foxbat wrote on 2022-08-24, 22:04:

I just have collected some old equipment to play with: GA-586T2 with Cyrix MII 233 64MB RAM, 486VLB with IBM 486DX. Also some other ISA/PCI cards, CF-IDE and old IDE drives. I wish to run FreeDOS there firstly. Do you know if utilities like Norton Commander, Norton Utilities 8 or OS like Windows for Workgroups 3.11 works with FreeDOS? I need to run diagnostics on those old IDE drives and remember that Norton Utilities was outstanding in this area in old good 90's.

Not sure about Norton stuffs, but I think Windows 3.x still needs some work for FreeDOS and the support is not enabled by default yet, so I don't think release and CI builds have it.

You need to build your own FDOS kernel with that flag enabled. I've filed an issue before, but I'm not sure if there are any further work being done about that.

At least at the time I filed that issue the kernel can only be built with OpenWatcom if you enable that flag, as there seems to be an issue on the GCC side blocking successful GCC builds.

Sadly, I did not get Win3.x working even after enabling that flag, as perhaps my test environment was too new for it to work, but people with period-correct hardware could try.

Still, I do think for your particular builds MS-DOS (as well as PC-DOS and DR-DOS) might work better than FreeDOS.

Thanks for advices. Now I know that I should stick to 'real' implementations.

Do you know any place I can download MS/PC/DR-DOS and/or WfW 3.11 and/or Norton Utilities?

foxbat wrote on 2022-08-25, 17:18:

Thanks for advices. Now I know that I should stick to 'real' implementations.

Do you know any place I can download MS/PC/DR-DOS and/or WfW 3.11 and/or Norton Utilities?

Well... given the nature of these stuffs I'm afraid you're on your own to look for those, as this is not the right place to ask...

On the other hand, modern DOS utilities such as those came with FreeDOS should work just fine in other DOS environments, that you can use to further extend the functionality.

foxbat wrote on 2022-08-25, 17:18:

Thanks for advices. Now I know that I should stick to 'real' implementations.

Do you know any place I can download MS/PC/DR-DOS and/or WfW 3.11 and/or Norton Utilities?

It's very much readily available online. A simple Google search can take you there. If you still need help, you can send a PM.

For real classic systems, I prefer MS-DOS. I have tried other OSs, but I still come back to MS-DOS. Mostly because I'm used to it. And my personal favourite for faster machines - (486 to Pentium) is MS-DOS 6.22.

Never a fan on FreeDOS but I have installed it before once for experimental purposes in my Pentium 4 machine.

In 86Box (A PC emulator), I keep multiple configurations of period correct "machines" where I have installed IBM-DOS (PC-DOS) for the IBM PC, etc. And since it's an emulator I am free to try other OSs like DR-DOS in their own "hard disk" image files.