I've stopped having DOS 6.22 on my PCs since 1995, and i'm certainly not going back to formatting to FAT12/16 with them now. I didn't feel trapped since I went beyond 2gb well into 1998 to even care about old DOS anymore. Also there's not a lot of DOS games to do 'full cd installs' for, they'll all want to access the CD for that. You'd have to go out of your way to fill up 2GB with pure DOS gaming stuff - that you desire to play that is

I think the panic to install and set up working ethernet drivers for newer cards in pure dos is more of a trap than hard drive space.

System dependent.

For the 286 I have DOS 5.0 installed and for my 386 (Well, 486DLC) I have DOS 6.22/WFW311. For machines of 486DX2 up to Pentium 90 I have started moving towards DOS 7 though as it's a little easier to setup and use, it also has FAT32 which it seems Win3.1 and other software generally doesn't care about enough for it to be a problem. Once a 100MHz Pentium and up is reached various revisions of Windows 95 are employed until 200MHz Pentiums are reached, then it's 98SE for the foreseeable remainder with faster PIIIs and Athlon machines dual-booting XP as well.

The 2GB limit doesn't really bother me, but the LAN card can be a bitch to work with and that's what WFW311 spends most of it's life handling. The 286 doesn't have networking capability, but there isn't much that won't fit on a 1.44MB floppy for that anyway and split archives can be used when it doesn't.

I use DOS 6/6.22

2 GB is not a problem at all.

I have a 512 MB CF card with DOS that I swap out between my 512 MB Win95 card, my 1 GB Win98 card and my 2 GB Win2000 card
for my 486.

In other words, you need more than 2 GB then why are you running DOS anyway. Most DOS programs don't take much disk space

My 90's DOS gaming machine is 6.22. I have little need for extending partitions beyond 2gb. I always split drives into logical (in both senses of the word) partitions, to my knowledge, the extent of the games I wish to play on this particular machine has yet to exceed 1500mb.

Forgot to mention, I also have an Amstrad PC1512DD, with DOS 3.2 on it. I do want to put at least DOS 3.3 on it for Microsoft Clients 3.0, but i'm having issues installing 3.3 considering I believe I need a new CF card for the machine. I don't want to wipe the MFM drive that is in it, not with it having an archive of previous people's lives (I think it was initially based at an Army Base that is long gone).

Regardless, when I can i'll put 3.3 on it. From what I hear and what i've read, MSDOS 4 can be problematic, and 5-6 seem overkill for what I need it for.

squareguy wrote:

How many people here are purists and just stick to MS-DOS 6.22 vs Windows95/98 or just using the DOS 7.00/7.10 from Windows 95/98?

For those sticking with MS-DOS 6.22 have you really felt trapped with a maximum 2GB partition size? I mean if we are only playing DOS games 2GB sounds like a lot to me.

Just curious.

Yes I fell trapped even with four 2 GB partitions 😀 It's games that have speech that quickly fill up your drive.

But for quick tests I usually install MS-DOS 6.22. I made a boot CD with the upgrade version of MS-DOS 6.22 and my startup files + drivers which gets me up and running within a minute or so.

MS-DOS 7.1 uses a little bit more memory but not enough to cause any issues. With my starup files I haven't found a game that doesn't work.

Having all your games on a single drive is great. Because many of my games are from GOG.com they often need a bit of tweaking to get going so I rather not do it again, just once and be done with it. I organise the games by developer and for example Sierra you quickly have a lot of storage need.

So pure MS-DOS 7.1 (without Windows 98SE) is what I use in my main Socket 7 time-machine computer. For quick testing I go with MS-DOS 6.22 though because it just feels a bit nicer 😀

Unofficial Dos 7x>Dos 6.22
Win3x works fine under it, and can use fat32.
Have enough storage space for shcdx33f to load iso's off larger fat32 drives, not to mention its pure heck dealing with Short file names, and a large midi collection, that is mostly LFN and wanting to play that collection in dos. Finding what file you want can be a nightmare, with most of them truncated.
After finding out there is a way around ctcu\ctcm failing to load under it, there isn't much reason to keep my PB using dos 6.22 anymore.

Real DOS 7 > Unofficial DOS 7

With the mentions of the partition size limit popping up a few times and a couple of people mentioning ways they get around it, I'm wondering if I'm the only one to experiment with PXE booting to counter it? My theory with it was that I could boot several more simple machines from a single installation with a "key disk" and ignore the limit, more complex machines had their own images to boot, sometimes just an image of whatever drive was in them. The "Key Disk" was a floppy containing system specific startup files and info that was INCLUDEd (Given that it was always A:\NAME.EXT) and once the partition was full, a new additional partition could be mounted on the next boot - additional partitions could also be loaded and used by more complicated clients with a specific boot partition as they were a separate disk as far as the client could see. The only reasons I threw it out were that Windows couldn't run and the write speed was abysmal for some reason. It did, however have the potential to be useful as it meant less drives were needed, with patience I could just have used individual boot images and all the images could be edited when the client was offline or even attached to a virtual machine.

If I could get the write speed up over a few KB/s I would probably have kept it for the pure DOS machines, given that WFW is only there for file management and networking which would be redundant for the reasons stated above... Also if I found out how to make Windows run on it. Heh, you know, I don't think I'm done playing with it.

I use both DOS 6.2 and Windows 95A (DOS 7.0) on my Socket 7 build. It just feels very comfortable and familiar, which is what I really want.

Space is not a problem. I have two 4.2GB hard drives divided into two 2GB partitions each, and each partition is about half-way full. Short filenames are also fine and still use them to this day - long filenames are kind of a drag for me 😒

I don't bother with networking since I can only have one computer running at a time. I use ZIP disks and blank rewritable CD's to transfer data from one computer to another - works just fine for my needs.

All good points, thank you all for your info.

I guess my biggest gripe with DOS 7.10 is that it's not a complete DOS the way 6.22 is. I just have a thing for using defrag to get my folders in order and I hate folders out of order when i do a dir command hehe. Maybe i'm just OCD? Anyways I'm installing Daggerfall now and wow that's a big install. I may need to go multiple partitions or just suck it up and go with 7.10. Antone know of a defrag utility that will do what I need in 7.10? I don't really care if it destroys the long file names.

I suspect this would work; http://www.nongnu.org/free-defrag/

Says it's for FreeDOS (Which I've never really played with. Viable alternative? Might have to test that.) but so does a load of other software, including several that I have run under DOS 6/7 without issue.

Thanks I will try that utility out as soon as I get a 7.10 install to play with, hopefully tomorrow.

OS/2. More stable than DOS or Windows.

Its easy to fill up a 2GB DOS partition but I don't find it an issue having a couple of them.
Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Indiana Jones, Lands of Lore are just a couple of CD's that will fill your 2GB.
I mainly use DOS 6.22 however I have one retro machine with a 16GB SCSI drive and Windows 98 with MSDOS.SYS set to GUI=0

For me, I would mostly use dos for slow 486s and slow pentium1s. Anything 200MHz and above is for 9x gaming. Because dos's prompt really humbles computers a bunch, I usually pair it with a crummy socket 7 motherboard like an Amptron PM8700 and leave the fancier boards for my typical "non-high-end-gaming" Windows 95 computers.

computergeek92 wrote:

For me, I would mostly use dos for slow 486s and slow pentium1s. Anything 200MHz and above is for 9x gaming. Because dos's prompt really humbles computers a bunch, I usually pair it with a crummy socket 7 motherboard like an Amptron PM8700 and leave the fancier boards for my typical "non-high-end-gaming" Windows 95 computers.

Agree. Well even 486s I run 'dows on

But that is where a swappable CF is handy. Of course 95/98 has a fairly decent restart in MSDOS mode

squareguy wrote:

How many people here are purists and just stick to MS-DOS 6.22 vs Windows95/98 or just using the DOS 7.00/7.10 from Windows 95/98?

For those sticking with MS-DOS 6.22 have you really felt trapped with a maximum 2GB partition size? I mean if we are only playing DOS games 2GB sounds like a lot to me.

Just curious.

Good question sir...
For me, it is a question on what type of machine that I am building, and what the OS is for me. First up. Dos is not Windows9X for me.
By that I mean, that my main Dos-software rig (games and programs) is a pure MS-Dos 6.22 machine.
For me, the built in Dos in Windows9X is not Dos, as I view it as a sort of emulation. Dos is Dos, and Windows is Windows.

Anyway.
I have two main retro-rig's at my disposal. One running MS-Dos-6.22 and one running Windows98.
The Windows machine can run Dos games. Yet I am not setting some specific configuration for Dos on that machine.
Eighter it runs dos software out of the box, or I must run it on my Dos machine.

Yes, I have two other retro machines. One Dos and one Win95 machine. They are lower in processing power and my secondary rig's.

sliderider wrote:

OS/2. More stable than DOS or Windows.

Depends, if I take the word "Windows" it is a really broad terminoligy in the world of computers. 😉
Os/2 more stable than Windows, is only true up until WinXP/Win7. As my Win7 machine have
been running rock solid on the same install since 2010. 😁 Os/2 have never been able to do that. 🙁

My Windows7 machine is my "workhorse", not my hobbyist machine. I use it for homebanking, mail,
word processing and stuff that are related to modern day society. You know... Everyday stuff.

stand-alone DOS from 98SE. FAT32 support is just great.