14 ms·
FreeDOS 1.2
- edem 10y agoHow is this useful in 2016? I'm genuinely curious.
- jszymborski 10y agoHaven't been to HMV in about 5 years, but all the point-of-sale computers ran DOS at the Montreal locations I'd been too. Went to a local bookstore recently, seemed they were running a DOS app too. So unless they are emulating (a distinct possibility), they can use FreeDOS to run natively. And if not for enterprise-sake, then just for fun :P
- david-given 10y agoThey might be OS/2 --- in text mode, it looks just like old fashioned DOS. Apparently lots of ATMs still run OS/2.
- gjvc 10y agofor running firmware updates for some (older) devices
- brainfire 10y agoOr not so old devices...
- ams6110 10y agoYes I use FreeDOS on a USB flash drive to run BIOS updates on current hardware.
- sengork 10y agoOr those who run non-vendor-supported OS on their computer, FreeDOS is often their only way to upgrade BIOS/UEFI.
- dispose13432 10y agoFreeDOS doesn't work on computers with UEFI
- pwdisswordfish 10y agoFreeDOS doesn't work on computers without a PC BIOS; there's a difference. Look up 'Compatibility Support Module'.
- wamatt 10y agoDepends on whether one's utility function definition, includes the nostalgia parameter
- Sanddancer 10y agoIt has a lot of uses here and there. A ton of companies use it as the OS for their hardware diagnostic packages, or for things like firmware updates. It claims very little of the hardware for its own, so it makes it a lot easier to do things like low level format a hard drive without having to worry about some other driver/process messing with things.
- kalleboo 10y agoOne interesting exception is Apple, who's Hardware Diagnostics disc runs as an EFI binary (why boot another OS when you have one in ROM already?)
- sigstoat 10y agountil a few years back, my company still owned some old scientific equipment whose software ran on DOS. we've still got equipment which is controlled by software that runs on XP (and does not work on anything else). i should probably donate a bit to ReactOS, because i expect i'll need it sooner or later. these sorts of projects can keep perfectly good, old equipment running and useful. (and considering the aversion some physical scientists have to computers, save drastically on training costs.)
- rocky1138 10y agoWhat about WINE?
- dispose13432 10y agoI would assume driver issues, which can be taken care of in ReactOS (which is meant to be a reversed-engineered windows kernel) but not in Wine (userspace)
- xianwen 10y agoFor me, WINE is preferred because Microsoft Office ran better on WINE last time I check.
- hvidgaard 10y agoYou could run XP in a virtual machine. Bonus is that it will portable when and if you upgrade the machine.
- swiley 10y agoOlder XP supposedly has a real time mode that got dropped in vista. If that's what they're using then a VM won't work.
- hvidgaard 10y agoAre you sure? I don't recall XP being real time of any kind, as it was designed ground up to be general purpose and specifically did not try to incorporate real time. I do remember some sort of extension that could install drivers that made it behave like a real time OS. However at that point I think seperating the control out to seperate hardware with a real time OS seems like the obvious choice, and then keeping the interface on a genereal purpose PC. Though it wouldn't be the first time a vendor made a stupid choice.
- amalcon 10y agoDOS was and is an absolutely tiny operating system. The job of an OS is to act as an intermediary between you and the hardware. Sometimes, having stuff between you and the hardware is a problem. DOS lets you basically just use the hardware directly, so it can make sense for some types of control systems or firmware updaters.
- wtallis 10y agoIt's really not ideal for either purpose, though. Control systems can use a much richer RTOS rather than building on DOS and implementing an RTOS within the application. Firmware updating only happens on DOS because Microsoft isn't interested in accommodating that use case with Windows. It is increasingly common to see firmware update boot images based on Linux, which has no trouble offering access to those low-level interfaces while still having a modern feature set.
- guard-of-terra 10y agoWhen I bought my current PC (custom assembled for me from parts I chose) a few years ago, they installed FreeDOS on it. It booted all right from SSD and could DIR onto 37" LED TV.
- beachstartup 10y agoinstall onto a stick or disc for server firmware upgrades. "but the cloud..." someone maintains that cloud, every day.
- untog 10y agoBut 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)
- beachstartup 10y agobecause manufacturers still provide dos .exe's for flash updates.
- tfigment 10y agoBecause 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 10y agothis.. I wanted to upgrade an old bios recently and intel only provided an exe
- swiley 10y agoI had to re-install osx on my sister's machine and the osx download and install thing in the firmware can't install osx from the cloud any more and it's only been 5 years or so!
- digi_owl 10y ago> someone maintains that cloud, every day. Why i did a double take when i ran into the claim of being "serverless" while checking out a web framework. Holy buzzword bingo, Batman...
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoFirst off, DOS has very direct hardware access. This means it works very well in more embedded environements. It also means it's just flat-out fun to hack on for some sorts of people, for much the same reasons that, say, ITS was fun to hack on (although no ITS user would ever admit to liking DOS, obviously) Secondly, FreeDOS is useful for bringing a semi-modern operating system to your 486 or whatever, without it being unbearably slow: breathe some life into the thing. Finally, legacy software. DOS has a massive library of some of the finest software ever conceived: games in particular. Doom, Quake, Duke3D, Wolf3D, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Myst, Lemmings, Dune II, Descent, various Infocom games, and far more that was less widely ported than the above and hard to play nowadays.
- digi_owl 10y agoLemmings originated on the Amiga, iirc. First level on PC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ9CS0KUZvY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ9CS0KUZvY First level on Amiga 500: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZ-zeVJCxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZ-zeVJCxw Anyways, to elaborate a bit on what you stated. It was common back then that games came with driver libraries rather than having them installed on the OS. Effectively each game took over the PC for the duration of play, and if it crashed you reached for the ever so useful reset button. Quake for example had multiple versions. The original one that used software rendering. One that was custom built for 3DFX cards (assets now owned by Nvidia), GLquake that used OpenGL, Quakeworld for playing online (different network code to be less sensitive to latency etc), and the list continued on. Quake 2 had a in-game toggle between 3DFX, PowerVR, OpenGL and software render.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago>Lemmings originated on the Amiga, iirc I think you might be right. I was confused because it was made by DMA Design, who would later rise to prominance on the PC (I know what you're thinking: what could possibly be more prominant than Lemmings? To which I answer that DMA Design is still around: However, they are now known as Rockstar. Yes, that one). >Anyways, to elaborate a bit on what you stated. It was common back then that games came with driver libraries rather than having them installed on the OS. True, although my point was merely that there were many excellent DOS games that haevn't been ported to other systems.
- kijin 10y agoA lot of new PCs in my (highly piratey) country come with FreeDOS pre-installed. You won't see them in retail stores, but they're offered for a significant discount online, even from major brands like Asus and Lenovo. I have taken advantage of these offers several times to avoid buying a Windows license for a computer I intended to run Linux on, or to install a different version and/or language of Windows than the one the manufacturer offered by default. Sometimes I even buy Windows separately at additional cost, just to avoid the bloatware and spyware. I have several theories about why manufacturers choose to do this instead of just leaving the disk unformatted or using a proper user-friendly Linux distro. By having another O/S pre-installed, they can claim that they are giving consumers a choice rather than outright encouraging piracy. But since most people who buy these PCs put pirated Windows on it anyway, they don't want to pre-install anything that they might need to support seriously. This means using a minimal O/S that "just works" but one that nobody is actually going to use as a daily driver. FreeDOS fits that bill, whether the developers like it or not. I'm grateful that it exists.
- dispose13432 10y agoAre they cheaper than the equivalent computers with Windows?
- avhon1 10y agoTypically yes, because the price does not include the cost of a windows license. This article has an illustrative screenshot: http://fossforce.com/2016/12/foss-dos-21st-century-hardware/ http://fossforce.com/2016/12/foss-dos-21st-century-hardware/
- dispose13432 10y agoThat's interesting. I remember that back when you could buy a computer without an OS, it cost more than with Windows.
- kalleboo 10y ago
- epx 10y agoGambling machines are one niche that, last find I checked, still used it a lot.
- naner 10y agoI still use it infrequently for firmware updates for certain hardware that's only delivered as DOS executables. I also needed to deploy such an update to a large number of embedded systems and ended up pxe booting freeDOS (not challenging to setup, but pxe booting DOS seems a little humorous). FreeDOS is a lot nicer to deal with than DOS or DRMK.
- vacri 10y agoI'm not sure if this is "the" DOS used[1], but MS forces a contract on vendors saying that they can't sell a server without an operating system, as basically a way to help force out ^nix (vendors don't want to support a full-blown ^nix, so don't want to ship one). However, FreeDOS is an operating system with extremely limited functionality - there's nothing to support. This gives those vendors an 'out', so they don't lose clients who don't want to pay for MS licenses. [1] I think it's FreeDOS that's an option on servers, but I can't recall. I've been cloud-ey for too long :(
- dispose13432 10y agoWasn't that part of the anti-trust lawsuit?
- digi_owl 10y agoNo, i think that was about them bundling IE with Windows and claiming they were joined at the hip. That said, i think MS since then changed their tactic to offering deep bulk discounts. In particular when the OEMs pre-installed both Windows and Office. This because the margins pr PC had become so thin that the way the OEMs make a profit is to charge third parties like Symantec a pr PC fee on bloatware bundling.
- Aloha 10y agoUsed to perhaps, but no longer. I regularly order machines from dell with no OS on them - its just not available retail.
- psibi 10y agoI occasionally play Dave using it. :-)
- tscs37 10y agoI have it on an super old desktop with even older serial adapters so we can maintain an ancient piece of machinery that nobody has a plan how it works. Additionally, some OEMs will ship PC/Laptops "without OS" which usually means "FreeDOS preinstalled"
- endgame 10y agoMerry 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?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
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- rafowuj 10y agoStay at home mom Kelly Richards from New York after resigning from her full time job managed to average from $6000-$8000 a month ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, http://www.ebiz3.com http://www.ebiz3.com
- rafowuj 10y agoHERE ►ＷＷＷ.ebiz3.ＣＯＭ
- carlosrg 10y agoI'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.
- pavlov 10y agoAn 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/drivers/ https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/HEAD/tree/kernel/trunk... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_interrupt_call https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_interrupt_call
- DHowett 10y agoThis 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 10y agoI think they're just making an ironic comment about how times have changed.
- pavlov 10y agoYes, 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.
- jmspring 10y agoHelpful how? There are problems where access to a DOS command line and ability to run applications is useful.
- dispose13432 10y agoAhh, an OS which never had vendor lock-in, and had multiple independent vendors. That dream died with Windows.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago>"multiple independent vendors" Unless I'm missing something, there weren't multiple vendors for MS-DOS pre-Windows.
- Sanddancer 10y agoThere 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.
- wenc 10y agoThere was also IBM PC DOS, which was essentially a rebranded MS-DOS but later diverged into its own thing, with support for REXX scripting, etc.
- zzalpha 10y agoDon't forget 4DOS. I loved that OS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS
- dguaraglia 10y agoActually, 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 :)
- 10y ago
- fsiefken 10y agoDOS + 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.de/dwnload1.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140202233045/http://www.japheth... 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-5-0-blue-lion/ https://www.arcanoae.com/current-release-timetable-arcaos-5-... http://theoven.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=4883b8169b752f637e3611673a7ce3ea&topic=1336.0 http://theoven.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=4883b8169b752f637e361...
- decaysackparity 10y agoTook the words right out of my mouth, we just became best friends.
- yuhong 10y agoI wonder if anyone still have a copy of the Global EMM Import specification.
- masdijer 10y agosdf
- masdijer 10y agoasd
- rootme 10y agoWho use DOS this days?
- amiga-workbench 10y agoI 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 10y agoYou use physical manuals?
- rocky1138 10y agoThe "why this exists" part of the home page is pure hacker. Kudos!
- kruhft 10y agoIf 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 10y agoDoes 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
- Vesnica 10y agoGlaDOS, where are you?
- innocentoldguy 10y agoI 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).
- rasz_pl 10y ago1.2 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
- savad 10y agohappy Christmas to FreeDos Project
- teamview3 10y agohappy xmax freeDos
- teamview3 10y agoFreeDOS project Merry Christmas
- vram22 10y agoUsed 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_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_stay_resident_pr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick
- vram22 10y agoIf 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 10y agomTCP 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...
- ndimensional 10y agoLooks like an interesting project.
- mysterydip 10y agoFreeDOS 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 10y agoIt amazes me that people on HN have anecdotes for everything.
- rootbear 10y agoI've had similar experiences with embedded PCs. I keep a copy of FreeDOS handy for just such situations.
- suprjami 10y agoFor all people wondering why FreeDOS is important, this is it. Education needs Free Software.
- digi_owl 10y agoIt would be tempting to try a DOS web browser in this day and age.
- UncleSlacky 10y agoYour best bet is probably Arachne: http://www.glennmcc.org/ http://www.glennmcc.org/
- stuaxo 10y agoIs there a changelog somewhere ?
- xianwen 10y agoI 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.
- throw7 10y agoI 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 10y ago>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.