VOGONS


Msdos and win95/98

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First post, by Rekoil

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I am currently starting my adventure into my first build. I am 40 years old so the build will be for the good old ages of growing up gaming. I am wanting to use directacess 5.0 to boot into. Can I use that version if I run windows 98? Cheers and thanks for any advice.

Reply 1 of 7, by megatron-uk

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Windows 95/98 come with their own version of DOS.

You can either do a dual-boot system and retain DOS 5.0 and Windows 98, or if you wish just use Windows 98 and reboot into DOS mode.

The advantage of Windows 98 (Second Edition) is that the version of DOS it comes with supports FAT32 filesystems, so supports much, much bigger drives than DOS 5 or 6 ever did.

It's also possible to *only* use the version of DOS that came with Win 98 SE and not have windows at all. That gets you a FAT32 native DOS system without any trace of Windows.

Really, it's up to you which route you want to take.

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https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 2 of 7, by wierd_w

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DA5 works just fine under the 'dos 7' supplied by win9x.

You may need to set bootgui=0 in msdos.sys, to stop windows from automatically loading though.

Reply 3 of 7, by RetroPCCupboard

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directacess 5.0 seems to be some kind of menu driven launcher for DOS. You want to use that with DOS 7 I assume, amd maybe launch Windows 98 from it for Win9x games?

Reply 4 of 7, by wierd_w

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In theory one could use lilo for DOS with appropriate boot images to chainload other versions of DOS from DA5... but...

Reply 5 of 7, by Rekoil

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Thank you for all the great advice. This has put me in the right direction. I was thinking of doing a dual boot. I remember booting directly into Da5. I would prefer that due fact I will be mainly msdos games. Then in the menus you could choose to boot into windows. I beleave it was win95 at that time. I would like to use win98. I have more games I would like to play in windows for 98 then 95. Sim city 2000 with some changes can run in 98 as well.

Reply 6 of 7, by Rekoil

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RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-18, 10:37:

directacess 5.0 seems to be some kind of menu driven launcher for DOS. You want to use that with DOS 7 I assume, amd maybe launch Windows 98 from it for Win9x games?

Yes you are correct. That is a older program for dos then win95/98 I beleave. My goal is to launch into da5 then choose to go into windows. I did not know if I could run da5 using win98 due to dos version difference.

Reply 7 of 7, by wierd_w

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Yes.

Set bootgui=0 in msdos.sys, then add a win.com entry in DA5 to start win9x.