So here's an oddball question....how new can a PC be and still have DOS run?

[mariushm]

1 minute ago, Beerzerker said:

I do recall ME being the first (And last) 9X OS that used FAT32, all the others before were FAT16 or older.
 

No, Windows 95 OSR 2 supported FAT32.   Well, to be exact OSR 2.1 but that was sold/available as OSR 2  ( version 4.03.1212-1214 (4.00.950B) )

Windows 98 supported FAT32 by default.

 

There were some limitations, like maximum 16 KB cluster size on Windows 95, basically limiting you to a maximum 32 GB partition on Windows 95 but back then you were lucky to have a 2 GB drive. I bought my first computer (K6-2 333 Mhz with 32 MB SD-RAM) with a 4.3 GB Maxtor and got Windows 98 SE which was the latest then.

 

On systems of that time, there were some other BIOS limitations that could mess you up ... a few could not work with drives bigger than 8.5 GB (due to 1024 cylinders x 256 heads x 63 sectors/track calculations) , even older bioses were limited to 2.1 GB due to using only 12 bits to calculate things. Then there was the most common 137 GB limit due to ATA (ide) limitations, the workaround was adding support for ATA-6 protocol which used 48 bits instead of 28 bits to report capacity.

 

See Large Disk HOWTO: History of BIOS and IDE limits

[Beerzerker]

Note I said "I recall" and memory of that after all these years can be flakey - Like me.

Tracked down the skinny on FAT stuff and here it is: File Allocation Table - Wikipedia
 

[darknessblade]

this might also be a solution

 

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, darknessblade said:

this might also be a solution

 

huh, thats interesting , i hope you can plug in floppy / cdrom drives though (idk DOS games only came on floppies, aka the "diskette" i guess?)

 

Also no battery seems like an oversight… but otherwise its really interesting… probably until i see the price! until i find out that i have to build everything from scratch lol… 

 

 

 

Quote from the "project site":

 

"This has no 3d acceleration at all. It can do DOS games, and 2d windows games. If I understand correctly, it runs games similar to a pentium 1 PC."

 

This is also a typical incorrect "myth", sadly.  My Pentium 1 PC has no GPU, outside a tiny AMD chip on the motherboard and it plays 3D windows games just fine! 

 

 

 

[ApolloX75]

Just going to weigh in on this real quick in regards to sound and video. Older SB16 compatible PCI sound cards are stupidly easy and cheap to find. I literally have a bag of them. They get tossed around like lead weights all over the place and are still common in school systems. You can go as far as I think the Audigy series and you'll be ok with compatibility. Anything after the X-Fi series gets a bit more muddied IIRC.

 

Video is a bit of a mixed bag but old Matrox PCI cards and ATi Rage (2C, 128, etc) can be found everywhere. Even TNT and TNT2 cards can be found if you know where to look.

 

If you want the simple and easy route that has next to full compatibility then get a Core2 system with a motherboard that has all integrated hardware (G series in particular). Most if not all of those sound solutions from then were SB16 and lower compatible. Old nForce2 Socket A boards and chips are easy to get too, same with Socket 370 Celeron/P3 and SDRAM can be found easily if needed, DDR more so.

 

Personally stay away from anything older than Socket A. Too much trouble if you ask me. I have a lot of 370 and Slot 1 hardware and getting it to even POST is a royal pain in the ass now. Plus if you get a good enough Socket A board you can have SATA with full two channel PATA and a floppy connector in a relatively robust package.

 

Also anything using EDO ram = Stay away.

 

That's my two cents on the subject, I stopped playing with DOS a couple years ago as I had enough of it when I was growing up and the novelty has worn off. That and most of my floppy drives have kicked the bucket now.

[Bitter]

Be aware that some DOS programs will not run on CPU's over a certain clock speed

On 1/26/2022 at 3:11 AM, Beerzerker said:

I do recall ME being the first (And last) 9X OS that used FAT32, all the others before were FAT16 or older.

XP could use it too if you wanted but 9X OS's themselves were done when XP came along.
Win 2000 was the first to use the NTFS file system that's commonly seen now.

Pretty sure 98 or 98SE used Fat32. Wikipedia says 95 OSR2 was the introduction but I think most people didn't really take advantage till 98 came along.

[whm1974]

If you have old 3.5" Disks that still work, you can buy USB Floppy drives if you to see what is on them. Or put FreeDOS on them to boot really old systems.

[8tg]

A lot of hardware can natively run some form of DOS, freeDOS will run on basically anything, though as others have mentioned it doesn’t always run particularly well.

 

Native MSDOS can theoretically run on a lot of hardware well into modernity but you start losing compatibility with other hardware that wasn’t a thing for MSDOS and doesn’t hold any backwards compatible firmware, such as modern audio chipsets, USB in general, pci express, sata, etc.

Best natively running hardware with zero issues is usually early Pentium M hardware. The Pentium M is just more P6/i686 hardware, onboard audio of the time has soundblaster compatibility, IDE/ATA, pci and agp, etc. You could rub MSDOS natively on something like a Thinkpad T40 without issue.

 

[Error 52]

This makes me wonder about the potential of a self-contained OS that just ran DOSBox-X and nothing else. So it'd still have those retro vibes of a DOS computer but would be able to have support for modern drivers and all that jazz.

[Beerzerker]

21 hours ago, Bitter said:

Be aware that some DOS programs will not run on CPU's over a certain clock speed

Pretty sure 98 or 98SE used Fat32. Wikipedia says 95 OSR2 was the introduction but I think most people didn't really take advantage till 98 came along.

I believe you could be right about 98/98SE being able to use it, not so sure about 95... But then again....
It's been years since I've even ran a system based on it but still can if I want. Have the hardware, the discs and all else I'd need to set something up based on any of these operating systems.
Maybe I just need to do it again one day.