💾 Archived View for kg4vma.duckdns.org › gemfeed › 2023 › 2023-08-01-tinkering-with-freedos.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:26:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
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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. 🤞
Tags: #DOS, #FreeDOS