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Running DOS on modern hardware is impossible

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First post, by twiz11

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I think this dos topic should be relegated to dosbox because dos doesnt work in modern infrastructure natively, either it should be moved to a new forum for virtual machines or dosbox.

Reply 1 of 20, by LSS10999

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Running DOS natively is possible, just that you might encounter a few more issues than usual.

While you might not be able to run DOS for gaming purposes, as it's hard or impossible to get audio working (and video might have issues sometimes), it's still good enough for some business or industrial software.

And it is not the same as running a VM (VMWare/VBox/PCem) or using DOSBox. There are already separate forums for these.

Reply 3 of 20, by twiz11

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LSS10999 wrote:

Running DOS natively is possible, just that you might encounter a few more issues than usual.

While you might not be able to run DOS for gaming purposes, as it's hard or impossible to get audio working (and video might have issues sometimes), it's still good enough for some business or industrial software.

And it is not the same as running a VM (VMWare/VBox/PCem) or using DOSBox. There are already separate forums for these.

ok i goofed, i mean modern system as in windows or mac most likely... can you run dos in linux

Reply 4 of 20, by LSS10999

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twiz11 wrote:

ok i goofed, i mean modern system as in windows or mac most likely... can you run dos in linux

Running DOS in Linux was possible a long time ago thanks to DOSEMU, although DOSBox (preferrably the DOSBox-X fork) is available for Linux as well.

Reply 5 of 20, by kolderman

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mothergoose729 wrote:

DOS will boot on almost anything with an x86 processor. Even modern video cards will support a surprising amount of standard VESA modes. The hard part is getting sound... but even then, every motherboard has a PC speaker.

And until a few years ago, a parallel port - can you still get brand new mobos with printer ports...would be cool to plug in opl2lpt in a ryzen7 then install msdos and start playing monkey island or something.

Reply 8 of 20, by weldum

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twiz11 wrote:
DosFreak wrote:

DOS will continue to work on modern hardware wthout emulation until 2020 and possibly beyond depending on the motherboard manufacturer.

yea i was thinking the x64 architecture would not allow x16 dos to run

actually that's not the biggest problem, that problem would be CSM (compatibility support module) support on UEFI can be eliminated (and in some machines and devices it has been done already). this component is mandatory for booting any OS that requires or expects a BIOS instead of UEFI (mainly 16 and 32 bit stuff, and some "early" 64 bit stuff like Windows XP 64bit)
obviously CSM is going to dissapear since it's not necessary anymore, and then maybe Intel and AMD will remove 16 and 32 bit modes from their processors

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Reply 9 of 20, by LSS10999

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weldum wrote:

actually that's not the biggest problem, that problem would be CSM (compatibility support module) support on UEFI can be eliminated (and in some machines and devices it has been done already). this component is mandatory for booting any OS that requires or expects a BIOS instead of UEFI (mainly 16 and 32 bit stuff, and some "early" 64 bit stuff like Windows XP 64bit)
obviously CSM is going to dissapear since it's not necessary anymore, and then maybe Intel and AMD will remove 16 and 32 bit modes from their processors

While CSM is definitely going away, if they remove those modes at hardware levels, then it probably wouldn't be called x86 anymore.

And this makes me think about the future of desktop computing... and whether there could be a computer architecture that could succeed x86 in the desktop market (on the other hand, x86 failed to compete in the mobile market which was dominated by ARM).

Reply 10 of 20, by dr_st

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twiz11,
Maybe you should do your research before starting threads with misleading and obviously wrong titles. Tip: if you want to use the thread itself for a discussion where you would learn such things, it is better to phrase the title as a question rather than a rather bold statement. 😉

https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/ - Random content on hardware, software, games and toys

Reply 11 of 20, by Srandista

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twiz11 wrote:

I think this dos topic should be relegated to dosbox because dos doesnt work in modern infrastructure natively, either it should be moved to a new forum for virtual machines or dosbox.
yea i was thinking the x64 architecture would not allow x16 dos to run

My 3GHz Core 2 x64 CPU is running native DOS with no issues, I even have sound in majority of games. There really isn't any reason, why even most recent machines wouldn't run DOS natively, since even latest CPUs still have 16-bit capabilities. And they are even using those before POST every time you start your PC.

Socket 775 - ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA, Pentium E6500K, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, ESS Solo-1, Win 98/XP
Socket A - Chaintech CT-7AIA, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT, ESS ES1869F, Win 98

Reply 13 of 20, by Srandista

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ESS Solo-1, with VIA VT8237A southbridge. You can read more about that rig in my topic, check my signature.

kolderman wrote:

And until a few years ago, a parallel port - can you still get brand new mobos with printer ports...would be cool to plug in opl2lpt in a ryzen7 then install msdos and start playing monkey island or something.

Yeah, my old Skylake motherboard (with H170 chipset) still have both serial and parallel headers and also PCI slots. I didn't tried DOS on it, but I have no reason to believe, that DOS wouldn't work on it, if I would try. But for that I have primarily mentioned 775 system.

Socket 775 - ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA, Pentium E6500K, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, ESS Solo-1, Win 98/XP
Socket A - Chaintech CT-7AIA, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT, ESS ES1869F, Win 98

Reply 14 of 20, by Jo22

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kolderman wrote:
mothergoose729 wrote:

DOS will boot on almost anything with an x86 processor. Even modern video cards will support a surprising amount of standard VESA modes. The hard part is getting sound... but even then, every motherboard has a PC speaker.

And until a few years ago, a parallel port - can you still get brand new mobos with printer ports...would be cool to plug in opl2lpt in a ryzen7 then install msdos and start playing monkey island or something.

There are PCI Express cards with a parallel port, too. Remember, the PC platform (still) has slots for expansion. 😉
Getting these to work natively in DOS, is another story. It depends either on the BIOS/CSM configure it to the old 3BC, 378, 278 addresses
or an supplied DOS utility (if there's one provided by the manufacturer).

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?624 … pter-compatible

When CSM is slowly fading away in the 2020's, things may look different, of course.
Hopefully FreeDOS or PC-MOS/386 will get support for UEFI, as the OS/2 successor ArcaOS does.
Or an BIOS emulator that runs off UEFI during boot. Alternatively Coreboot/SeaBIOS could help.

https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-progress-r … -only-hardware/
https://www.freedos.org/contribute/

If this all fails, it would be still possible to use VMs to run DOS semi-natively.
As in: DOS can still run "natively" on a virtualized x86 processor, but the rest of the PC environment is emulated/mapped.
Virtual PC does this for example. If your PC has COM or Parallel ports, DOS programs in a VM can access them on the old I/O range
independently of the real I/O ports. Bit-banging stuff even works in most cases here, so that you can access the
individual pins on, say, the physical COM port (like RTS, CTS, RI) rather than just plain ASCII transfer.

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 15 of 20, by Sonic_The_Furry

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My current motherboard, the MSI B350 Tomahawk has 1 Serial and 1 Parallel port on the board as well as 2 PCI slots. While I doubt that the PCI slots would work for a soundcard since they use a bridge chip, the LPT port is mapped correctly and I've tested it using Windows 3.1 and my dot matrix printer so the OPL2LPT would work in this case. But DOS on a Ryzen 5 1600X was nothing to write home about to be honest because my GTX 1050 doesnt have proper VESA mode support to run any benchmarks.

Reply 16 of 20, by petran79

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LSS10999 wrote:

Running DOS natively is possible, just that you might encounter a few more issues than usual.

While you might not be able to run DOS for gaming purposes, as it's hard or impossible to get audio working (and video might have issues sometimes), it's still good enough for some business or industrial software.

And it is not the same as running a VM (VMWare/VBox/PCem) or using DOSBox. There are already separate forums for these.

I used to run DOS games on Windows XP though I used SoundFX and VDMsound emulators for music and sfx. This was early 2000, before DOSBOX. Unfortunately Vista dropped support for it.

Reply 17 of 20, by Azarien

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Jo22 wrote:

If this all fails, it would be still possible to use VMs to run DOS semi-natively.
As in: DOS can still run "natively" on a virtualized x86 processor, but the rest of the PC environment is emulated/mapped.

One can imagine a specialized Linux distro with nothing but QEMU (or something similar) on it.
Or even a thin kernel providing enough of the BIOS environment to boot DOS - essentially a CSM replacement. I think it will happen sooner or later.

Reply 18 of 20, by LSS10999

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petran79 wrote:

I used to run DOS games on Windows XP though I used SoundFX and VDMsound emulators for music and sfx. This was early 2000, before DOSBOX. Unfortunately Vista dropped support for it.

Yeah, VDMSound/SoundFX was something very interesting before DOSBox becomes popular. Although the performance was far from perfect (partly due to NTVDM itself), it at least allowed DOS games to have proper sound.

Windows Vista and its new WDDM dropped legacy DOS full screen resolutions completely (even on 32-bit where NTVDM was still there), so they're mostly useless.

Azarien wrote:

One can imagine a specialized Linux distro with nothing but QEMU (or something similar) on it.
Or even a thin kernel providing enough of the BIOS environment to boot DOS - essentially a CSM replacement. I think it will happen sooner or later.

Someone made a simple Linux distro that boots directly to DOSBox.

A long time ago DOSBox's performance was not really that acceptable that only some 80s games (that would run too fast on real machines) worked best on it, so for a while I always preferred getting a real environment for my DOS games. Nowadays DOSBox is considered good enough for most games if proper configurations are given.

And the DOSBox-X branch (which focuses on accuracy) might be ideal for those who want to have an accurate DOS environment for general purpose applications.

Reply 19 of 20, by Malik

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dr_st wrote on 2019-09-07, 07:20:

twiz11,
Maybe you should do your research before starting threads with misleading and obviously wrong titles. Tip: if you want to use the thread itself for a discussion where you would learn such things, it is better to phrase the title as a question rather than a rather bold statement. 😉

Agree to this. Misleading title and the contents of the original post does not explain the thread title itself and instead seem to open discussions by the contributors á là a debate. At the very least, the thread title should have ended with a question mark.

Coming back to PCI based audio with compatibility with DOS games, I once made a thread about it here.

5476332566_7480a12517_t.jpgSB Dos Drivers