Otherwise, when the MS-DOS setup screen appears after computer starts, press the F3 key two or more times to exit from the setup. MS-DOS will re-check the configuration. Continue to setup and format the drive using Fat Once finished you will be asked to confirm your country and keyboard settings. Use arrow keys to highlight what needs changed and hit enter, you can then select a different option to install.
Less free memory in the lower KB range, and having to tune available memory by selectively loading drivers high. Wikipedia: Timeline of DOS operating systems. Getting these image files is outside the scope of this guide. There are various limitations that DOS imposes that are dependant on the version. A few milestones:. MS-DOS 6. Removed some features such as real-mode support, although there are patches to re-enable some of these features.
This uses an extra few KB of conventional memory, but has resulted in less random application crashes. Now that I'm using boot menus as described below to re-configure my system as necessary for memory hungry games, I can afford to give up a few KB of RAM here, so the aggressive settings aren't really worth it.
SmartDrive is a bit more complicated. I recommend reading the SmartDrive help page for more details, but the short version is that the above command instructs SmartDrive to always use 4 MB of extended memory for cache, use a read-ahead buffer size of 64 KB, use an element size of 8 KB, and disable support for caching CD-ROM drives.
MS-DOS 6. This is handy because it let's you easily change system settings by rebooting and choosing the new configuration rather than modifying config. This generally isn't really needed, but it can be useful on a system with multiple games loaded to easily switch between sometimes configurations needed by each different game, eliminating the need for bootdisks and hand-editing each time you want to play a different game.
The DOS 6. SYS Menu's for Dummies guide explains how boot menus work pretty well, and includes example config. For a much more complicated example probably unnecessarily so , I'm providing my latest config. Few notes about this:.
Finally, for the curious, you can also obtain my games. It's fairly basic, but does show how you can prompt for basic user input and take action based on that input from a pure MS-DOS system, so it might be handy as a reference if you're not sure how to do that. With that I think we're finally! I hope this inspires a few folks to tinker a bit with some of their old hardware, or at least fire up a DOS session under VirtualBox or something, and experience either anew or for the first time the joy of getting MS-DOS configured just right for whatever your needs might be.
Breadcrumb Home Tips and Tricks. That's a very valid question, to which there are a few answers: Setting up a fully working DOS system will give you great appreciation for how far computing has come.
For old-timers, it will be a walk down memory lane; for youngsters who've never used nor even seen DOS before, it should be quite an eye-opening experience to experience first hand both how primitive DOS was and yet how capable it could be. DOSBox does an amazing job of supporting DOS games on modern platforms, but for perfect accuracy, including the full memory management experience which can be a game unto itself , a real DOS system can't be beat.
This makes sense as MS-DOS predates the web as we know it today, but I don't want knowledge of this system to be lost to time. I did a significant amount of research for this project, and I want to document and share what I've discovered and re-learned for future reference. Perhaps most importantly, why not? This project was inspired by a previous project to resurrect my old Packard Bell , my first computer that, not coincidentally, ran MS-DOS 6.
Rebuilding and enhancing it from a hardware perspective was a fun experience, and now I'm doing the same from a software perspective.
Prerequisites Old hardware - if it has ISA slots you're probably good to go; anything newer may require some extra work, but it should still be possible to get at least a basic working system installed.
Alternatively, you should be able to get this up and running in a virtual machine with VirtualBox or VMware Player , but as with the note about FreeDOS above I'm primarily interested in an authentic experience for this project, which is what's documented here. If possible, I suggest using or tracking down any original installation media you may have had in my case, I was able to pull the original MS-DOS 6.
If you don't have access to any legit copies and don't want to go the eBay route, you can find a copy online easily enough I recommend the WinWorld Software Library. I don't generally condone piracy, but given this is twenty year old software that's no longer commercially available, I see no harm at all here. Part of the experience here is the journey itself, so if you get immediately frustrated at any given setback you will not enjoy this project.
Basic CLI experience is also expected; I hope to provide enough guidance to get you through this project without the need for too much prior experience , but I have to assume you have at least a basic familiarity with the command line.
Return to top Preparation Relevant Software: RawWrite for Windows - Unless you have physical installation media, you'll need to write the floppy disk images to real diskettes. RawWrite is a simple way to do this in Windows. Set the options for date, time, country and keyboard layout as appropriate, then choose "The settings are correct" to continue. Press Enter to continue. Switch disks twice when prompted, and reboot to complete installation After rebooting, you'll be in a fresh, and very basic, DOS environment.
To workaround, I suggest the following: Download and unpack stepup. Both interfaces are quite similar, but GUI mode can be configured to run at a much higher resolution. Try dosshell. The program list in the bottom pane seems like the most interesting part to me. In addition to customizing it through the GUI, you can also edit dosshell.
Like I said, if you're willing to invest a little time in this, it could probably be tricked out pretty nicely. Running doskey -? Pedit Copy peditlgt. If you wish to have access to a spell checker and thesaurus, copy the larger pedit.
This will let you launch Pedit by simply typing edit , making it effectively replace the built-in DOS editor. Configure Pedit by running edit , hitting Esc if prompted to open a file, and entering Alt-F1. I like the following non-default settings: Editor Style - 2. Other included binaries simply provide extra functionality not required for Zip extraction. Configuration Now that we have a good editor and input processor installed, it's time to configure DOS itself.
You can also refer to Microsoft's list of applications that require SETVER I recommend rebooting at this point to let the new configuration take effect.
Get watb. Crynwr provides an alternative packet driver that's half the size 3 KB vs. If you're only interested in packet driver applications, this is a nice option. Kingston EtheRx KNE20T - Kingston NIC driver; this can no longer be obtained from any official site, so the website linked here is the best current option I've verified against multiple sources that it's a copy of the original QStart 1. Network Options Now it's time to finally configure networking.
In brief, there are two types of drivers we're going to install: NDIS - the newer device driver interface co-developed by Microsoft, with somewhat more features and capabilities at the expense of more bugs and significantly more memory usage. This file can be manually unpacked, but it's probably easiest to use QStart to unpack them for you: Run qstart. If you made configuration changes especially for the PnP mode , you may want to restart to ensure those changes take effect. However, you can almost certainly find a newer driver than what's included with MS-Client, so I recommend choosing "Network adapter not shown on the list below" to use use your downloaded driver instead.
Enter the username you will use to login to this computer this is primarily for authenticating against server shares to map drives Choose Change Names Edit your hostname, workgroup, and domain name as appropriate. The only reason you should need to use the Full Redirector is if you plan on authenticating against an NT domain controller. You can also choose to not run the network client automatically, but we can disable MS-Client from autostarting at any time after installation, so it's easier to let MS-Client configure the startup options itself.
They can be changed later if desired. Select "The listed options are correct" to return Choose Change Network Configuration This option window is a bit difficult to work with. You generally should not need to modify this unless you have more than one NIC. This generally shouldn't be needed, though.
When finished, select "Network configuration is correct" to return Return to main configuration menu, and choose "The listed options are correct" to continue installation When prompted for the OEM Driver Disk, specify the path to MS-Client Disk 2, or just press Enter if all files were copied to a common directory Press F3 to exit setup without rebooting A bug in the MS-Client installer prevents a file necessary for Windows 3.
Reboot load the network drivers. Finally, make sure you can ping your gateway's IP address this can be found in the ipconfig output : ping You can verify DNS is working properly with ping again: ping www. Two additional notes: The el90x. You must change this to point to the NDIS driver for your hardware. Order is important: be sure to leave the lines in the order I have listed above.
We also need to edit autoexec. To test, try the following: pingw www. Network Applications It's time install a few essential network applications.
Installation is pretty simple; just copy and rename the following files as suggested: copy scp2d I also recommend renaming ls. Edit hosts, comment out everything currently in there, then define your NFS server as: aaa. Reboot here if using NDIS before continuing. As an example of how to do this, say you want to SSH to another system while you have an NFS share mounted; you can do this by calling the following additional commands before and after SSH: xfstool pktdrv stop ssh username hostname xfstool pktdrv restart While in the "stopped" state, your mounted shares will still exist but will not be accessible.
Mouse Driver Next we'll install a mouse driver. Sound Card Driver Next up is sound. Run install. CTCM is pretty easy and worked on the first try. Verify the suggested settings are sensible and hit Enter to continue. Again, verify the suggested settings are sensible and hit Enter to continue. Make note of the Audio Device settings you can review this later, if necessary and hit Enter Hit Enter to make the config file changes, then Enter again to complete installation We'll need to reboot to activate the sound card, so do that now.
Return to top System Optimization At this point it's time to do some configuration cleanup and memory optimization.
For reference, here's my config. Most of this has been covered previously, but there are a few new items: emm By default, it'll use all available extended memory, up to 32 MB. This isn't needed unless a specific program requires it, but in my case I'm using it to increase the number of rows displayed on screen and enable my custom shell prompt see below. This isn't especially necessary, but enabling it makes the my BIOS power management settings actually work put monitor to sleep and spin down the hard drive after 10 minutes.
You can run help power. You generally should not change this. Each should generally be set as low as possible to reduce memory, without going too low as to adversely affect your system.
I find the settings above provide a good balance for my system. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Ms-Dos Version 7. EMBED for wordpress.
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