MS-DOS [Retro-PC series]

Microsoft via Wikipedia

Last time I talked about FAT32 and came to the conclusion that my options for DOS in my Retro-PC are MS-DOS 7.1, FreeDOS or Windows 98 Second Edition (in MS-DOS mode).

MS-DOS 7.1 ISO is an unofficial DOS release bundled with an installer “wizard” and configs to get you started. Good info about MS-DOS 7.1 is a bit hard to find, but you can still download via some torrents or here. Microsoft never released something called MS-DOS 7.1.

If you want not only FAT32 but also decent support for recent hardware, FreeDOS is probably the way to go. It should be very compatible with games, but the lack of support for some Windows versions indicates that this is not entirely compatible with the proprietary DOS created by Microsoft. The history of FreeDOS reaches to the year 1994 (after Microsoft announced discontinued support for MS-DOS), but it still has a strong user base and community backing it up, and new drivers/packages are being actively developed.

The third alternative getting an authentic MS-DOS version with native FAT32 support is to install Windows 98SE (or Windows ME). With this option, you will get both MS-DOS and Windows on a single install. However, to login into a DOS prompt, you might end up having an annoying “dual-dual boot” procedure – you first select Windows 98/ME in the first boot menu (over Windows XP, Linux or other operating systems you have), and then choose MS-DOS only mode from Windows boot menu. Of course, nothing stops you installing two separate Windows installation, then removing Windows binaries from the one you want to call “MS-DOS”, and finally setting up these two systems to your boot manager.

As I probably have mentioned many times earlier, the easy way to old games is not to install DOS at all and go with DOSBox instead. For my Retro-PC project, I wanted to install MS-DOS 6.22 for best authenticity but finally opted in for using MS-DOS 7.1 ISO as a compromise between authenticity and efficient partition management in a multi-boot environment.

What about Windows? Let’s think of that in my next post.