Yasashii wrote:

My Windows 98 SE machine has been working well for most old Windows and some DOS games, however, not perfectly for the latter. Sometimes the games won't detect the mouse, sometimes they won't run properly.

I can't imagine why you think FreeDOS will help with that, especially compared to MS-DOS mode. Maybe you should check using a bootdisk or something before you start rearranging your partitions.

So before I do it, I'd like to know how do I set it all up so after the installation I have a boot menu to choose either Windows 98 to start, or FreeDOS. It can be GRUB or something like that.

We went over a lot of this in Re: Multi Boot Dos 6.22, Windows 98 SE and Windows XP Pro .

Also, I've noticed that there is nothing USB-related in the "features" section of FreeDOS. I need USB support for my flash drive so I can easily transfer files from my main computer to the retro PC. Is USB already included in FreeDOS? If not, is there some kind of a third-party driver I can install on it?

There are DOS drivers out there for USB drives, but whether or not they'll work depends on your motherboard chipset. http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/84249-usb-20- … rivers-for-dos/ should get you started. Note that DOS drivers for USB mice or any other USB devices will probably never ever happen (though of course legacy keyboard support is often available in the BIOS).

Jorpho wrote:

I can't imagine why you think FreeDOS will help with that, especially compared to MS-DOS mode. Maybe you should check using a bootdisk or something before you start rearranging your partitions.

I meant that those games work fine in DOS mode but the thing is, every time I want to access it, which is almost every time, I have to boot to Windows 98 and then restart it into DOS mode. You'd have to have some understanding of how lazy I am to get why this is a problem 😊

Another option would be editing autoexec.bat or msdos.sys so that it always boots directly to dos but then every time I'd want to access Windows 98, I'd have to edit a file, which again, is too much for my laziness level.

I've decided that just having two separate operating systems for each task, with a boot menu, is a cleaner and more comfortable solution.

Jorpho wrote:

We went over a lot of this in Re: Multi Boot Dos 6.22, Windows 98 SE and Windows XP Pro .

Thanks. Plop Boot Manager looks interesting. I'm gonna check it out.

Jorpho wrote:

There are DOS drivers out there for USB drives, but whether or not they'll work depends on your motherboard chipset. http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/84249-usb-20- … rivers-for-dos/ should get you started. Note that DOS drivers for USB mice or any other USB devices will probably never ever happen (though of course legacy keyboard support is often available in the BIOS).

Looks good. I don't need usb mice and keyboard support but I sure hope it will work with my flash drive.

edit: btw. is there a way to pull this off without slicing the partition? I mean I could just install FreeDOS on the Windows 98 partition, but if I do, is there still a way to set up a boot manager?

Yasashii wrote:

I meant that those games work fine in DOS mode but the thing is, every time I want to access it, which is almost every time, I have to boot to Windows 98 and then restart it into DOS mode. You'd have to have some understanding of how lazy I am to get why this is a problem 😊

Another option would be editing autoexec.bat or msdos.sys so that it always boots directly to dos but then every time I'd want to access Windows 98, I'd have to edit a file, which again, is too much for my laziness level.

Or you can just use the Windows boot keys. Press F4 when "Starting Windows 98" appears and you will go straight to MS-DOS mode, if I'm not mistaken. Alternatively, use F8 and select the appropriate option from the boot menu. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/180902 suggests pressing and holding CTRL will do it too, but I've never heard of that until now.)

This is immeasurably simpler.

Furthermore, even if you edited MSDOS.SYS to boot to the command prompt, if you wanted to run Windows, you just need to type "win". You certainly don't need to edit the file again and reboot. The result is, to my knowledge, indistinguishable from the standard Windows boot sequence (which actually runs win.com directly from IO.SYS).

edit: btw. is there a way to pull this off without slicing the partition? I mean I could just install FreeDOS on the Windows 98 partition, but if I do, is there still a way to set up a boot manager?

It's probably not impossible, but I'm not familiar with any easy way of doing it.

Yasashii wrote:

I meant that those games work fine in DOS mode but the thing is, every time I want to access it, which is almost every time, I have to boot to Windows 98 and then restart it into DOS mode. You'd have to have some understanding of how lazy I am to get why this is a problem 😊

Another option would be editing autoexec.bat or msdos.sys so that it always boots directly to dos but then every time I'd want to access Windows 98, I'd have to edit a file, which again, is too much for my laziness level.

I've decided that just having two separate operating systems for each task, with a boot menu, is a cleaner and more comfortable solution.

This is crazy talk! 😉 Just follow this guide: http://www.deinmeister.de/dosconf_e.htm

You set MSDOS.SYS to boot to DOS (BootGUI=0), then use CONFIG.SYS with subsections to do a boot menu (with corresponding sections in AUTOEXEC.BAT).

Mau1wurf has some tutorials too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVbue9qYYkE and Re: MS-DOS Time-Machine Gaming - Mau1wurf1977's YT Videos

Jorpho wrote:

Press F4 when "Starting Windows 98" appears and you will go straight to MS-DOS mode, if I'm not mistaken. Alternatively, use F8 and select the appropriate option from the boot menu.

Yeah, I think I'm just gonna go with that. Thanks. 😊

USB support is very hard in DOS. I messed around with it a bit but could never get it to work. Ethernet (even wifi) is much easier and even faster to copy files from one PC to the other.

jwt27 wrote:

USB support is very hard in DOS. I messed around with it a bit but could never get it to work. Ethernet (even wifi) is much easier and even faster to copy files from one PC to the other.

Sorry to necropost this thread but I did try to do that and could not find any useful info, not even on google dot com.

I wanted to have freedos and win98 to dualboot. But as I understand it, both OS want to be on the active primary partition. So you setup a dual C partition, install freedos, then hide it with xFDisk, make the other C partition active(*), you install win98 on that visible disk. Then I heard and seek some positive aboute plop boot manager to setup the partition scheme and boot the active selected os.

My problem is that I didnt foresee that I would need win98 for vgmplay on winamp, but maybe the linux port is as good and can be used with a capable player frontend like winamp or xmplay? So what I have to do is create an 10gb D:\ partition with my music, games and demos, and stuff like that and two C:\ OS disk to load appropriate OS while hidding the other.

It bug me that Yasashii didnt know about the f8 and enter boot menu. If he his that lazy he could use tweakui to set an boot menu on win98 asking you to boot dos 7 or win98.

* = place where I am in this tuto, all the rest is speculation

btw about usb support on freedos, I found that you need to find the five usb system drivers and try them one after the other until you find the one that work. I did it this with for two usb (uhci and one ohci) controller, trying all them in a buch is no use.

ElBrunzy wrote:

I wanted to have freedos and win98 to dualboot. But as I understand it, both OS want to be on the active primary partition. So you setup a dual C partition, install freedos, then hide it with xFDisk, make the other C partition active(*), you install win98 on that visible disk.

Hiding the partition isn't necessary, if I'm not mistaken.

My problem is that I didnt foresee that I would need win98 for vgmplay on winamp, but maybe the linux port is as good and can be used with a capable player frontend like winamp or xmplay? So what I have to do is create an 10gb D:\ partition with my music, games and demos, and stuff like that and two C:\ OS disk to load appropriate OS while hidding the other.

Linux generally requires at least two partitions: one for the OS, and one for the swap space. There might be ways of getting around it, but they're probably not pretty. You also might want to look into methods of installing Linux such that the entire OS resides in a hard drive "image" stored on your DOS partition. I think you can do that with Puppy Linux; see for instance http://puppylinux.org/main/How%20NOT%20to%20i … all%20Puppy.htm . In any case, Linux definitely does not require any fancy partition-hiding, though it does tend to require some sort of boot manager.

It bug me that Yasashii didnt know about the f8 and enter boot menu.

Well, geez, not everyone knows all these little secrets. 😒

Linux generally requires at least two partitions: one for the OS, and one for the swap space. There might be ways of getting around it, but they're probably not pretty. You also might want to look into methods of installing Linux such that the entire OS resides in a hard drive "image" stored on your DOS partition. I think you can do that with Puppy Linux; see for instance http://puppylinux.org/main/How%20NOT%20to%20i … all%20Puppy.htm . In any case, Linux definitely does not require any fancy partition-hiding, though it does tend to require some sort of boot manager.

Thanks alot for writing me that, yes I'm familiar with frugal puppy but I hate the concept as I crash my OS so often and it take ages to boot on old, memory starving, computers. On old computer sharing DOS and Linux Kernel 2.4 I usualy run swap on a file as it dont conflict with extended dos partitions 🙁

Really I want to dual boot with freedos and win98, I think about having dual C drive (one hidden at a time) and a shared D:\ [DATA] big partition

Made me laught when I realised my freedos partition was 12gb and fat32 and I could install win98 on a 2gb fat16 partition, kind of the world upside down...

I wanted to install win98 and freedos using a dualboot but didnt find any step by step tuto on the web. I knew there where gotcha like both os needed to be on the primary partition. Many peoples suggesteded ideas and recommeded softwares. So I wanted to put togheter a working solution kind of procedure you could follow if you want to dualboot freedos and win98 by swapping os partitions and using plop boot manager.

In my scenario I have a 16gb compact flash disk that I partition 14gb for freedos fat32 and 2gb for win98 fat32. Of course feel free to arrange the size to your liking. That main p1-233 computer is for freedos, but I want to use some players for the computer's guspnp and the adlib for win98. I have also read that you could use a third shared partition, but in this case both OS see each other. Of course if you run dos software or scripts while running windows and use static path it can get the wrong assignement letter.

1. install freedos on first primary 14gb partition, I used fat32 to have one big C: drive and a smaller 2gb D: to hold win98 os and few programs
2. use xfdisk to create a second 2gb primary partition (for some reason the freedos installer didnt copy it on my install dir so I had to fetch it from the install cdrom). Put that new partition inactive and make sure it's D:. After xfdisk job is finished, you are prompted to reboot and can do that. Then I formated the new disk using those options : [format D: /V:WIN98 /S /D]. You can check with fdisk to make sure you have two true PRI DOS Type partitions and not some logicals that I assume wont work, but who knows?
3. You can now access to prepare the future win98 partition. Make sure command.com and kernel.sys are there, I would copy xfdisk and prog to load cd-rom drivers, in fact I just did a xcopy /s of C:\fdos to D:\fdos to make sure I'm on the safe side. Because I dont want to mess around, with all what I heard about freedos drivers being problematic, I want to install win98 from a clean boot; I take the advantage to have the freedos drivers and OS to copy the win98 source to it's future 2gb partition. You could use USB, CDROM and NetWork at this point.
4. It is time to install plop partition manager, I also did a copy of it on the D: partition just in case things go wrong, but didnt need it. I used the dos installer that create a backup, version 5.0.15 worked like a charm! I did a test reboot and this booter is simply awesome, it just miss a chiptune music now 😁.
5. Once you rebooted and are into the menu to configure plop manager. You have to boot in plop first to configure it, it is unexpected but work great. I'm sure there is a way to edit the config being offline. So I added a profile to boot on the D: and set the boot partition to be HDA's first and swap HDA1 to be HDA2, and HDA2 to become HDA1. You can boot using that configuration and win98 will think the 2gb is the primary master. Also make sure the freedos profile is set to reassing this back to original (ie hda1=hda1, hda2=hda2).
6. So now we can clean boot on the 2gb partition being the boot C: and have freedos live on D:. To install win98, I run setup.exe with those options /C (because I run on a CF and did a clean boot), /ie (because I dont want startup disk), /im (do not check for low conventional memory), /is (no do run scandisk), /iv (because I hate those billboards), /nm (because undocumented magic switch NoMachinecheck that make win98 dont check if you have 16mb of ram ? guess my 128mb stunned the installer and it keep on complaining about "Windows 98 requires a computer with at least 16mb of memory", using himem or not.) [setup /ie /C /im /is /iv /nr /nm]. Win98 should install properly, it will reboot with a new boot manager, dont mind and continue forward, next step is to fix that.
7. It is expected that win98 will overwrite the mbr of the hard disk, too bad there is no setup switch to prevent it from doing that. The installation when thorougly, now we have to repair plop mbr. While you are in the bios start to jackhammer the F8 key to bring the Microsoft Windows 98 Startup Menu and select the fifth option to Command prompt only. Now traverse directory to get to your plop boot manager install location and run it. Hit [2] to Rewrite loader (because plop btmgr got overwriten by win98 installer).
8. Et voila! Relax, reboot and enjoy having the choice to boot freedos or win98.

It would be nice to have USB mouse support in DOS. Once you get used to an optical mouse you don't want to go back to using mechanical mice.

Errius wrote:

It would be nice to have USB mouse support in DOS. Once you get used to an optical mouse you don't want to go back to using mechanical mice.

I dont care about usb mouse directly on my dos machines as I use a KVM. Often time the mouse connected to the KVM is USB with an adaptor. Then the KVM is hooked into the computer via ps/2 cables. I have an LKV-S04ASK linkskey, the only problem I have now is an lenovo SFF computer that I just recently got that dont have ps/2 connectors so I have to convert back the signal to usb, did try an passive Y cable but it was no success. I bought some ps/2-in to usb-out adaptors, and an Y cable with passive signal from china, cost me 10$, I await to receive them. The passive Y cable worked when only one device was connected so I have faith in the dual passive adapters.

Keyboards are a problem here. You have to get special adapters to connect PS/2 keyboards to USB interfaces:

http://clickykeyboards.com/product/ps2-to-usb … hort-usb-cable/

Errius wrote:

Keyboards are a problem here. You have to get special adapters to connect PS/2 keyboards to USB interfaces:

http://clickykeyboards.com/product/ps2-to-usb … hort-usb-cable/

Interesting... Many thanks Errius, if what I've bought dont make the job append I'll look about your very adapters.

I used one of these adapters to connect an old Compaq KB-9860 keyboard to a new wide screen TV. This keyboard has a 2m cable so you can control the TV from the sofa. (It's mainly used to search up Youtube videos.)

Errius wrote:

It would be nice to have USB mouse support in DOS. Once you get used to an optical mouse you don't want to go back to using mechanical mice.

Weren't there USB mouse drivers for DOS ? I thought I've got seen some.

Jo22 wrote:

Errius wrote:

It would be nice to have USB mouse support in DOS. Once you get used to an optical mouse you don't want to go back to using mechanical mice.

Weren't there USB mouse drivers for DOS ? I thought I've got seen some.

I'm pretty sure you were mistaken.

If I'm not gravely mistaken, there is of course no shortage of optical PS/2 mice (or at least mice that work with a PS/2 adapter) that work in DOS.

Found 'em! 😁

I think these are the drivers I remembered.. I don't know whether they can be called "mouse drivers" (or mice drivers), though.
- Some time ago I came across them, as I attempted to use USB mice with an MediaGX computer lacking legacy suppport (no PS/2 emulation).
But unfortunatelly, these drivers weren't compatible with the on-board USB host controller.
So I ended up adding some SMD parts to the mainboard and restored the serial interface. ^^
Anywaym, I can't say whether they are functional or not.. If you want, just try them and give feedback!
I'm still curious. How do they work ? Do they provide PS/2 emulation for another mouse driver or are they stand-alone ?

^^ I got the OHCI.EXE to work, but it's no good for games or Windows. Only simple text-mode programs work.