Maybe this will help, eventually, https://github.com/tkchia/biefircate

Does DOSBox not work? If the programs are text-only you can also try MS-DOS Player.

cloverskull wrote on 2022-06-15, 02:28:

Ah, yeah, these are DOS 16 bit programs. Old BBS doors like Legend of the Red Dragon and Tradewars 2002.

What about OS/2? It was popular among BBS sysops. 😀
There's some development going on in ArcaOS (ex BlueLion OS).
The goal is to make it run on UEFI, or so I heard.
And since OS/2 is 32-Bit, anyway, 32-Bit UEFI support seems logical.

https://www.arcanoae.com/uefi-support-in-arca … -february-2022/

Edit:

Plasma wrote on 2022-06-15, 02:50:

Does DOSBox not work? If the programs are text-only you can also try MS-DOS Player.

I second that! 😁

I used to use that player to use ARC on Windows 7 x64.

Because, ARC was such an old archiver with an obscure compression,
that my mail hoster and the one of a friend, wasn't able to scan the archive.
That was the only way to send a friend an EXE file!
MS-DOS Player made that task very easy.

DOSBox would have needed a huge Cycle number to archive the same in a short time.

DOSBox is great but has one limitation: multinode/multiplayer games won't work due to the way DOSBox works with the filesystem.

I've used dosemu2 in linux to decent effect but it also has a lot of problems with various games. It's pretty imperfect though I'm happy the project has actual ongoing development.

I appreciate the recommendation to try MS-DOS Player, I'll give that a shot 😀 But I'm still back at square one where I have a UEFI-only machine that is stuck with a measly 4gigs of RAM. Installing Windows 7 would be far and away my preference.

ArcaOS seems interesting, I'll give that a look. Very intriguing. I never got into OS/2 back in the day so have very limited experience, but this sounds like a cool thing to explore 😀 Thanks.

cloverskull wrote on 2022-06-15, 05:49:

DOSBox is great but has one limitation: multinode/multiplayer games won't work due to the way DOSBox works with the filesystem.

Maybe ask the dosbox-x devs? They seem pretty responsive to problems like these.

cloverskull wrote on 2022-06-15, 05:49:

I appreciate the recommendation to try MS-DOS Player, I'll give that a shot 😀 But I'm still back at square one where I have a UEFI-only machine that is stuck with a measly 4gigs of RAM. Installing Windows 7 would be far and away my preference.

Msdos player works fine on windows 7.

I won't need msdos player if I use win7 32 bit, which is precisely the reason I created this thread 😀

cloverskull wrote on 2022-06-15, 16:15:

I won't need msdos player if I use win7 32 bit, which is precisely the reason I created this thread 😀

I think you should try WinXP on VMware, I remember it working quite fine on my 4gb ram Windows 10 PC.

I also second *TVDM and dosemu2 solutions (even if there are problems, surely their devs would help you) rather than bending over backwards with godawful hacks.
And if that still doesn't fly, XP Mode or virtualizing whatever even older windows version certainly cannot leech away that many system resources.
(or conversely, you could deploy the barest host possible and install whatever you want then as a guest)

But since the question is worded differently.. I'll bite. If your motherboard has no CSM (that is, you couldn't even unlock the bios settings to enable it):

• W7 specifically might be unlucky, but native 32-bit UEFI boot should be doable with every other version (and if you hate W10, 32-bit W8 is probably the smoothest choice)
• it is possible to boot even XP x64 with just pure UEFI (well, provided you have compatible gpu drivers for it).

Not both though. Legend has that with DUET32 it should be possible to cross the bit barrier at least with XP, but it's the theory of a single forgotten madman.
Maybe in the future some Windows loader magic might make all of this superfluous, the system casually thinking it's running in bios mode when in fact execution came from UEFI.. But for the moment there is no such alternative code written (the reactOS guys just barely got UEFI boot to work at all recently).

What hardware are we talking about here?
If it's a nuc or compute stick, good luck.

A normal motherboard, might be easier.

darry wrote on 2022-06-15, 02:44:

Maybe this will help, eventually, https://github.com/tkchia/biefircate

The biefircate project, later renamed to muefircate, unfortunately hasn't seen any development for quite some time.

However, another developer recently created the CSMWrap project, which seems more promising, and already seems to work.

I opened a thread for it here.