Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Addeddate Identifier ms-dos Reviewer: yoshiisawesome - - December 24, Subject: does this work on chromebook does it? I have released free versions before - and I'm sure I will again.
Reviewer: Movies xp - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - October 1, Subject: finally finally i can experiment on dos thank you ;. Reviewer: OldInternetTraveller - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - September 26, Subject: what why is this so popular all of sudden lmao. The Vintage Software Collection. Click "OK" at the bottom of the window.
Double click on the virtual machine that you created for DOS. Close the virtual machine's windows and select "Power off the machine". Follow the setup instructions to install DOS 6. To insert disks 2 and 3 when setup asks you to, just follow the second direction in this step.
Leave comments at the appropriate step about anything you have to say about it. Use this step to leave comments regarding the entire Instructable. Good luck! Question 2 years ago. Hi, love the tutorial. But now I am stuck with trying to get files onto the virtual hard-drive. I'm on a mac and the PowerISO etc apps to create a floppy drive image only are available for windows machines.
Any tips on how to get some files onto the Dos virtualbox from my Mac? Thank you! Answer 9 months ago. Use Storage to put the. What a state of nostalgia that I am in right now. Thank you so much. Question 2 years ago on Introduction. DOS 6. How do I copy some pre-existing bat files from real hard drive to v drive?
I wrote a few applications in Lattice many, many years back and would like to play around with the code, just to see if can work. Thanks in advance. Great tutorial! Besides the Target drive a Destination drive of equal or larger capacity is needed!
Having to create the VHD and VFlop like shown however am I barking up the wrong tree expecting all the drives to be mounted and accessible in the directory after installing the OS? This is great!!!! Thanks a lot! I remember the days I used MS Dos 5 and made several changes to config. Thanks for the information!!! Thanks for the detailed info. OK, Step 5 gets a little confusing for someone who hasn't played with Virtualbox before.
The sequence should be like this:. Click on OK, and then click on the green 'Start' arrow to run your virtual machine. The machine will boot up, and you will be presented with the blue installation screen. Don't worry about formatting your drive -- it's just the virtual drive you created previously.
This is a pretty trivial example, but you can use it to provide a number of useful conveniences. For example, here's my aliases. It isn't necessary to use an alias file, but I find it convenient to keep all alieses grouped together.
Another neat, but this time entirely superfluous, trick is to enable support for colored directory listing output. This is similar to what modern Linux distributions do by default as shown in this simple example if you're not familiar with it , and makes it possible to quickly and easily recognize common file types at a glance. I modeled the following configuration based on Linux's default scheme for dircolors, with a couple differences and pruned down a bit:.
There are a couple additional points to be aware of. The extension list can also be a special type of file, such as dirs directories , hidden hidden files , rdonly read-only files , etc. So, the first item in the line sets my directories blue. The color code is also fairly flexible; as shown above, you can specify both normal colors yel and bright colors bri yel bright colors tend to be easier easier to read against dark backgrounds. You can also change the character background color: bri blu on yel , for example, will display blue text on a yellow background.
You can run the above with the set command to activate, then run dir to test the results. Feel free to customize it a bit, then once you're happy with it you can make it permanent by either adding it to autoexec.
I recommend the latter, as it won't clutter up your environmental variables. For more advanced 4DOS features, refer to the online documentation by running help. Support for modern web standards is quite limited, as should be expected, but basic web browsing should work pretty well. The name of the browser is Arachne, and it can be obtained from it's home page.
After a four year hiatus, it very recently had a new release, so it's good to see that it's still under active development. Installation is a bit involved, but not too complicated.
The largest hurdle is that this requires at least KB of free conventional RAM, and if you installed everything listed in this walkthrough so far, you will almost certainly be under that threshold. Please see the above System Optimization for tips on freeing up enough memory i fnecessary.
You'll also want to use a mouse for this, so be sure to follow the mouse driver instructions above to get that setup. After everything is unpacked, the GUI setup process will start.
If you have just barely more over KB free, the installer will exit with a low memory error, as the memory from the unpacker was still in use at the time, pushing you under the threshold. Set the video options to your preference. Try to go with at least x, higher if possible and you have a reasonably large monitor , but you'll probably be limited by your video card memory.
You'll be prompted to set your computer speed profile next; it's probably best to go with Arachne's recommended setting here, as it will do a quick benchmark of your computer first. Select your preferred option and click Next. You'll then be prompted for some system configuration changes.
This is entirely personal preference I prefer to update my files manually after installation, but I do have it create the shortcut batch file for me , so choose what you like and click Next. Set the max video resolution to the same resolution you selected previously and click Next.
Up next is the network configuration. The next page, Arachne Options, can be configured at any time later on to your preferences, so click "Use new settings" to complete setup. You'll be kicked back into DOS at this point, so now would be a good time to make any system config file changes.
Consider changing the following in config. Finally, run arachne. It won't look very pretty, but you should see all of the content in its complete, barely styled glory. Arachne supports a ton of layout options, performance options, etc. To get started, click on the Desktop link in the right navbar or press F10 , then click Options.
This is a fairly random collection of utilities I found while researching this project that I consider useful or interesting. I won't cover them in great detail, but I do recommend checking them out. This is by far the best such utility I've found, is one of the only such utilities that is completely free and not crippled, and is even under reasonably active development. As a bonus, it even can even perform a basic CPU benchmark. If you have any questions about what's in your computer or how it's performing, this is a very worthwhile utility.
Snarf is a simple screenshot utility for DOS. It doesn't support much in the way of options, but it works well in my testing. Screen Thief is another screenshot utility. This one has far more options, but for some reason saves images as pixels wide rather then , which makes everything look stretched horizontally.
That seems to be expected behavior and I can't find a way to fix that, and that's a deal breaker for me. Since this is of somewhat limited practical use I won't spend much time covering the details, but it's a quite nice remote-access solution if that's something you need. A couple other options that might fit the bill are Remoter and Tiny. Installation and configuration is a bit wonky, so I recommend reading the included ansiplus.
It's useful for very old software generally games that run relative to CPU speed. The problem with these games is that they will always run faster as CPU speed increases, so once you reach a certain CPU speed which can be easily hit even with original Pentiums , games become unplayably fast.
There are several utilities that can slow your computer down enough to play these games Mo'Slo probably being the most well known , but my favorite is SLOWDOWN; it's free, has a wealth of features, and is very well documented.
After spending a while playing with the system and, most importantly, playing and installing many of my original DOS games, I have a couple few extra tips I wanted to share.
I'm now using the following more conservative settings:. 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.
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