Fire up your Compaq Deskpro: FreeDOS 1.4 is the first stable update since 2022
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Any of the 5 or so Microsoft entrainment packs are all win 3.1 games. If you want to just play them, it may be better to use WineVDM to play them depending on your setup. As long as it;s not the arcade pack, it should work fine
WineVDM is a port of wine ,which is a port of windows APIs to run on linux, that will emulate the old 16 bit APIs from windows 3.1 on a modern 64 bit system
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I prefer bash.
For example: try to set a value to a variable and print it with the "echo" command. In DOS, you'll have to use a batch script.
In bash, you can do it from the command line.
Try "echo off: in DOS, and your prompt will be gone.
In bash, the prompt is not gone and echo is off by default.
For example: try to set a value to a variable and print it with the "echo" command. In DOS, you'll have to use a batch script.
In bash, you can do it from the command line.
Try "echo off: in DOS, and your prompt will be gone.
In bash, the prompt is not gone and echo is off by default.
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I used FreeDOS around 2006. I had a friend who ran a beauty shop and used a DOS based CRM system. His computer died and he got a new one and his "computer guy" had windows on it and ran it in a shell. It didn't work well...especially printing. I found a spare hard drive, put FreeDOS on it and his software...he was so happy.
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Haha, thanks for reminding me of my Unix years. And of course this classic:This is DOS. A clone of CP/M. It has no truck with the luxuries of UNIX.
By comparison, the footprint of DOS hardware is so small that UNIX might confuse it for a tape controller, or perhaps a network card. If UNIX is a celebrated cathedral, DOS is a bus shelter on a rural road that nobody uses anymore.
Some pervert has no doubt ported ed to DOS. But the true ascetic, who has faith in simplicity and simplicity in their faith, shuns such fripperies. They know in their heart that edlin's simplicity is its strength, and that no matter how small a measure of strength it may be it is still strength nonetheless.
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A few years back I needed to boot a server in DOS to install a firmware upgrade for a disk controller, and I think it was FreeDOS I ended up using for that.
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This is DOS. A clone of CP/M. It has no truck with the luxuries of UNIX.
By comparison, the footprint of DOS hardware is so small that UNIX might confuse it for a tape controller, or perhaps a network card. If UNIX is a celebrated cathedral, DOS is a bus shelter on a rural road that nobody uses anymore.
Some pervert has no doubt ported ed to DOS. But the true ascetic, who has faith in simplicity and simplicity in their faith, shuns such fripperies. They know in their heart that edlin's simplicity is its strength, and that no matter how small a measure of strength it may be it is still strength nonetheless.
Bravo sir!
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This is like the third reference to the absolute horrors of Windows updating I have seen in the last week. You don't have time to restart your computer and pour another cup of coffee?
Y'all must be some busy motherfuckers.
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Projects like this are great - beyond hobbyist interest there will be so much legacy technology out there relying on projects like this.
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Maybe they added a dark theme?Wait...
What the hell is there to update in edlin?
I love FreeDOS and think it's well worth supporting. But the idea that edlin needs updates is... it's like finding out that someone is wandering around gluing new bits of stone to boulders, because they think that they weren't boulder-y enough.
Edlin is supposed to be tiny, efficient, baffling and infuriating. In a world gone topsy-turvy, please a least leave us that!
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Edlin Copilot, of course.Wait...
What the hell is there to update in edlin?
I love FreeDOS and think it's well worth supporting. But the idea that edlin needs updates is... it's like finding out that someone is wandering around gluing new bits of stone to boulders, because they think that they weren't boulder-y enough.
Edlin is supposed to be tiny, efficient, baffling and infuriating. In a world gone topsy-turvy, please a least leave us that!
Note that this requires at least a Cirrus Labs CL-GD5426 with 2 MB VRAM - or better - to function. The VLB bus is preferred for best results.
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As said virtually every time this question comes up, there are basically two audiences. Retro computing enthusiasts/gamers, and industry.
Tons and tons of industrial equipment that handles trillions of dollars in goods runs on antiquated machine control systems that were installed thirty or more years ago and never hit by the "must update every cycle" mentality because the machine and control system were packaged as a unit.
I've worked in factories in the 21st century where testing and validation for QC ran on a beige machine that required the Turbo button not be pressed.
Some machines, even if not integrated directly to a computer running DOS software, can only be serviced by one. Often with antiquated connectors and protocols that run bare-metal on card slots that haven't shipped in consumer PCs since before The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest debuted.
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Getting to byte number (2^32+1) in a retro-compatible way is going to be a fairy tale for FreeDOS...
Not even EMM386.SYS could access more than 0.03GB (32MB), then XMS initially could only do up to 0.06GB (64MB) until the upgrade to XMS 3.0 finally got to a then-shocking 4096 MB.
(To put down the semantics pitchforks, the mebibyte/gibibyte versions of GB, aka 4096 MiB = 4GiB = 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes)
That byte at 4GB+1 remains out of universe boundaries to all these DOS memory API's
/s
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When you run a modern package that has a retro game built into it, it may have a nice FreeDOS package automatically running.
At home, if you click on Leisure Suit Larry at Internet Archive, it's running a Javascript port of DosBox running FreeDOS directly in your web browser, completely packaged with a real AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS directly in the FreeDOS VM, just to load the SoundBlaster drivers to the virtual audio card->browser sound, to run the DOS game one-click, with both graphics and sound. If you look closely, you'll see the CONFIG.SYS/AUTOXEC.BAT messages for a fraction of a second as the VM almost instantly starts up even in interpreted javascript.
At a factory, the same may occur if you're running modern software that has a quickly developed third-party plug in CNC driver. It may be running FreeDos in a DosBox VM just to run the serial/parallel signals (PCIe RS232 cards exist and can be mapped to DOS VM!) to communicate to the 1980s CNC machine, because it was the easiest way to reverse-engineer the million dollar CNC machine. Some products you have in your home may have been created by such a machine at a low-cost factory.
You never know -- the DosBox+FreeDOS+VM glue can be invisible and near instant creation (<1 second) -- It's all scriptable in dynamically created VM's nowadays in ways more easy than reverse engineering a complex protocol. Sure, you can run an 8086 directly and some still do! But some have DIY'd a DOSBOX VM, possible by the single IT guy in an experiment to try to eliminate a decaying machine into a VM wrapper -- in a quick overnight HDD-mirrored computer switcheroo test with easy revert-to-real-DOS-metal option --
Today, you have improved Linux+(FreeDOS-in-VM)+passthru to real PCIe COM1/LPT1 ports on /dev/ devices does make it much easier and allows you to add some modern upgrades like remote control (e.g. REST APIs on Linux that consequently automates a VM operation) etc.
Especially if that 1980s or 1990s machine is still cutting metal parts perfectly and cheaply, with low physical maintenance costs.
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Getting to byte number (2^32+1) in a retro-compatible way is going to be a fairy tale for FreeDOS...
Not even EMM386.SYS could access more than 0.03GB (32MB), then XMS initially could only do up to 0.06GB (64MB) until the upgrade to XMS 3.0 finally got to a then-shocking 4096 MB.
(To put down the semantics pitchforks, the mebibyte/gibibyte versions of GB, aka 4096 MiB = 4GiB = 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes)
That byte at 4GB+1 remains out of universe boundaries to all these DOS memory API's
You can blame IBM for that 64MB limit originally. It's the original PC/AT INT15H API to get the amount of extended memory; it was returning the amount of extended memory in kB in AX (seeing it was for a 286, and 16384 fit fine....).
So IBM not only gave us the 640k limit (by putting the video cards at A000:0000/B000:0000), but also the 64M limit. Can't blame MS for the 640k - they had 896k versions of MS running on non PC systems...
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