Jim Hall, creator and developer of FreeDOS, on the eve of the project’s 25th birthday
In 1994, I read articles in technology magazines saying that Microsoft planned to do away with MS-DOS soon. The next version of Windows would not use DOS. MS-DOS was on the way out. I’d already tried Windows 3, and I wasn’t impressed. Windows was not great. And, running Windows would mean replacing the DOS applications that I used every day. I wanted to keep using DOS. I decided that the only way to keep DOS was to write my own. On June 29, 1994, I announced my plans on the Usenet discussion group comp.os.msdos.apps, and things took off from there.
FreeDOS – alongside DOSBox – are staples of the DOS community, and it’s great to have them available as free software.
I love free dos.
Back in an old job, we had a product that ran on top of DOS, but not MS-DOS, but Data Lite ROM DOS. It was awful. The shell utilities were broken, we re-wrote our own. I begged with my manager to let us replace it with Free DOS, which completely and totally worked, flawlessly. But, he couldn’t because his manager would be pissed to see us replace our licensed version that we paid for (absolutely huge amount of money) and terrible support. It was so dumb.
We had a DOS product in the mid 90s that we shipped with DrDOS. It was far superior to MsDOS, which is why it wasn’t surprising the lengths MS went to prevent Windows from working with it.
So you were looking at FreeDOS in ROM? How did that work, just a chunk of memory that executed on power on? I’ve used FreeDOS from read only media or PXE before but never ROM.
Another piece software that I’ve recently found indispensable for running old DOS (and old 16-bit Windows) software is WineVDM. As the name suggests, it’s a reimplementation of the old NTVDM – AKA the compatibility layer/pseudo-VM thing that NT-based OSes used for running old 16-bit software, and which Microsoft couldn’t be bothered to port to the 64-bit versions of Windows.
It’s not perfect, but for the kind of stuff I’ve used it for (allowing my mom to keep using some old Win3.x card games on a modern, 64-bit version of Windows) it’s a much nicer user experience than, say, getting Win3.x installed in DOSBox & fiddling with the config to get to auto-start certain applications.
https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
There’s also NTVDMx64, which appears to a port of the “real” NTVDM, though it was limited to running old 16-bit DOS software (while WineVDM can run 16-bit Windows programs as well), and seems to be based on the leaked NT source code from a few years back:
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64.html
And while Win3mu seemed promising at first, it’s been in development for 3+ years and its developer seems to have some odd aversion to releasing a compiled version:
https://www.toptensoftware.com/win3mu/
You can also build the ReactOS VDM (though it only support DOS apps right now) in a “standalone” mode, to launch DOS .exe files.
I don’t see a reason why the OS hacks to get NTVDMx64 working on win64 couldn’t be used to get the ReactOS VDM to run in it’s place, since it’s already mostly compatible with the standard VDM that I can see.