You'll note that I clarified with 32bit.
Yes, it was sort of extended, but its far harder to end up with a working 32bit OS on a modern machine.
9x can mostly work ok with patches BECAUSE it can fall back on BIOS calls, but it's harder to get the NT line working.

As for remembering, yep. I was there too.

All I can say is I have iDOSBox (an Android app of DosBox) on my Samsung Galaxy A7 Tab Lite tablet and after I downloaded bunch of DOS applications and games, I managed to get them working properly. No problems at all, although iDOSBox did crash twice so far.
Unfortunately I haven’t used a PC in years so I don’t have a good answer on this but I’m sure DOS emulators will work just fine in a modern PC.

Well I have asked the question, somewhere, why, to the extent that a cpu still has a real mode, after booting, the uefi crappola can't just be replaced with a bios. Even an enhanced one.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-08-02, 07:56:

Not exactly true. […]
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Not exactly true.

The original BIOS was indeed, a combination of an IPL (Initial Program Loader) and a toolkit of useful IO service routines.

To say it was never extended though, is just wrong. Some noteworthy modifications/extensions to old fashioned BIOS are the many INT13 improvements, El Torito and USB booting, USB Legacy support for keyboards and mice, fancy new chipset features, including PCI CLK and pals, Plug and Play extensions, and many many more.

The actual thing that happened, was that Intel and Pals decided (tm) that its days were over, and switched whole-hog to the New!(tm) Universal Extensible FIrmware Interface. (UEFI)
This does not start the processor in real mode anymore, (which Intel REALLY REALLY WANTS. They have wanted to axe realmode for over a decade now, and have wanted very hard to not have back-compatible ISA for even longer. Remember Itanium? I DO! Remember Pentium-Pro before that? I DO!)

The MAIN selling point of UEFI is that it starts immediately in flat mode, and can supply more sophisticated services (like straight up ethernet stacks, audio processing stacks, complex biometrics bullshit, you name it), and allows the CPU to better do fancy shit with its spiffy new Secure Enclave, (Trusted Platform Module, and the Secure Enclaves baked into Intel and AMD processors, respectively) and to be able to deal with GPT partitioning, so that it can handle modern "Its ENORMOUS!" disk drives.

However, this means old legacy utilities and routines are "NO LONGER NEEDED!!", so, you see only the most vestigial trappings of such things on these systems. Just enough to display video before the GPU driver loads, etc.

Since CSMs are no longer being baked into UEFI firmwares, legacy DOS support is becoming more and more impossible to pull off outside of emulation.

The afore-mentioned SoC I wasted 6 posts on, uses only UEFI out of the box. It was DESIGNED this way, as it is an Intel product, designed by Intel, and pushes the "NO, WE HATE THAT!!" philosophy. They even tried to go so far as to claim it was not actually a "computer", and was instead a "Hobby Platform". This is WHY I wasted 6 pages, answering how to gut that UEFI firmware out, and get a FOSS minimal BIOS on instead. (Coreboot + SeaBios).

Still lacks a suitable audio chip, but it could potentially be convinced to have one. (On the underside, is a compact high-density header that has a PCIe 1x lane, which could have a PCI bridge chip put on it, and a PCI Soundblaster clone. I wont hold my breath-- the MinnowBoard is EoL, out of production, (but DOES have FOSS published Gerbers, so if somebody wants to have some made, they CAN....) and did not sell well when it WAS in production. It cost too much, and was crippled from the gate for what most enthusiasts would have wanted to do with it, due to Intel's characteristic lack of vision on what the market wants. (VS what THEY want.)

Regardless, we are stuck with Intel's lacklustre future with UEFI for the foreseeable time being.

You're efforts don't go unnoticed manster.

Not sure why you want to struggle getting DOS to work on a new PC. Personally, I just hit E-Bay and put together a 486 DX4 system. Cost a couple of hundred bucks and it was fun doing the time warp back to the days of old.

Just my 2 cents

Cheers

Why spend the money if you don't have to???

Also, getting something to work that "Is not supposed to" scratches both the tinkerer itch, AND the rebellious user itch.

I am sorry to learn that SBEMU does not support my minnowboard's sound chip... but I am wondering if some prodding from the linux sound driver sources, and a local recompile, might get it working or not...

And it's not a struggle. Even for some games, MAME and such, sound shouldn't be an issue I'm supposing.

I'd be tickled to find that certain games I played back in the day would work on something recent.

Quick Update (from the topic poster ^^):
I've bought a HP T610 Thin Client for $15 for the lolz.
I managed to get Dos 7 running with SBEmu, but only barely. Any games with Dos4GW crash (probably due to 2gb DDR3 ram. And yes I've tried LIMITMEM.SYS and many other options). Some games don't run because of the CPU as well... but I've found a nice little collection of games that run great like Transport Tycoon, Dune2, Police Quest 3. 😀 Unfortunately SBEmu takes up a lot of conventiall memory which further excludes some games like Formula One Gran Prix or Space Quest 4&5.

I've tried to install Windows 98, but I couldn't get it to play nice with the SATA SSD. The IDE Emulation of the BIOS just seems to be wonky and the system froze every few seconds and crashed a lot. But I was able to install Windows XP with no issues and even found sound and gpu drivers (ATI Cataliyst ftw!) and everything seems to work great. Teste Hot Pursuit 2, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and a few others. Only Windows9X game that wouldn't start was Dark Reign.

So, got a lot of nice tinkering time and some decent results out of my $15 😁

Dark reign runs fine on xp+
Just set 256 colours and 95 compatibility in the shortcut

Good_Punk wrote on 2024-07-30, 09:23:

Hello everyone, […]
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Hello everyone,

I've recently heard that you can still install and run MS-DOS on modern PCs.

What are the downsides on doing so?
Can you get sound to work (is there maybe some special hardware for that?)
Can you play games? Or do they all run too fast or crash?

I'm asking because I though about maybe buying on of those cheap Mini PCs and use it for playing DOS games. (Doesn't need to support all games, just a couple)

Nowadays, the development is that DOS is perfect on a completely modern machine.
Re: Which CPU is the Fastest in the World for Real Mode Operations in MS-DOS?
Re: Which CPU is the Fastest in the World for Real Mode Operations in MS-DOS?
Re: Which CPU is the Fastest in the World for Real Mode Operations in MS-DOS?

I'd really like to see TKChia's muefircate project (formerly known as biefircate) get more attention.

TK Chia has been occasionally working on it by themself, but it would be nice if more talented volunteers would join this project.

The goal of this project is basically a UEFI boot loader for DOS that doesn't require a Compatibility Support Module (CSM). See the project notes for some more info.

This is useful for most PC motherboards and laptops that were released in the last 3 years or so, since those no longer come with a CSM, but have CPUs that still have native 16-bit and 32-bit support.

A solution like muefircate would allow such newer PC hardware to still boot DOS natively, at least until Intel and AMD adopt the x86S architecture, which removed 16-bit and 32-bit compatibility from their CPUs completely. Yes, that day will eventually come, but until then, let's see how far we can stretch continued native compatibility. 🙂

Also, even once x86S CPUs make it to market, the era of PCs that no longer have legacy BIOS compatibility while still supporting 16-bit real mode at the CPU hardware level will still span about 5 years. (Say, from 2020 to 2025 at the earliest?) That's a lot of systems that could still benefit from this.