DOS ain't dead

(Clueless Newbee still floundering for the moment)

I have a machine with Windows 7

I want to see if FreeDOS will do what I want.

I search for this answer on the internet.

Every single hit returns a page purporting to show me how to install Windows 7 under FreeDOS, i.e., the exact opposite of what I want to do.

Could someone please tell me how to do this ?...

1. Put an x86 emulator on my Windows 7 machine, and then
2. Within the context of that emulator, install FreeDOS

Perhaps this is a better question...

Can I use FreeDOS under Windows 7 ?

Any videos or whatever on this ?

> (Clueless Newbee still floundering for the moment)
>
> I have a machine with Windows 7
>
> I want to see if FreeDOS will do what I want.
>
> I search for this answer on the internet.
>
> Every single hit returns a page purporting to show me how to install
> Windows 7 under FreeDOS, i.e., the exact opposite of what I want to do.
>
> Could someone please tell me how to do this ?...
>
> 1. Put an x86 emulator on my Windows 7 machine, and then
> 2. Within the context of that emulator, install FreeDOS
>
> Perhaps this is a better question...
>
> Can I use FreeDOS under Windows 7 ?
>
> Any videos or whatever on this ?


You can start taking a look to this: http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/VirtualBox

---
Visit my personal blog at https://www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com

> You can start taking a look to this:
> http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/VirtualBox

Thank you for the suggestion.

Taking a look now

From that source...

> "...The recommended size of the hard disk is 500,00 MB..."

No way.

I don't even have half that amount available on my machine

Back in the day when dinosaurs wrote Interpreted B.A.S.I.C. "programs", you could easily get by with forty or fifty Megabytes; indeed, that size was a luxury for "power users" (N.B. for the younger set; that was actually a buzzword of the day back then)

Can I get by with less ?

Yes, you can get by with a lot less. The Readme.txt file in RC4 says this:

>###############################################################################
> FreeDOS 1.3 Release Candidate 4 ("FreeDOS 1.3 RC4")
>###############################################################################
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> General system requirements:
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> * DOS-compatible system (Intel + BIOS, or UEFI with Legacy support)
>
> * At least 20MB free disk space:
>
> 20MB Plain DOS system
> 45MB Plain DOS system, with sources
>
> 250MB Full installation including applications and games
> 450MB Full installation with sources



*That's from https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos...s/distributions/1.3/previews/1.3-rc4/readme.txt

Wow

I have homework to do

But, thank you, a lot.

A Thought just hit me: Could I make this hard disk space on a thumb drive ?

> A Thought just hit me: Could I make this hard disk space on a thumb drive ?

You could. "This hard disk space" (usually) is just a file on the host system.

(By the way: Thumb drives are not recommended for I/O intensive stuff, but for a DOS VM it's probably fast enough. I wonder, how large/small your HDD on the Windows 7 PC is, that you don't have 500 MB left.)

I recommend you to also read http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/ebook/using-freedos-24/using-freedos-24.pdf

---
Forum admin

USB flash drives vary a lot in their speed. You often have very limited speed when you use the BIOS for USB access. I once, long ago and for the sake of experiment, ran FreeDOS with Windows 3 (standard mode, not 386enh mode) that way and it felt like running it from a floppy.

If you use USB 3.0 sticks and your BIOS at least has decent USB 2.0 support, you will suffer less, but even then, only "SSD style" thumb drives will give you reasonable speed for what DOS apps need: Access to many tiny bits of data. You only get full speed for accessing large files (for example CF compact flash cards are optimized to write few, but large digital camera photo or video files) or with multitasking OS which use large caches and parallel I/O queues etc.

Given that your Windows 7 computer has a very small harddisk with only 0.5 GB free space, I assume that your computer also has very old USB ports. You should probably just put a larger harddisk or SSD in your computer instead of expecting too much from USB drives.

---
FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...