Anyone actually run DOS games on modern hardware lately?

[SimicEngineer]

On a lark, I recently rigged something up with PXE boot and MEMDISK (a SYSLINUX component that provides a RAM disk by hooking BIOS calls) to netboot MS-DOS, and it worked. I ran a handful of old games, which didn't run any worse than I'd expect from a "too fast" computer from the '90s. I didn't try any workarounds like Mo'Slo for the ones that ran too fast.

I had to use a VM to prepare the boot disk image, and MEMDISK has no way to persist changes to it, so I was hoping to be able to use some DOS networking stuff to mount network shares for games. Unfortunately, the only thing I could find that looked like it might be compatible with IP networks and SMB shares (the "Microsoft Network Client") ate up too much conventional memory to really be useful as a basis for gaming. Maybe there's some method to load less of it or move things to EMS/XMS, but I didn't find it for the few nights I spent messing with it. Maybe some setup based on a USB flash drive would be a better way to go?

This is on a mildly dated but essentially modern system (Ivy Bridge + GTX 970 + onboard gigabit Ethernet). I was pretty impressed by how well it worked. I assume that PC hardware vendors will eventually get rid of the UEFI Compatibility Support Module and EGA/VGA compatibility needed to do this, but for now it looks like it's still in pretty good shape.

Anyone else have similar experiences with DOS games on modern hardware?

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

Google DOSBox.

[SimicEngineer]

If I want emulators, I know where to find them.

[InvictusDoom]

Some of really old games on GOG use DOSBox.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

^ This

You don't need legacy hardware for such things.

[TehSpoopyKitteh]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Bad_Motha:

^ This

You don't need legacy hardware for such things.

I love DOSBox as much as the next person...however:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS9hiSwL1KY

Keep in mind that this is doable...but given the results from LGR, it is definitely not advisable. I agree..OP is better off using DOSBox.

[Arya]

I run a few vintage IdTech games via Steam. It's as simple as playing another other game, they have a built-in DOS emulator that auto-runs with the game. All you need to do is hit play.

I'm playing on Win10 with an 8700K and 16GB of RAM. GPU is irrelevant for obvious reasons.

[SimicEngineer]

Opprinnelig skrevet av The Spoopy Kitteh:

I love DOSBox as much as the next person...however:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS9hiSwL1KY

Keep in mind that this is doable...but given the results from LGR, it is definitely not advisable. I agree..OP is better off using DOSBox.

Thanks; that video gets right at the sort of thing I was curious about. I might not have even bothered fiddling with this if I'd seen it, since it more or less answers the main "what would happen?" questions that I had. I'm still a bit interested in how DOS networking works and what interesting setups could be cobbled together with it (later versions of MS-DOS are a lot more flexible than people realize; MS added a bunch of cool batch file capabilities, and you could e.g. have a boot menu that customizes the configuration for picky programs as opposed to the old-school boot disk method).

Opprinnelig skrevet av Maleko:

Perhaps you'd be interested in FreeDOS:

http://www.freedos.org/

In principle, yes, but something about it is off-putting to me. I feel like there's a lot of inconsistency (like early Linux distros that basically wedged in any software that sort of fit) and a high entry barrier for people who haven't been die-hard DOS users for the past decade. I'd probably try DR-DOS first, despite its unmaintained status. Maybe this feeling is totally irrational and FreeDOS is the best DOS ever, but I'd have to play around with it for a while and get a feel for it, I guess.

[InvictusDoom]

The main issue you'll run into are drivers. VESA BIOS programming and Intel PXE network boot has been standardized for a long time. There are no standard programming interfaces that I know of for network cards at the H/W level. If there were then an OS could have a single basic driver for any network device. Same thing for USB devices and so on. FreeDOS might be a better bet looking for compatible network drivers.

Also note in the video DOS 6.2 never ran he was booting with Win 98 version of DOS.
So the boot from HD might still be an issue.

[SimicEngineer]

Opprinnelig skrevet av frodak42:

There are no standard programming interfaces that I know of for network cards at the H/W level. If there were then an OS could have a single basic driver for any network device. Same thing for USB devices and so on.

There's no standard host interface, but a bunch of modern Ethernet chips (e.g. Realtek RTL8139 and Intel PRO/1000 families) do have DOS drivers available. Apparently even some of the pre-802.11 wireless adapters (Orinoco/WaveLAN) do as well. Their primary use recently seems to be with Symantec Ghost, which has some kind of DOS-based boot disk. The funny/frustrating thing is that there's no single standard interface on the DOS/application side, either. You can get drivers that expose an NDIS2 (3Com/Microsoft), ODI (Apple/Novell), or "packet driver" (MIT/FTP Software) API, and your network client software has to have matching support. It's like if you could install OpenGL or Direct3D drivers for your GPU, but not both.

USB actually does have such standards, which is part of why USB devices are so widely compatible. There's even a standardized USB interface for Ethernet adapters, but it seems that nobody actually sells adapters conforming to it. On the other hand, so many vendors ship ASIX chips that those might as well be the standard (though it looks like the USB 2.x and USB 3.x families each need a different driver).