Re: MS-DOS 7.10 Utorrent
Tae Damndjperiod
Dear fellas, I'm sorry to revive such an old topic but I have a question. I watched a video about DOS 7.10 on YT and it said on the video that MS-DOS 7.1 is free and distributed under GMU GPL. Is it really so? If true, where can I download it?
Yeah, mislabeling with GPL illegally is much akin to hexediting copyrighted games to say PUBLIC DOMAIN in the 80's so it's warez that's spread from no guilt and a lack of awareness, unfortunately getting it more mass-distributed lumped in with genuine public domain/GPL software. The only DOS 7.1 I acknowledge is the WINDOWS\COMMAND directory shipping with 9x, and not some repacks as 'oficial 7.1' or anything.
Sorry for the thread necro, but this post was so incredibly helpful that I had to bump it. I've been fighting with DOS 6.22 all day. I did the steps in this thread and had a perfectly working clean DOS install with FAT32 support with no difficulties what so ever.
Well based on my own experience, the reason for sticking with DOS 6.22 instead of DOS 7.10 is because the latter is a memory hog. See, DOS 7.10 eats up a lot of conventional memory; a lot more than DOS 6.22, so booting with DOS 7.10 to play DOS games is a no-no.
Now I haven't tried it out myself, but from his page, it is said that such feats is possible through the combination of HIMEM.SYS, UMBPCI v3.66, and HIRAM.EXE v1.9. The config.sys can be found here, while the autoexec.bat is here.
If this is true, then I think DOS 7.10 could provide a nice alternative to play pure DOS games, especially those that need a lot of conventional RAM (Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager comes to mind...). I assume that the reason to not using DOS 7 is the amount of conventional RAM it consumes, so if the solution works, there's no more reasons to not using DOS 7 anymore. Furthermore, DOS 7 support FAT32, which would be ideal for old games that have a lot of small files (FAT32 is better for small files, isn't it?).
However, I could be wrong; there could be any other reasons to not using DOS 7 for DOS gaming purpose, such as compatibility issues, etc. Probably there are DOS games that just won't work on DOS 7 no matter what? Probably there are ISA sound cards that just don't work with DOS 7?
On both of my "oldschool rigs" I use MS-DOS 7.10. No big compatibility problems encountered yet.
Some old programs cannot get along with FAT32, in these cases putting them onto a ramdisk or a FAT16 partition helps.
The only program that refused to work with MS-DOS 7.10 was Creative's DOS/Win3.11 installer for their SB16/AWE32 card. It assumes you are running it in a Win95 shell and quits with an error message. However, there also is a DOS driver package for Win9x users on their support server, which contains all all the stuff needed for the cards.
Like the guy on the webpage you mentioned, I use chipset UMB drivers instead of EMM386.EXE, which gives me 628K of free base memory. But the biggest advantage is that these drivers keep the CPU in real mode.
UMBPCI does not work on all systems due to chipset restrictions, read the docs before installing. Here is a link to the author's website. You can also find links to other chipset UMB drivers there (for 486 chipsets).
Like the guy on the webpage you mentioned, I use chipset UMB drivers instead of EMM386.EXE, which gives me 628K of free base memory. But the biggest advantage is that these drivers keep the CPU in real mode.
UMBPCI does not work on all systems due to chipset restrictions, read the docs before installing. Here is a link to the author's website. You can also find links to other chipset UMB drivers there (for 486 chipsets).
By the way, the Soyo 845PE ISA is the only Pentium 4 mobo with ISA slots. In fact, it has THREE ISA slots ? . I indeed plan to use Pentium 4 processor for my DOS-bootable system, because I also plan to dual boot with Windows 98 to play Win98-only games (won't run on WinXP) like Jane's USAF and Jane's F/A-18.
As for pure DOS, I know I'm gonna' need a good slowdown utility to run DOS games. I think the only problem of running DOS games with Pentium 4 is the speed. However, am I being wrong here? Speed issues aside, are there more problems (compatibility, etc) in running pure DOS in Pentium 4?
By the way, what CPU are you using? Is there any known compatibility problems of using newer processor (Pentium 4, etc) with pure DOS? Speed aside, I mean. But speed issues can be handled by slowdown utils, right?
EMM386 is basically the same in all DOS versions. Yes, it puts the CPU in protected mode in order to gain access to high memory. To maintain compatibility to real mode programs, it then runs the whole MS-DOS session in a single virtual 8086 mode task (which is the same method Windows uses for executing DOS programs). Everything would be fine, except that some games do not get along with this kind of arrangement, because they are programmed to access hardware directly and often include their own crude memory management. Problems mainly arise because of these two issues:
1) Since direct hardware manipulations are not possible in protected mode, EMM386 has to simulate hardware behaviour when DOS programs try to access it. This leads to timing problems in games (e.g. stuttering in video output, generally slow behavior).
2) Many games use advanced real mode tricks to gain access to more memory, often these methods collide with EMM386 and Vmode86, the game crashes the whole V86 session.
In manuals and README files you often find the hint to remove memory managers like EMM386, QEMM, etc... or using a "clean" boot diskette to get a game running or increase performance.
Now just for a few UMBs, all these issues are a high price to pay. People often resort to setting up multiple DOS configurations -- one with EMM386, one without -- to cope with that, but it's cumbersome to have to reboot every time a game needs the other configuration.
Hence the chipset UMB drivers. They provide UMBs without switching to protected mode. They have their own problems too (because of the peculiarities of some chipsets), but are generally more comfortable to use.
Yes, for some titles turning off the caches will not be enough, so a slowdown utility will certainly come in handy.
In very rare cases DOS games use 486 programming tricks that will crash a Pentium (Comanche was one of these, but there is a patch to fix it). Other than that, there shouldn't be any problems.
EMM386 is basically the same in all DOS versions. Yes, it puts the CPU in protected mode in order to gain access to high memory. To maintain compatibility to real mode programs, it then runs the whole MS-DOS session in a single virtual 8086 mode task (which is the same method Windows uses for executing DOS programs). Everything would be fine, except that some games do not get along with this kind of arrangement,
Thanks. It may be an overkill to play pure dos games with Pentium 4 CPU, but I plan to dual-boot with Windows 98 to play old Windows games. See, games like Jane's USAF was really a CPU hog the first time it came around. It scored about 25 fps with Voodoo5 AGP... while the freaking Quake 3 Arena could score about 80 fps or such, so I guess it's CPU problems instead of video card. I'd really like to try it with P4! ?
The only later DOS game I can think of that doesn't like fast CPUs is Daggerfall. But then again, I haven't really tried many DOS games on fast CPUs. Slowdown utils doesn't really work well with Daggerfall either.
Gotta' see the manual of my mobo then. I just wonder: are there games that require the L2 cache to be disabled too? And if that's the case, if the mobo doesn't support it, then it's a "compatibility problem", I guess.
Some games (Jazz Jackrabbit) won't work with high performance processors (like a 350 Mhz Pentium II... at least it was a fast processor when I bought it). Disabling caches MAY allow you to play that games (by the way, you may get a slow down utility and play without disabling caches).
The advantage of hardware slowdown methods (disabling caches or lowering FSB) in contrast to software slowdown programs is that the hardware methods results in much smoother gameplay. Of course doing it the the hardware way is limited, a P3 with lowest possible FSB and without caches may still be too fast for some games. It's recommended to run such old games with DOSBox.
as for the 629 free conventional memory is not really a big deal. I own PC-DOS 6 and 7 (IBM versions) and from 6 and up, 630kb conventional is no big deal. their HIMEM.SYS can load in UMB without EMM386.
but it lacks fat32 so I don't use it anymore, I use a win98se machine that boots in dos.
The only DOS version that is a memory hog is MS-Dos-8 which built himem.sys into io.sys.
MS-DOS 7.1 is the same as Dos 6.22 memory wise, it depends entirely on your config.sys and Autoexec.bat. with the advantage that it supports FAT32 disks and upto 4GB of system RAM with himem.sys.
I have yet to come across a game that would not run under realmode DOS-7.1(out of thousands of games tried over the last 10 years). Along with MS-DOS 6.22 it is still the 'standard' for compatibilty, more compatible than FreeDos and any other Dos version. Hopefully FreeDOS will catch up.
Relamode DOS7.1 sees the 2GB ram(with himem.sys loaded), sound works with the sblive dos drivers. System shock works fine, Star-trek final unity works with sound. This new hardware won't even boot into win95/98/me.
Looking at my old notes, I had a problem where DOS 7.1 with "DOS=NOAUTO" caused the size of DOS in memory to be much larger than expected. My guess at this late date, without experimenting, is that with DOS=NOAUTO it doesn't automatically load files or buffers high, and ends up having to load something in conventional memory that it otherwise wouldn't need to, and that it wouldn't need to load at all in 6.22. (Maybe the Windows startup screen?)
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