This video was quite the challenge to make despite the simple premise. How do you install FreeDOS on a 5150? After testing, I don't think there is an "Official" way to, so I decided to make one myself.
Grab the files I made for FreeDOS 1.3 here:
archive.org/details/free-dos-...
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This is awesome to see! Thanks for sharing! 👍
You should take this as an opportunity to revise fdimples so that you can only install certain languages and omit 386 programs.
@@OpenGL4ever fdimples won't run on an 8086 anyway. Even on a 386 it runs slower than a pregnant hippo in a mud pit. It has too much overhead.
@@dschoene57 I didn't knew that. In that case a complete rewrite would be a good idea.
@@OpenGL4ever That kind of application simply doesn't run on an asthmatic processor like the 8086 as it reads its info directly from the zip files, and the processor is simply too slow to decompress the files in a reasonable time. On pre-386 systems you'll have to make do with the command line package tools.
@@dschoene57 This also explains why fdimples only knows the packages that are on the inserted CD-ROM (e.g. the bonus CD). A cross-CD search is not possible at all. The problem could be solved differently, with catalog files. One for each CD-ROM. If you put the CD-ROM into the drive and run fdimples, it could create a local copy of the catalog file on the hard drive. This means that when searching for and reinstalling programs, you could search for the corresponding programs before you have to insert the corresponding CD-ROM. In the case of the FreeDOS distribution, one could go even further and store the catalog file for the main CD as well as the bonus CD on the main CD, so that both catalog files can be installed locally for fdimples without the need to insert the BonusCD. And an 8088 would be powerful enough to also handle catalog text files.
Nice job. You did just about everything I would have done, with the exception of removing the command processor from root -- never remove the one from root! :-) Remove it from the DOS directory instead, unless you're going to rewrite COMSPEC as well. Also: Not sure you need to worry about a specific version of ZModem, as Chuck passed away in 2015. FreeDOS definitely needs volunteers, because there's a lot of the OS and distribution that could really use some tightening down.
I miss 'dead trees'. Reading the documentation in a book is so much more pleasurable than squinting at oversized, overly-complicated man pages.
This
Well man pages were not any more helpful when on a piece of paper, they were still the same obtuse and often hard to read collections of arguments and examples. That's just how Unix manuals always were
@@kreuner11 It's much easier to use their manuals when you can see both at once.
Deleting unnecessary files from programs and operating systems WAS a thing back then. People tried stripping down DOS, Windows 3.1 and other applications by a trial and error method even later with hundreds of megabytes of hard disks. Some programs dropped a few "missing file" error messages but if it ran, it was okay :)
Yeah, I remember "bricking" (temporarily, my fathers work friend helped us get the system back running) our IBM PS/1 (model 2011 I believe) DOS install by removing "unnecessary" files - who knew those system files weren't really that unnecessary, LOL :D Still, you really could save some precious space by doing things like this, but that experience kept me away from trying to do it without proper knowledge or a way to get it back running if I removed something necessary - once I learned a bit more I was back at it :)
I remember stripping unused drivers and documentation files out of Windows 3.1 while building a master image for my highschool. I slimmed Windows to a fraction of it's "minimum install size" by manually amputating support for hardware we didnt' have. The final tested *and accepted* install (including all of the curricilum's specified CAD, drawing, animation and office suites) fit on a 80MB harddisc. (decades later) I still haven't forgiven the politically-motivated-[*] who physically destroied it when they shifted blame for their malfunctional-bloated image that deleted features from the applications instead of the 'important Windows files'.
i remember stripping down windows to run in ramdisk on a 486 so it would run faster
For sure, disk space was precious. I once wrote a program to scan for file duplicates (examine files of the same size and see if they were duplicates of the other) to make a report to help decide which copy to remove.
Deleting random stuff is a time honored tradition. I remember reading something about how when Naughty Dog were making Crash Bandicoot, they were just chainsawing out chunks of the PSX libraries to see if it crashed.
This brings back memories of roughly downsizing an early Knoppix Distribution just to use gparted to rollout PCs with windows preinstall images. We basically took a hacksaw and deleted anything that wasn't required, then changed the startup sequence to launch directly into bash console. The XP images barely fit on the DVD but we made it happen and in the end we preinstalled about 9000 clients with it during the project. Yes that's awfully crude but when it's 2004 and you're in a hurry facing a showstopper you make ends meet.
You made a pre-set image with preinstalled stuff, imaged that and put it on the dvd along with gparted to write the image into the pc's by just popping the dvd in?
That brings back memories for me too. I used Knoppix for a year back in the early aughts, even using it as just a boot CD. Every time I had to restart the system, such as for power outages, I had to type a bunch of commands at startup to get it booting back to where I had it configured.
@@lasskinn474 and it was scripted and would detect which hardware type it was to be installed to and selected the correct image for it (we had 3, desktop, nb with onboard and nb with dedicated graphics)... We tried to do the same with norton ghost at first but at the very last moment someone realized that the customer had no license for it and wouldn't pay for one. Quote of customer "here take this ghost of a promo cd from that computer mag, noone will notice!"
@@spitefulwar I remember doing that for customers with laptops in the early 2k's.. Bart-PE built XP images custom made with all the required drivers for the particular machine, and any "special request" software.. (license?.. what's that??.. not my machine.. not my problem).. autorun setup so after hitting "install" all they needed to do was provide a user name and sit back. Of course those same people would then try to run them on different hardware and complain because important things wouldn't work..... I really enjoyed the challenge back in the day.. I was the town's "go to" girl when all the shops failed them. Even the shops were my customers when somebody literally couldn't afford a new motherboard or whatever.. I could pretty much guarantee them a repair enough to "get em going" for a few months until they could save up for the new hardware. One of my old customers is still using a desktop P4 I recapped for them way back in 2006. (using caps from a destroyed P2 of all things).. The bad caps era was great fun, but not many machines from that era survive now.
Back in the days of MSWindows 3.0, I had tried it out and decided it wasn't what I wanted to use, and didn't have the disk space to waste on the installation. But I still wanted to play MSWin Solitaire. So I made a custom 2-floppy (1.2mb) setup of MSWin, replacing the system shell (progman.exe) with sol.exe. I would boot from the first floppy, which would assign half or more of the system memory (don't remember how much) as a disk cache. At some point it would need the second floppy, and would load right into a solitaire game. Your first game through would play VERY slowly, but once it had gone through that first pass, the entire environment would be in disk cache, and would be quite peppy (this was a '386sx). Disk prices have gone down far enough I can keep a VM of MSWin10 on my system (Fedora, of course) for those rare occasions I'd need it.
I've always wondered what the deal was with FreeDOS but I never bothered to do the research, so this was the perfect video for me lol
Absolutely a great username. No questions asked.
Very cool to see. It always struck me as odd that FreeDOS installs in such a non DOS like way, the CD seems to even boot the Linux kernel instead of being self installing. The 2 disk transfer setup is really cool, but I think the 4 disk option was in the sweet spot for being fully self contained. Wondered why FreeDOS was so big and documentation and languages make sense since they only want one distribution and there's no other way to provide local documentation for a download, but it is odd that the install to disk still includes every language, multiple copies of files, and versions of executable for multiple cpu revisions, seems they could really slim that down with prompts in the install process
Makes me wonder how difficult it would be to compile your own distribution of it from source. I don't know what build system they use, but it would definitely be cool to get a self-hosting installer.
The CD does not boot the Linux kernel, but DOES use the SYSLINUX bootloader. All the different boot methods use the SYSLINUX bootloader so they don't have to rewrite the program multiple times to work with any boot method that the CD supports (ElTorito and emufloppy and I think one more)
@@nathanielbarragan882 ----"(ElTorito and emufloppy and I think one more)" romeo..
@@anon_y_mousse I am looking at seeing if i can compile the kernal and command to use a little less ram.
part of that reason is thats its time consuming, and to do the language appropriate installer & test the install is not something a single person can do, which again make it more time consuming. I believe the real reason for the single "package" and not better suited smaller install setups is to _not_ make it too easy for comercial use, which dont contribute to the project. If it was packaged in more convinient was it would have been used on more than just the 1000 odd device models it already has been used on, of which not a single donation has been made, nor contribution to the project - well thats always been my take on it anyway
Pretty cool. I will say that the number of floppy disks could grow and still remain "authentic" because my copy of MS-DOS 6.22 on 360K is on 13 diskettes!
Yeah, it's fine. I still remember buying a game box, and opening it to find 10+ diskettes in there for some of the bigger adventure games. 880K diskettes no less, since it was the Amiga. But it would probably be a good idea for Free-DOS to come with a scripted tool that let's you choose what you want/need in your installation. Very few people will need more than one language, and most people will probably gladly look for documentation on their mobile phone instead of searching for the help texts on their classic computer itself.
I'm sure it's buried deep in my bookmarks folder, but there was an 8086/8088 distribution of FreeDOS I used back in 2010-2014. It was small enough to fit on a single 1.4MB floppy and was generally pretty speedy. Unfortunately, FreeDOS at the time didn't have 100% compatible support for some DOS routines I needed at the time, so I didn't end up using it, but I never thought I'd see someone take up the mantle again. I super appreciate you making this distribution, and I have a 5150 clone next to me that's about to try it out :D
How'd it work?
How did it work?
FreeDOS is not only used by vendors for updating BIOS and firmwares. It has become somewhat of an "standard" to ship laptops without Windows or Linux preinstalled with FreeDOS.
sadly EFI systems will kill that tho, as DOS can only support BIOS.
@@Vlad-1986 It's the other way. DOS and most DOS programs require the BIOS, they won't work without it. So as long as your UEFI firmware doesn't have a BIOS legacy compatibility mode, you're out of luck. And since the Intel Haswell CPU, the Intel CPUs no longer support the A20 Gate.
@@Vlad-1986 Legacy Mode is still a thing
Even as late as just a few years ago, the Dell Optiplex machines work would order came with a FreeDos CDROM instead of Windows installed, since we had a site license for Microsoft software already.
@@Vlad-1986Feh. They just need to use a chain loader with an EFI capable kernel to kickstart the DOS system. It's already long since been a thing.
I have known about FreeDOS since the beginning but I hadn’t been tracking it. I had no idea the install was so large. I would have thought compatibility with classic systems would have stayed important to the project.
nope they only care about money nothing more nothing less.
@@Bewefau money?
@@MurderMostFowl my guess is salt about donations
@@MurderMostFowl yes someone is getting paid for it.
I guess that since FreeDOS development started long after these machines were obsolete but DOS itself was still widely used they never gave much thought about the early PCs and instead chose to leverage contemporary hardware (486, early Pentiums).
Awesome video, and thank you for sharing your work with the community!
amazing set. you really get that 80's home vibe. this feels like a magazine cover for the topic you want to discuss.
this is what we need on youtube, very helpful and informative, not just just filler!
I'll absolutely amazes me at how smart so many of you are on KZhead! See some of the stuff you do and explain on here completely boggles my mind as to how you know and understand it. You are still SO YOUNG and have amassed so much knowledge in this area already. I hope you know and appreciate that!
Thank you for the video, actually helpful with a project I'm working on :)
A pretty cool little package of programming with some odd organizational quirks but the fact that you could edit it down relatively easily is pretty cool!
Thanks! This brings back sweet memories from the eighties when I was first infected with the computer virus. 😊
So impressive! 6:29 I'd like to thank the Patron you mention here. It's always good to get help! I'll hit you up on Discord for a follow-up on this. Excellent work!!!
Excelente trabajo !!! Muy creativo y con una experticia técnica impresionante !!! Desde Caracas, Venezuela.
Could you also give us the option to use the self-contained 4-disk version? I would much rather a longer, simpler process with a self-contained install that feels a lot more like the original OS than this complicated method for a two-disk version.
an xt with a 3.5inch drive can still install the 720k version. It only took me 2 hours.
@@wishusknight3009 That's not bad at all. Definitely feels like a lot was compromised with the install process just because of size.
When I did this for a hotel chain in the 90's I used the Dos from Windows 95 and found it gave the best environment with the most free ram and all the utilities on a 1.4 MB disk to set up the hard drive. I am proud to say it self installed and included the ethernet drivers and the ability to pull down the hotel application to the hard drive. Worked for years on a 1000+ PCs so well worth the effort. Not too sure about the licensing but the PCs did come with Dos 3.x so it was nearly okay, I guess.
okay. this is epic. *listens to the entirety of the 1986 Van Halen album 5150 in celebration*
Really, I barely understand the stuff on here but I just find it interesting taking modernized software revisions and features to run on older systems. I'm always intrigued by older hardware limitations that can be solved with either modern software or hardware solutions.
I once connected a Mac 512Ke using PhoneNet adaptors, Serial to PhoneNet, A Serial to 10BaseT printer adaptor and managed to hook it up to a modern Cable internet connection successfully & do a little emailing and whatnot. Always super fun to get the old working with the new!
Thank you for this from the Tandy 1000 TL!
I freaking love FreeDOS
Thanks for this. I've included your "distribution" with my PC/XT emulator, and it works great. The only issue though is the large amount of RAM usage, unfortunately...
7:39 This is giving me flashbacks from when I used to delete translations and help files to get file sizes down to save space on a 2GB hard drive in an old laptop. I really like new operating systems for vintage computers
Great work.. yes indeed.. we had to do things like this all the time back in the day to make things fit on the minimum number of disks and have space left on the internal small drives. I remember well the battle to get linux installed on my 386 back in the mid 1990's when I managed to get a Pentium 90 from somewhere for my main windows 3.1 work setup.
Nice one! I had been looking about this kind of video for a while ;)
Awesome 👍😎 thanks for this
Many years ago I was following work on a bootable NetHack floppy using Linux. It ended up making such a disk using FreeDOS. Watching this brought back memories of that. A few things I did: The disk made a RAMDrive, and extracted files to it from the disk. On shutdown, save files were then recompressed back onto the disk. I think I may have also used an EXE compressor.
Just ordered an XT ide for my recent PS/2 model 30…. Leve the vídeo…. Suscribed!!! 👏👏👏
Great work!
Thank you for posting on LGR's channel. It help me find yours.
Wow dude that's is amazing! I didn't realize it supported 8086 computers.
Thank you for this video = D
This is awesome!
Back in the early 90s my friend's father used Caldera DR-DOS on their home computer. I vaguely remember there were some compatibility issues with certain games, but they didn't have as many games as I did, and they were mostly edutainment titles at that stage anyway. Last time I tried FreeDOS I found it a bit buggy and difficult to use compared to regular MS-DOS. Granted that was more likely because I wasn't used to doing things the way they're done in FreeDOS. If you're looking for a good RS-232 adapter, I've been using a GearMo "USB RS-232 serial adapter with LED indicators" (model FTDI-LED) for some time. It's nice to see the TX and RX and other indicators blinking, and I haven't had any issues with compatibility at least with any of the Cisco devices I used it with.
Still working as of today, ty!
Way cool ... I will try this out!
Good video. Thank you
Thanks!
I had that same rig back in old days, I was probably the only kid in my town with a PC in bed room.
This a video just down my alley 👍 Immediately subscribed… BR, Per (DK)
The older, stable FreeCOM 0.82pl3 used to support KSSF / VSPAWN for allowing "call /s" to shell out and thus save about 100 kb of conventional RAM. I used that in my old floppy BARE_DOS under 8086tinyplus.
Cool! Interesting wee project, I should dig my old ZX81 out and finally fix it!
What's wrong with it? I must say I prefer the ZX80 though (although with nmi-generator added, for ZX81 mode), because it is built entirely out of standard components that are still made. So no hot "ULA" (gate array), that can go bad and which is hard to find.
@@herrbonk3635 It's just dead to the world, probably the regulator. I've as couple of microdrives i'd like to take a go at first!
Nice cap, i used to have coffee mug with same ibm logo :)
15:02 That is one incredibly colourful laptop.
You are a true MEMMAKER :)
I think you blew my mind with simply "vim for DOS". Seems I need to find that..
Is there any news about the 6150 that you made a video about a long time ago? I would love to see more about that system!
The last I touched *-DOS was circa 1993 so YMMV. I picked up UNIX in 1993 and didn't look back. As I recall MS/PC-DOS 3.3 had three disks. Two were the OS and one was optional on-lilne "help" files that none installed. I also recall one of the DOS's used a compression program (not pkzip) for the distribution. I think they ended in \.ex_ or \.exc . So don't feel bad about an install using compression. To that end: unzip understands spanning volumes. So a install disk just needs COMMAND.COM, the \.SYS file(s) an AUTOEXEC.BAT file, the "sys" command, any other drivers an FDISK, FORMAT.EXE and UNZIP.EXE along with a zip file with part of the "bin" folder . Unzip should prompt you to put in the second disk when needed. Serial ports: You will need a Late 80s to Mid 90s UART to get above 9600 bps. The "newer" UARTS have a buffer in them to cut down the number of interrupts and make it possible to do 19.2Kbps however with the (pk)zip method of spanning multiple disks this may be moot.
Yes, you are on a roll, but ... despite the zip format becoming universal i.e. integrated into Java and windows, there was another file format that has better compression. ( yes, and as much as I hated using it, it did have better compression. ) Its the ARJ format: But that is not all: This is something that was used by people with really small disks. ( I had 2x20MBs, RLLed to 32.5 ) but my friend had 2 10Mb disks, the second of which had a bad area giving him only 15Mb, and he wanted to run DOS 5: What did he do? Executable compression. A program that compressed executables. The problem with this is that you cannot compress something twice... so you either used ARJ, and compressed afterwards, or you compressed first, and used ARJ just to split, and place ( i.e. it put stuff back in its proper directories. ) The UARTs of which you speak is the 16550N. The real ones. Have a 16 byte FIFO First in, first out, that combined with the ZModem protical, allow you to send a character, with only 8 bits, as it streams, and strips the 1 char start, 1 char stop, and does not use parity. Its a smart enough protical to resend packets that have errors. With good UARTs, you can bring the stream rates up to 38,400, and the DTE to DCE rates to 57,600. Necessary when using modems, but not very useful for DTE to DTE. ( The rate change, not the raw speed ). Hardware wise-you can get a 640k backfill card for really cheap. 630k free with DOS 6.22 Exepack is a program to compress and decompress 16-bit DOS executables with EXEPACK, a format for self-extracting executables. ARJ is currently on version 2.86 for MS-DOS and 3.20 for Microsoft Windows and supports 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit Intel architectures. It is unknown what version works with FreeDos. And lastly, the command processor only executes 1 line at a time, so leave your comments in a TXT file, and only have a single line in the beginning with the name, and the version number. My personal recommendation for the install? Have a ram disk that takes up 1/2 the ram, arj the files to the ram disk, then exepack them there, then write to disk or better, exepack them on the host, and then arj/store them, and just unstore & place them. Arj also has options for fastest uncompression, which would speed up the delivery side.
@@joeturner7959 I also preferred ARJ in the early days. Because it was easier to use, the help and program parameters were easier to learn, it offered self-extracting archive files, and supported splitting the archive across multiple disks. The compression rate was also good and the license terms were more free for private usage. Eventually I realized that it's not a good idea to use self-extracting archive files. Because they needed more space, were more susceptible to viruses and could only be run under DOS. That was the time for me to switch to pure archive files. And when the Windows Millennium supported ZIP files out of the box, I switched to ZIP files entirely. Also, I've found that zip files do better with a bitflip, while ARJ dropped out here.
My oldest machine is a Pentium MMX Compaq Armada 7770DMT lol. It originally came with 3GB worth of hdd space but since i didn´t get a drive with it, i put a much newer and bigger 60GB drive inside. Detects it fine, however the BIOS can only see it as a 8GB drive but unofficial DOS 7.1 and windows 9x installers did see the full drive just fine. Now i think i´ll try FreeDOS on it.
You can try Ontrack DDO (Dynamic Drive Overlay) to use large drives in older systems, but it is not compatible with FreeDOS.
@@alexandrecouture2462 Well as said, any OS i tried so far did detect the full drive just fine, no special programs needed. Only the BIOS setup doesn´t recognize the full capacity which is actually based on windows 3.11 installed onto the hdd as it was common for compaq machines from this era. So it´s actually only a overlay that controls the BIOS, not sure what the BIOS will actually see as it´s not accessible by its own
I booted off a USB install on my modern AMD Ryzen computer and plugged in my SD card to a reader. I ran a standard install and targeted the SD card. I put the SD card in an SD to IDE converter and booted my retro PC. Now, my retro PC was not a 5150. I was using one from the socket seven era but I'm sure you could do the same thing with a compact flash card and XTIDE right? After that if I wanted to remove software I just deleted it from the SD card.
Neat.
Informative and detailed discussion of the install of the FreeDOS with the IBM 5150. From the video I see you have a 5150 with dual floppies. During the course of the video, you referred to and showed a C drive. So, pardon my ignorance, but where is your hard drive?
FreeDOS is an excellent system for 386+ computers, but not so good on 8086 PCs as it is quite wasteful in terms of RAM and storage. SvarDOS might have been a better choice for such a machine.
I just re-found Svarog by chance just a few minutes ago and was delighted to see this. It's progressed a lot since I last used it, very cool.
SvarDOS is only a distribution using a FreeDOS kernel. Thus you will not save RAM. And FreeDOS programs are usually much more powerful than their MS-DOS or DR-DOS counterparts. In addition, one should better compare FreeDOS with the last standalone retail MS-DOS and DR-DOS versions, an MS-DOS 6.x or DR-DOS 7.x is also not lightweight for such old 8088 computers.
@@OpenGL4everHere is the amount of available memory reported by MEM on a 8086 PC with 256K of RAM: with SvarDOS: 186K with FreeDOS: 117K Looks like RAM saving to me. Another thing is that FreeDOS installation requires 11x 720K floppies, while SvarDOS fits on 3. Of course, that's because FreeDOS comes with lots of good stuff, but most of these goodies are not so useful on a 4.77 MHz machine.
As the owner of an IBM 5150, I'm loving the look of the desk you have your machine on. Is it something you made yourself, or is it a commercially available item?
The desk the printer is on, is a lot more functional and comfortable. I had one. It was made by Sullivan. The other desk,I think is Ikea, no the closest I can find is a design called a 'Mantis desk'
Managed to get one of those Eye Bee M hats :)
I second the request for the 4-disk version that doesn't require any zmodem transfers.
I guess a great alternative is to have an ethernet card like NE1000 and transfer the files using mTCP - FTP, from Mr Brutmann. There are options for parallel port that works fine like XIRCOM PE2 or PE3 models. The bootable disk could, in this case, have bootable files, FDISK, FORMAT, SYS, Ethernet pocket driver, DHCP, FTPSRV and some small mTCP conf files.
I haven't used freedos since rhe early 2000s but I do remember a version that fit on a single floppy as I was using it on my 486 which had a crashed hard drive. I would boot to freedos from the single floppy and then swap out the floppy to run my software as freedos was already loaded in RAM
I was able to use your disks to install FreeDOS in a virtual IBM 5150 with a 20MB HDD running in MAME. There is some learning curve required for setting up the hard disk CHD image, but once you know how to do it it works well. I may make a video about this sometime soon.
What's the advantage using MAME over VirtualBox or PCem ?
@@stchanx3 He probably didn't know there were better emulators. He could take BOCHS or QEMU, which also run on non-x86 processors such as ARM and can then emulate a Pentium or better, allowing him to use 32-bit protected mode DOS programs.
The fastest way to get the data from FreeDOS to your IBM 5150 system is to use a 8 Bit ISA CD-ROM Controller and a CD-ROM drive. That way you can get the Data directly from the FreeDOS CDs. You will probably need a boot disk though.
You could setup usb v1.1, card and use usb storage to copy. Or throw the drivers for ethernet and a compliant ethernet adapter.
Subtitles at 1:44 says "MS-SOS", is this a special Among Us release? :p
When the DOS is SUS
Z-Modem was the best mode when downloading... it had the first "resume" feature. It was a life saver with downloading large files over dialup.. nothing was worse than trying to download a 10mb+ files and having the download crash at 9.9mb lol
Does Grub2 support dos n all of it's flavorts? As in able to find them when probing... I'd like to add em to grub2 boot menu without doing to much extra bs. 😋
One downside is that the memory utilization for the FreeDOS kernel is something over 100K so if your 5150 has 256K or less that will seriously eat into the memory available to run programs. Compared to DOS 2.x which is I believe in around 20k or 3.x which is 30ish. Otherwise tab completion is on a 5150 is just way cool. :)
Is this with kernel86.sys?
Commander Keen runs out of memory :(
Interesting. So are TRSDOS and LDOS related to MS-DOS and PC-DOS, other than being optional OSs for a specific hardware platform and sharing an acronym? Was the BIOs the differentiating factor of the IBM PC compatible that allowed for so many hardware variations and clones?
TRSDOS and LDOS are related to CPM/80 so they share that heritage but other then that no. What allowed so many clones was the IBM PC was made with off the shelf part except for the BIOS where other machines tended to have more custom parts.
You should check out ELKS sometime, it's neat... def.... not complete... but neat!
I remember I had to recompile the Unzip program because for some reason it required a 32 bit extender
in my case just added an 8bit network card to my 5155 and used mtcp to transfer all software to the hard drive you could only need a single floppy to do the sys c: and the mtcp ftp server. Never need floppys after that.
From FreeDOS to FreeSpaceDOS! :P
this is pretty cool, but kinda surprised at how they do things, specifically how there's the bloat of duplicate programs on the slimmed floppy version (the installer should be able to copy it, itself, on the final system), and how it's not even modular, like, if documentation takes this much space, then I'd expect them to specifically have it on a separate add-on disk (probably along the other install disks, but all on one disk, and prompt whether to install), although some other stuff like AMB support and package management still makes sense to ship by default, since pretty much everyone using it normally, would probably have big enough floppies, and AMB makes a great format to keep interactive text, such as documentation, or converted webpages such as wikipedia, or maybe even CYOA games
14:47: Perhaps it's worth reporting the fact that paths are hardcoded, and that FORMAT and SYS look for redundant copies as a bug? The trouble is, DOS doesn't really have an _ln_ command, at least not by default, for well-known versions of DOS I'm familiar with. (I did wonder if it might have been possible to JOIN that /root folder back to A: or whatever the drive letter is, but I haven't tried this and I'm not sure this would work.)
alias?
@@mycosys Interesting. Apparently that's a FreeDOS extension command. Does this work for providing a new path and not just another command name?
you could have used the included GZIP to squash more stuff onto the floppy's in the same way MS used CAB, but I dont know that it would have been any quicker. At least this way you have a bootable 360k floppy with FDISK, with enough BIN/tools to make complex .BAT files (like the installer) which is more than enough for most use cases. You could provide an optional 3 & 4 th disk as mentioned by other and GZIP those, as an alternate to the ZMODEM method. As far as text editors go, I suggest the Bisqwit version of JOE, which has specific additions for screen/stream capture and playback editing .. cheers for your good work and making the results available
GZIP requires 32 bit protected mode and thus a 386 CPU. It will not run on a 16 bit 8088 processor.
@@OpenGL4ever the current binary is (possibly) built for 32bit protected mode, but GZIP itself is available on MSX (Z80) which is 8bit CPU and AtariST (68000) which is 16bit CPU - so I can't see the problem
@@paulwratt In this case you might be right. I just took a quick look at the source code and it appears to be C code. So it might also be possible to compile it for 16 bit x86 CPUs. This assumes, however, that no inline assembler instructions are included that use instructions from the 386 or later. I didn't look after that.
My first thought was to use a serial cable to another computer that has internet capability. But for sure delete all docs and other extras
Is there something like cruncher for 8bit machines or UPX that could be used for some of this files? Software that make compressed and self-extracting executables*
The open source version of ARJ archiver supports 16bit DOS and has a self extracting mode, though it would seem to be to be better to just include the decompressor and run it in the autoexec.bat for all files
Yes, but even LZ4/LZO would be excruciatingly slow on these machines.
I have an IBM Model 30 286 that I'd love to get this working on.
Beautiful work. Now, rewriting in 100% assembly language might get it even smaller. 😁
Modern compilers do much better job at assembly generation than humans.
This was fascinating You got a like and subscribe for me
If you need a faster way to transfer files you could try using Laplink. It's pretty fast when you use the printer port. Back in the early 90's I used it before I got a network card.
Same here. Had a laplink cable first and then bought an ISA Ethernet NIC for my 486DX.
About the 9600 baud limitation : I had to suffer it when transferring from my 8088 to my 386 at the time, but when I got a Pentium 75 and wanted to sell the 8088 I tried a piece of software that ran the 'server' component on the 8088 and made the Pentium the client. And then I could hit 115200 bauds. It might have been theoretical, but transfer speed was more than 6 times faster (I did try copying to and from a RAM disk and it was faster still, so I guess it was a floppy drive bottleneck or an I/O one) and I wasn't likely to make it faster, so I trudged on at 10Kb/s.
It had a name, and the name was actually the name of the cable ... Laplink which became interlink.
this is how i transfered files to my cpm, just kermit, and a cp/m sys gen'd disk, then used tera term on an xp machine, i could get up to 19k baud with the kaypro 2x being only a 4mhz machine
FreeDOS' FAT32 support is "sweet". The "best" non-HDD upgrade for a 2 floppy drive 8088 PC is a V20 CPU chip. Superior block data transfer performance matters. Early Norton Utilities showed a silly performance gain, because of block data transfer bias. The CMOS V20 helped in a Compaq Model 1, where the 2/3 reduction of CPU power usage truly mattered. Every last mW. mattered.
I tried FreeDOS but the first thing I tried, EDIT, had bugs in simple features. (Can’t remember the specifics right now.) so I’m not sure if there’s any benefit over the DOS 5.0 I currently have on my 5150.
Does anyone recognize the card he brings up @ 0:39? I know he said there'd be a video on it but I'm curious.
18:19 Which vim did you end up using on your 5150 ? The one bundled with FreeDOS 1.3 requires 80386 instructions. I'm currently working on adapting your distro on my Book8088 :)
You should try installing ELKS, the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset. It should run on a PC-5150 just fine.
Which VM host software are you using to run DOS? Oh, PCEM?
That EGA folder probably contains the fonts usable on an EGA graphics card and enable different code pages to display
Wow
Is there any Issues with the 8088 running the 8086 functions?
thiiiiinkjet. yessssss.
Hmm, did you use himem.exe or the tools from the "umbpci" package to gain more free memory?🤓😁
8086 doesn't support any kind of memory expansion except the EMS hardware.
5:33 I thought something went wrong with the video. but you have the same desktop wallpaper I have
why I watched this to the end ?! :)