
FreeDOS 1.2 - suprjami
http://www.freedos.org/jhall/
======
mysterydip
FreeDOS saved my bacon some years ago. I was working at a college and one day
a chemistry prof came in and said their spectrometer (IIRC) was dying. I took
a look and found an old 386-based machine with a hard drive on the fritz. It
ran some odd version of DOS from a company that no longer existed, there was
no budget for a replacement, and classes relying on it were starting soon.

My memory is hazy but I was able to get a compactflash card with FreeDOS on it
and used it to boot the system. The special programs that operated the device
over the serial or parallel port took a little work to keep from crashing, but
eventually all was working as before.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
It amazes me that people on HN have anecdotes for everything.

------
endgame
Merry Christmas to the FreeDOS project, and congratulations. It's great to see
you lot keeping on.

Does anyone here know the plans for the future, now that UEFI is on most new
consumer PCs? Will it be considered "done" at some point or will it get
adapted into something else?

~~~
carlosrg
I'm interested in this too. I'm tempted to install it just to remember old
times - play around FreePascal and real mode programming, inline assembly and
so on - and I guess supporting UEFI would make it easier to coexist with
modern Windows/Linux installs.

------
vram22
Used to like working on DOS. Many of the apps on it were very fast to use, as
others have said.

And TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident programs) [1] were fun to use. I
particularly liked Borland Sidekick (a multi-utility tool that could be popped
up via a hot-key on top of whatever program you were running). [2] Sidekick
sold tons of copies, I read.

Edit: According to the Wikipedia article below, "Sidekick sold more than 1
million copies in its first three years".

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_stay_resident_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_stay_resident_program)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick)

------
fsiefken
DOS + Win 3.11 was very fast compared to Windows (9x, XP, 7 and 10), OSX or
Linux nowadays and there were lots of good games written for the platform
(MOO1, CIV1, Duke Nukem 3D).

I read about the problems with Windows 3.11 protected mode, does FreeDOS 1.2
allow you to run Windows 3.11 in 386enh and protected mode? A certain Jeremy
David wrote support for it, and I read that a windows 3 compatible kernel was
available in FreeDOS 1.0 under the name Winkernel. It should be used without
EMM386 but with Japheth's versions of HIMEMX and SHARE, allocating at most 256
MB of RAM to HIMEMEX. With some tweaking of the Windows config, it is possible
to use 1 GB, but not more. Do not use protected mode disk drivers. There is
SVGAPatch: a tool to patch svga256.drv to make it VESA compliant so Win 3.11
can be used within Virtualbox.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20140202233045/http://www.japheth...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140202233045/http://www.japheth.de/dwnload1.html)
[http://stephan.win31.de/w31mm_en.htm](http://stephan.win31.de/w31mm_en.htm)
[https://www.kirsle.net/blog/entry/nostalgia-for-
windows-3-1](https://www.kirsle.net/blog/entry/nostalgia-for-windows-3-1)

Conceivably it could be used to access the internet somewhat with Win32s in
combination with Dillo of D+ browser. [http://dillo-
win.osdn.jp/index.en.html](http://dillo-win.osdn.jp/index.en.html)
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-
browser/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/)

I remember that for DOS semi-multitasking you could use DESQview, does that
work with FreeDOS and are there better (more efficient or open source)
alternatives?

I am asking as you could make a very lean and fast OS, booting form USB,
extracting itself to a ramdisk, allocating 500M (with tools, editors and
games) and 500M for windows.

Perhaps HaikuOS, NT 3.51, Windows ME with KernelEx or the new OS/2 5 (ArcaOS),
or Win7PE or Win10PE are more capable and similarly faster compared to Ubuntu,
Windows7/10 or OSX. [https://www.arcanoae.com/current-release-timetable-
arcaos-5-...](https://www.arcanoae.com/current-release-timetable-
arcaos-5-0-blue-lion/)
[http://theoven.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=4883b8169b752f637e361...](http://theoven.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=4883b8169b752f637e3611673a7ce3ea&topic=1336.0)

~~~
jerf
"DOS + Win 3.11 was very fast compared to Windows (9x, XP, 7 and 10), OSX or
Linux nowadays"

You either have some seriously rose-colored glasses on, or you need to put an
SSD in your current computer because a lot of the slowness of modern machines
lies in the increasingly-obsolete hard drive. (Due to the increasing
prevalence of cheap SMR [1] drives in consumer-grade gear, I'm not just saying
"increasingly-obsolete" for rhetorical purposes; cheap hard drives are
actually regressing in performance lately.) I remember multi-minute boot times
and multi-minute load times for things like office suites and such, which are
now entirely foreign to me.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording)

~~~
iopq
> You either have some seriously rose-colored glasses on, or you need to put
> an SSD in your current computer because a lot of the slowness of modern
> machines lies in the increasingly-obsolete hard drive.

I have Windows installed on an SSD. I have 16 GB of RAM.

Yet Windows still wants to use a page file, or programs run out of RAM. It's
crazy. Programs don't actually USE this much, they just request more than they
use.

A page file slows things down compared to doing everything in RAM. Even on an
SSD, it's way slower.

~~~
icebraining
While a page file is definitively slower than RAM, it's not a given that
simply using one will make the whole system slower. As long as the kernel only
sends rarely used pages to the file, the slowdown in writing/reading them can
be made up by having more RAM available for the filesystem cache.

~~~
dom0
I don't know if this was improved in W8 or W10, but in W7 and before the
paging algorithm in the NT kernel was definitely subpar, having a pagefile
_always_ reduced performance, because applications in the background would be
swapped out even if plenty of RAM was available, so going back to an
application meant that it was unresponsive until the kernel swapped it back
in.

------
kruhft
If anybody is interested in some 'current' open source MS-DOS software, I put
up my old undergraduate thesis sources from 1997 recently:

    
    
        https://github.com/burtonsamograd/xp32
    

Te repo has a full DJGPP (GCC for DOS) toolchain environment included to build
the included sources of the project, so you can just clone and build.

Probably a lot easier to understand and build than the Doom sources.

~~~
suprjami
Does it run in DOSBox? If so, capture a video and upload to YouTube, that's
the popular thing to do with demos these days, the higher-res the better.

Need that crisp 2048x1080 Second Reality by Future Crew:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA)

------
dispose13432
Ahh, an OS which never had vendor lock-in, and had multiple independent
vendors.

That dream died with Windows.

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"multiple independent vendors"

Unless I'm missing something, there weren't multiple vendors for MS-DOS pre-
Windows.

~~~
Sanddancer
There was MS-DOS, and also Digital Research, later Novell, then Caldera, etc
DOS which tended to have features that wouldn't be around until a version or
two of MS DOS later. There were also nasty power plays involving the two --
early betas of Windows 3.1 would refuse to run on DR-DOS.

~~~
zzalpha
Don't forget 4DOS. I loved that OS:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS)

~~~
dguaraglia
Actually, I looked that up because that's what I remembered using as a "DOS
alternative". Seems like it was actually just a shell replacement, leaving the
actual OS stuff (such as handling INT 21h requests) to the underlaying OS,
whether DOS, Windows or OS/2.

I guess wee me back in the day didn't know the difference :)

~~~
zzalpha
Well son of a gun. I assumed it was a full DOS implementation but you're
right. Well TIL... 20 years later...

------
rasz_pl
1.2 ships with 4 year old and broken CDRom driver, CD audio and CD detection
doesnt work in a bunch of old games(for example Need For Speed).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGmCVeAKR4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGmCVeAKR4w)

------
edem
How is this useful in 2016? I'm genuinely curious.

~~~
beachstartup
install onto a stick or disc for server firmware upgrades.

"but the cloud..."

someone maintains that cloud, every day.

~~~
untog
But why not Linux in that situation?

(Not to talk the project down, it's great. But I don't think anyone wants to
depend on it for system recovery)

~~~
tfigment
Because shockingly the vendors still ship driver updates in dos compatible
form and not linux in my experience. Last time I did BOIS/RAID driver updates,
I was glad I could boot to DOS using a USB stick and not have to revert to a
USB-to-floppy converter + floppy.

~~~
djKianoosh
this.. I wanted to upgrade an old bios recently and intel only provided an exe

------
pavlov
An operating system hosted on SourceForge, whose "drivers" directory includes
support for a grand total of two devices -- the IBM PC floppy and the PC/AT
clock [1]. DOS thinks different!

(Of course counting drivers in DOS is highly misleading, as the BIOS [2]
directly offers all the useful calls like "turn on cassette drive motor" and
"read joystick" that you will need to build modern microcomputer software.)

[1]
[https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/HEAD/tree/kernel/trunk...](https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/HEAD/tree/kernel/trunk/drivers/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_interrupt_call](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_interrupt_call)

~~~
DHowett
This doesn't seem to be a particularly kind or constructive comment.

The linked article opens with:

 _DOS isn 't exactly a moving target anymore, so we don't have to chase new
features or shifting compatibility._

Are you making a commentary on the usefulness of DOS or of FreeDOS as a
project?

~~~
JonnieCache
I think they're just making an ironic comment about how times have changed.

~~~
pavlov
Yes, that was it. I was trying to express positive astonishment that a
36-year-old operating system is being maintained largely in its original form.

No disrespect towards FreeDOS intended at all.

------
vram22
If anyone is interested in doing TCP/IP networking on DOS (and it may work on
FreeDOS [1]), read on:

Reading this thread, I just remembered that I used to have an old IBM PC Jr
that ran DOS (years earlier), a great machine hardware-wise (though it was not
a marketing success, I've read). And some time back I had written this post
about it:

Lissajous hippo, retrocomputing and the IBM PC Jr.:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/lissajous-
hippo.html](https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/lissajous-hippo.html)

While looking up info about the PC Jr. for that post, I came across Mike
Brutman's PC Jr. page (mentioned in my blog post):

[http://www.brutman.com/PCjr/](http://www.brutman.com/PCjr/)

He was an IBM employee for a long time and so had access to good info about
the PC Jr. - both hardware and software, and his page above is one he
maintains about that machine - a sort of retrocomputing site about the Jr.

We then talked some on email, and he told me he had built a TCP stack for DOS
and was running it on his Jr. That page is here:

[http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP.html](http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP.html)

He says others are also using mTCP, for fun, work and even business.

Here's an excerpt from his overview section about mTCP:

[1]:

[ mTCP should run on all variants of DOS including IBM PC-DOS, Microsoft MS-
DOS, DR-DOS and _FreeDOS_. All of these applications will run well on the
oldest, slowest PC that you can find - I routinely use them on an IBM PCjr
made in 1983 because nothing beats the fun of putting a 30+ year old computer
on the Internet.

People are using mTCP for goofing off and for real work. If you have a DOS
machine that needs to send data across the network mTCP can help you get that
done. Besides its utility to vintage computers I have heard of people using it
to transfer lab data from dedicated industrial PCs, allowing backups to be run
on old machines, and sending sales reports from the branch offices of a retail
store to a central server.

Don't have a vintage computer laying around? No problem! mTCP applications
will run in a variety of virtual and emulated environments. It has been tested
with DOSBox, SwsVpkt, VirtualBox and VMWare. See the documentation for the
details. ]

~~~
cr0sh
mTCP is pretty sweet; I once ran it (IIRC) to set up an FTP server so I could
transfer some files from the base system to a vbox VM running FreeDOS (I think
it was to play around with some old QB4.5 code of mine from over a decade
ago). To be honest, there was probably an easier way to do it, but I may have
been hindered by the "draconian" rules we had on these machines (Win8 boxes,
and we didn't have admin access) - or maybe I just wanted to see if it could
be done. I don't really recall...

~~~
vram22
Cool!

------
innocentoldguy
I love the FreeDOS project. While my first computer (a Kaypro II luggable -
[http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html](http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html))
ran CP/M, my career in software began with PC-DOS on an IBM 5150. Every now
and then, I like to run some of my old apps on FreeDOS, just to how far we've
come (and how far we haven't, in some respects).

------
throw7
I still keep a FreeDOS install on most of my usb keys I carry around.

Just tried out the new version... nice updated installer. The old one would
write out the install really slow. Gratz and thank you.

~~~
vram22
>I still keep a FreeDOS install on most of my usb keys I carry around.

Ha ha, at one time, as a system engineer, I used to carry many essential free
DOS / Windows / Unix software apps (including some small utilities that I
wrote - for both DOS and Unix, in Turbo C / Unix C and shell) around with me,
burned onto a few CDs, on the theory that you never know when you may need it,
on some client's PC (I used to go to solve clients' software problems). And it
often did turn out that one of those apps was needed and I used it to solve
some of their computer problems.

------
rocky1138
The "why this exists" part of the home page is pure hacker. Kudos!

------
xianwen
I am curious to see functionality development in FreeDOS, for example, in
include a capability to run SSH with X11 forwarding. It will be very
interesting and useful.

------
stuaxo
Is there a changelog somewhere ?

------
digi_owl
It would be tempting to try a DOS web browser in this day and age.

~~~
UncleSlacky
Your best bet is probably Arachne:
[http://www.glennmcc.org/](http://www.glennmcc.org/)

------
Vesnica
GlaDOS, where are you?

------
rootme
Who use DOS this days?

~~~
amiga-workbench
I do, my IBM 5170 is running MS-DOS 5 and I use it for IRC, BBS and the odd
bit of distraction free programming.

Multitasking is a distraction.

~~~
dispose13432
You use physical manuals?

