exhibit that behaviour, but maybe you'll have other problems (maybe someone that uses DR-DOS+Windows can help you).
And no, games won't run any better using DR-DOS, because:
- Games don't execute much DOS code (maybe only data loading ), so they won't be affected by a faster DOS (I do NOT say that DR-DOS is faster/more optimized than other DOS).
- Most time, games are executing their own code. Changing the underlyng DOS won't change game code at all, so you won't get any optimizations. The only way to get a game optimized for pentium processors is recompiling it.
- DR-DOS had to support any PC from 8088 to Pentium. Writing Pentium specific code in DOS core would prevent that.
- The only thing in DOS that can benefit games is freeing up memory. I don't know if DR-DOS could get more free memory than MS-DOS, but I don't think it was so important for 486/Pentium games. Except some strange cases (like Comanche or Ultima games), they needed less base memory but became XMS/EMS hungry.
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wrote:Hello.
Hey!
wrote:I am looking for a version of DR-DOS that does FAT16.
Okay, just use any of them.
wrote:And I have a little bit to ask about DR-DOS. Is this a better DOS OS for Windows 3.1 and 3.11, And can this run DOS games better even on a pentium processor?
Nah, it's not more compatible than MS-DOS or PC-DOS.
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Windows 3.1/3.11 ran fine with DRDos 6.0/7.0 although MS did try to prevent that from occurring. As for WfW 3.11 I've never tried using DRDos with that. Some clever folk even got win95 running over DRDos. poo pooing MSs claim that Win9*/Dos were now integrated and couldn't be separated. There was was a project called Enhanced DRDos7 http://reboot.pro/topic/13574-enhanced-dr-dos/ that did have mods to support Fat32, but once FreeDos got a bit more mature the team switched over to that project.
Generally across the board performance wasn't much different between Dos variants. There's also PTS Dos 32 supported Fat32 but that can only be used on 386s up.
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Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
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There's also PC-MOS/386, which has a DOS 5 level ABI/API by now.
Even before MS-DOS, it did support partitions larger than ~32MB by using its own partition type.
The recent versions do also support FAT16B, of course and default to it.
https://github.com/roelandjansen/pcmos386v501
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I've got version 7.92 of IMSs Real/32 which is a multiuser multitasking Dos with Fat16/Fat32 support. A nice thing is it supports IDE Zip and LS120 drives natively. Basically it is a later development of DRs MDOS.
There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉
