For the past couple of days I’ve been playing with FreeDOS–trying to get it to behave with a couple of different modern-ish computers. Actually it’s been more like a week or so, but, meh. It’s been fun getting things to work, but I’ve discovered that the computers I’m playing with are really at an odd age where they’re a little too new for FreeDOS, but not new enough for anything else, other than the pre-installed OSes and almost any flavor of Linux. The computers being new enough to still get around using Linux is awesome and all, but I really want to have a DOS machine. My results have been mixed. The best memory handling and such coming out of running FreeDOS off a USB stick on the XP laptop–or motherboard–I wrote about a few posts ago. The best overall performance–counting things like networking, graphics, and audio have come from having it installed on an old thin-client that originally had embedded Win7. Unfortunately, neither has a BIOS doing what I would like, nor do they have PS/2 connections–so playing with USB has proven impossible for now, as both controllers go to “legacy mode” in order to run a keyboard, and I haven’t found a way for FreeDOS to steal the controllers back–which would be even more fun to try on the XP machine, as I’d have to figure out how to regain control of the thumb-drive.
As for that thumb-drive thing, if I’d gotten to where I could steal the controller from the BIOS, the solution would’ve been something like loading FreeDOS, creating a ram-drive to toss the drivers and kernel into, switching to the ram-drive, steal the host, then switch back to the drive. So, yeah, already thought that out; but it didn’t matter as I couldn’t even get that far.
Sigh.
Anyway. Just wanted to post a note about my latest tinkering. Meanwhile, I’ve discovered a few awesome little DOS programs that I really want to play with on the regular instead of just in this haphazard trial and error mess.
I dunno.
I hope to come back soon with a story of successfully getting a more appropriate machine running DOS. 🤞
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