Hi! On Mar 27 2020 05:14, Rugxulo wrote: > I only have DR-DOS 7.03, but AFAIK, DR-DOS 5 was compatible to MS-DOS > 3.3, DR 6 was their 5, and 7 was (of course) 6 compatible (though it > pretended to be PC-DOS, technically, unless you specifically asked > elsewhere). > > So, yes, FreeDOS should be more compatible than DR-DOS 5 [sic]. > > Although you could probably still download (non-commercial only) > EDR-DOS (circa 2005) from the Wayback Machine. Not sure where > "official" DR-DOS disappeared to either. I guess they don't sell it > online (anymore??). 7.03 is from 1999 (and the one with TaskMgr, > limited to 64 MB per task, using its own proprietary EMM386 only with > mandatory built-in DPMI). > > Yes, DJGPP is still updated (e.g. GCC 9.2, BinUtils 2.34, Make 4.3) > and thus newer than GCCs for "old Linuxes". Though you could probably > get some Linux guru to recompile newer for your old distro, if you > asked nicely. Not a lot of libraries for DOS anymore, but some stuff > still works.
Yes, FreeDOS tends to be growing, which makes sense. For old computers, original to that time, EDR-DOS might be a better choice. Digital Research did a hell of a job making CP/M into a real good version of DOS, with compatibility to MS-DOS i.e. PC DOS. I think DR DOS 6.0 did that job, although DR DOS 5 (which I still own and used back than, I even have the original box somewhere!) was my favourite. But I guess that's just nostalgia. DR DOS 7.03 as well as EDR-DOS seems to be a very good choice. Take some selected tools from FreeDOS (EMM386 replacement, ATAPI drivers and such, as well as some solid applications and utils from FreeDOS) and you will have a great DOS for an original machine. Anyway, 8 MB RAM seems to be one of the problems, with Linux a big one, with FreeDOS a small one. The other is disk space. As I mentioned, I cannot get the standard FreeDOS 1.1 installation installed for that reason. I assume that FreeDOS will also run very well on such a machine, but all developement went into making it fit for newer machines, integrating FAT32 and such, all of which are features not required for this original machine. A. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
