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LGR - Installing MS-DOS on a 2017 PC

🕑 Added 2017-10-01 23:45:01 +0000 UTC

Comments

Hamid

Amazing! Brings back a lot of memories.

Gary Leigh

I really appreciate just how easy and reliable things are nowadays for setting things up compared to the enormous amount of work that went into things back in the day. These videos highlight that nicely. As always, thanks for such a thought provoking video.

The 8-Bit Guy

Sorry, I'm late watching this. Fun episode. I'm not surprised by any of the results other than the green tint issue. The sound issue is a given and yeah, there's not a good work around at all for that.

Teemu Pekkanen

It seems that High Definition Audio integrated sound can be used in real MS-DOS 6.22. I was able to run a Windows version of a demo called Heaven/ by using a HX DOS Extender 2.17 and 2.17+. <a href="http://sound-dos.ucoz.ru/load/new_hxdos_extender_2_17/1-1-0-8" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://sound-dos.ucoz.ru/load/new_hxdos_extender_2_17/1-1-0-8</a> <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/hx-dos/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://sourceforge.net/projects/hx-dos/</a> <a href="http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5</a>

Norville8

There is no better reason to do it then "I can" Plus it is fun to see my 1986 Software run so fast I can not play it. The see just how many CPU cycles you have to eat up to play it. Still Wordstar and 123 just work. DTK 8088 10MHz runs them too. Have you used FreeDOS? I just got it on a TCP/IP Network. and setup a network printer HP 9050 and share on a Domain server 2003 . Norton Commander sees the share and copies to and fro just fine.

Ezydenias

damn that reminds me I still haven't installed a pc speaker. I will be so pissed next time something fails on me!. Which also means yippie I now have my pc for over a year without any problems at all, at least none with black screens.

We learned nothing. Absolutely nothing. Thank you for it.

Peter Metzger

"This is a pointless project, and I hope that you enjoyed watching." Hope fulfilled, LGR... hope fulfilled.

should have tried CPM/86 and xenix

Joseph Coco

I've heard my Ryzen 7 1800X won't run DOS because of some instruction set goof. I should probably update the firmware, in case I decide to install FreeDOS one day :)

Pow3rh0use

2/10, can't run Duke Nukem 3D.

Pow3rh0use

You're on a roll LGR. Are you going on vacation again?

More likely we'll get Skyrim ported to MS-DOS!

Jonathan Patterson

Dude! Your friend's computer is going to be famous now! You should charge extra for that.

Steven Zakulec

Does anything change if you switch on BIOS support as a CSM module? (It might be instead of EFI only boot mode, EFI+ Legacy or EFI+BIOS extensions?

floverSaeu09

Lolz :D We should have some MS-DOS game ported to the Switch

Bastien Nocera

Yay FreeDOS!

moosemaimer

Was 6.22 Y2K compliant, because that 9/30/17 date is looking a few digits short!

Purple Tentacle

"There is no reason to do this. That is why I did this." can pretty much be added to any LGR videos, and that's why we watch.

LGR

Interesting. It also stuttered in FreeDOS, so I would assume that doesn't utilize the CPU any differently?

LGR

Interesting! I wonder if it has to do with this particular underlying architecture itself then.

LGR

Conversely, I too am happy I'm not the only one mad enough to try this :) Interesting results you had with the sound cards!

LGR

Haha, yep. Legacy support for garbage color reproduction to the bitter end.

LGR

Aye, there's a definite shelf life to old hardware, although some is more robust than others and I imagine we'll have certain old x86 machines for decades to come

LGR

Well dang. Thanks for the insights!

LGR

Excellent!

LGR

It booted FreeDOS with no changes, so I assume it handles things a bit differently if that's the case

bet it wouldn't boot because the HDD was in AHCI mode instead of Legacy or had the BIOS configured UEFI where is looking for a GPT partitioned drive instead of MBR. DOS will boot from SATA drives as long as the mobo is configured to boot from MBR so would give that a try just for fun.

JF Caron

Well that tickled my fancy!

Kris Asick

These results don't really surprise me. Support for basic video modes like text mode are still around simply because POST screens and BIOS setup screens still use them and operating systems still need to be able to display stuff without proper video drivers loaded. Also, the stuttering with Jazz Jackrabbit may not have been a Hz difference: You were using a Samsung monitor, most of which (including mine) DO unofficially support 70 Hz signals, even though they're technically out of spec. I would be more inclined to say it was IRQ related, since modern hardware is set up to do interrupts a bit differently and since DOS can only use a single core on that CPU in there.

Crysis, phfft. Will it run Duke Nukem 3d is going to be my becnhmark from now on.

OverSoft

DOSBox has the same problems with Duke3D on my Threadripper PC. Noticed when using my "new" Roland SC-88 Pro to try out different MIDI games.

Garoninja

I wonder if using an Intel CPU and chipset would yield a better results? All DOS machines should be 4+ core systems running at 4ghz right?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA, so I'm not the only one mad enough to try this! I knew Clint would be able to get it working somehow >8D I have a working DOS 7.1 install in my main PC since 2015 (Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge CPU, MSI Z77A-G43 motherboard, 8 gig DDR3-800 ram, NVIDIA GeForce GT640). I did cheat to get it up and running - used a boot floppy image from my Win98SE retro PC to setup a bootable 2 gig USB thumb drive; took me a couple of months and quite a bit of trial and error, but once I got everything dialed in it ran as well as it could ^^. Since the MSI board has PCI slots I tested a number of PCI sound cards to try and get sound in DOS; none worked, save for one - a generic ESS Solo-1. The results were awful though, digital sound was very scratchy and had low volume while the FM synth had wrong instruments and would skip notes unexpectedly (this same ESS card worked fine in my Win98SE retro PC); it just wasn't worth the effort :/ . CGA/EGA games do look terrible, while SVGA is mostly unplayable; one game that does work well at 640x480 is Descent. No VESA drivers will work either, they're too old to recognize current video hardware. I do give this video a big thumbs up just for trying and succeeding (for the most part). Nice going Clint. Now to boot up that thumb drive and play some more Doom - with glorious PC Speaker sound ^^'

RetroSwim

Looks like on top of the "mashed peas" problem, it's not correcting the "dark yellow" colour to brown as per IBM's spec. Fascinating how far beyond 1982 that kludge continued to be implemented!

Joon Choi

So I guess we're all gonna have to source old motherboards, 486 processors, soundblasters, etc. if we want to build a working retro gaming PC. I know they're still relatively plentiful now, but it's going to be sad when the retro components all start dying off and DOSBOX will be the only option left.

Alyxx the Rat

Always wanted to do this myself. Interesting to see someone actually attempt it.

Jeff DeWitt

You had a couple of good reasons for doing this, one is just plain curiosity, the other is you need to make interesting videos to keep us coming back, and you succeeded admirably on both counts! I've wondered about this myself and it was really interesting to see what happened, and to see those old DOS install screens again, it's been a long time. Thanks for another great video!

It also just occurred to me that maybe due to deadlines they were only able to get minimally functional code for the VESA BIOS. It also reminds me of the weirdly flawed "reflective water" effect they implemented in the alpha version of Duke Nukem that's floating around there (makes reflective water surfaces by vertically mirroring the pixels above the surface of the water). It works OK in 320x200 mode, but any more where VGA "mode x" is involved breaks it.

The reason MS-DOS itself works so well even on modern hardware, as opposed to Windows 95, is because it sticks to BIOS calls instead of trying to talk to all the hardware itself. BIOSes these days can map the A: drive to anything from an actual floppy disk, to a USB floppy, and the C: drive can be a USB pen drive. Just don't remove the USB device while MS-DOS is running or it will lose track of it until you reboot. MS-DOS up until Windows 95 OSR2 have always had a 2GB limit per partition, and a 8.4GB overall limit for the hard drive. I have old 386 to Pentium III systems I've built for testing DOSLIB and they are all configured to boot off a CF IDE adapter with a 4GB CF card. Anything older than about 1993 needs MS-DOS constrained to the first 504MB because old BIOSes don't support the geometry translation that allowed larger drives. PC speakers have been an afterthought since about 5 years ago. Mine had the pin header for it but they didn't even bother to ship the piezoelectric beeper to attach to it. I wouldn't expect EGA/VGA emulation to be perfect these days either. These days it's only there to be "good enough" to install Windows, that's it. Hardware tricks from old games might not work anymore though Intel seems to maintain excellent VGA compatibility still. Fun fact, another legacy feature to disappear soon is the A20 gate. Intel boards already have an option in the BIOS to set whether it should even bother emulating it. Another one that's disappeared is any attempt to emulate ISA DMA channels. They're not there anymore. Not even for the floppy controller, which disappeared around 2008. I've noticed writing DOSLIB that modern motherboards seem to have CPU heavy timer interrupts every 0.5 to 5 seconds which may explain Jazz Jackrabbit. It's most noticeable when doing time-sensitive things like VGA "raster" effects per scanline. I'm betting Duke Nukem 3D is probably expecting the VESA BIOS to do "page flipping" or double buffering in a way that the VGA BIOS is not doing right, or is doing too fast. Modern sound cards (in fact anything since 2001) has not emulated Sound Blaster I/O ports AT ALL. They don't put anything at I/O ports 220-22Fh where Sound Blaster is expected to exist. As a DOS and Linux enthusiast I enjoyed this fun little test. One more fun fact: Modern systems don't even had an IDE controller anymore. It's all SATA. But, Intel chipsets do have the ability to take SATA and fake an IDE controller from the BIOS with it. So if an IDE controller appears in PCI enumeration, it's fake, your BIOS is faking it, unless of course you bought a PCI-e card to add an IDE controller.

Blair Harrison

i seem to recall some updated vesa shim drivers from the early 00s or late 90s , univbe and the like though these may only have been working for some early cards.. some examples here - <a href="https://dosdriver.de/graph.php" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://dosdriver.de/graph.php</a> - not sure if any of those would do any good on a 980 though somehow :)

J.R. Williams

FreeDOS is fertile ground for shenanigans.

Retail Archaeology

Rich from ReviewTechUSA is going to have kittens when he sees this video 😁

Foone Turing

Very cool! One sort of similar thing I've wanted to do a for a while, is write a little "hello world" program on a IBM PC 5150, then copy it forward through every single DOS and windows version. cause in theory you could go from DOS 1.0 right up to windows 10 (32bit, at least) and still run the very same program. That's some serious backwards compatibility!

Tore Svendsen

If you want to go super convoluted you can use PCI to PCI-E adapters and use a hypervisor like KVM to pass through to a VM and use actual soundcards and graphics cards in a virtual machine.