what problems are you having with your awe32 ?

In fact its a SB32 with 2mb. Creatives diagnose.exe only sees a SB16, the EMU synth (adress 620) is missing. Also there is some error message when the machine and creatives pnp manager are starting (but its to fast - so I can't read it before this other stuff from freedos is floating the screen). When I try to start ctcu, there is an error message saying that I have to unload "share" (some kind of memory manager?) if I do not want to use ctcu in silent mode.

Again - I'm not familiar with freedos. I'm sure there is a way to fix the awe problem, but I'm more interested in the question if there is some kind of game / old hardware compatible installation for freedos available or recommended by users.

The highest compatibility for MS-DOS games is offered by MS-DOS since that's the OS the games were designed for. (If we were not talking about physical machines then I'd say that DOSBox offers better compatibility than a real machine)

FreeDOS may be just as compatible but no one can really say for sure if it's 90% 95% or 100% as compatible as MS-DOS.

The most compatible config.sys/autoexec.bat configuration for the widest number of games is a blank configuration. There are so many memory managers/device drivers/hardware configurations possible that no one in their right mind can give you the "gaming" config you are looking for.

Almost everyone here uses DOSBox with a smattering of people using MS-DOS on their old machines. We have very few FreeDOS users here so you'll likely get better response from a FreeDOS specific forum.

The freedos kernel is far from 100% dos compatibility. Nevertheless it has
reached a nice level of compatibility, but the main plus is the number of
additional programs they (are/were) developing.

you can easilly find a ms-dos boot disk using google

Silent Loon wrote:

In fact its a SB32 with 2mb. Creatives diagnose.exe only sees a SB16, the EMU synth (adress 620) is missing. Also there is some error message when the machine and creatives pnp manager are starting (but its to fast - so I can't read it before this other stuff from freedos is floating the screen). When I try to start ctcu, there is an error message saying that I have to unload "share" (some kind of memory manager?) if I do not want to use ctcu in silent mode.

Again - I'm not familiar with freedos. I'm sure there is a way to fix the awe problem, but I'm more interested in the question if there is some kind of game / old hardware compatible installation for freedos available or recommended by users.

CTCU should be started before anything else. Seems to me that was the problem. If you cant read fast enough, use "Pause" button on the keyboard, next to the "scroll lock" and "print" buttons - It should help 😉

look in autoexec.bat for share and remove it
also you can put pause on the line after diagnose.exe to pause the screen
the adress 620 line looks like a problem with your set blaster line

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T3 P330 H6 E620
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |_______ AWE 32 Only Parameter
| | | | | | | |__________ "High" DMA Channel
| | | | | | |_______________ MIDI Port
| | | | | |__________________ Type of Card
| | | | |_____________________ DMA Channel
| | | |________________________ Interrupt
| | |_____________________________ Port Address
| |___________________________________ Environment Variable
|________________________________________ DOS Command

Isnt he supposed to have "T6" instead of "T3"? Wasnt T5 for SB pro/2 and T6 for SB16/AWE?

oh it was just an example of a set blaster line, it isnt supposed to be his set blaster line 😉

Davros wrote:

you can easilly find a ms-dos boot disk using google

Not so long ago, I was planning to put WinNT 4 on an old Dx4 system, and wanted a starting point in old DOS. I tried three to five 3 1/2" floppies I have /had that supposedly had DOS on them, before finding one that would boot. It has been so long since I'd used the first several of them, that ambient magnetism around the house had made most of them unusable!

(I don't even have a 5 1/4 floppy drive anywhere that I can recall, and only a very few of the old 5 1/4 floppies, way up high in a closet where I never pulled them down to discard them.)

I talked myself out of the NT4 idea before it got too far, however! I'm not surprised that you can find MS-DOS for download floating around the 'Net, though.

Why on Earth would anyone want to use NT 4 these days, given the option?

probably just because he has it lying about