DOS ain't dead

Hi everyone

I recently found out about Free DOS via the article on the Register and it made me want to try and set up my old LAN party network from the early 90s.

So I’m looking for advice for setting up a network to play early 90s classic DOS games in multiplayer mode, games like DOOM, Warcraft, Red Alert. Pre-WIN95 era where all the games were coded to use Novell IPX as opposed to TCP/IP. It would be really nostalgic to play these games on actual hardware for a change as opposed to in DosBox.

On my old mates-network we used Netware LITE as opposed to the full business version of Novell Netware. Everyone had to find NE2000 compatible network cards because it was the only card we had a driver for, it was a bit of a pain.

I held onto MS-DOS for as long as I could, I think I only gave in around 1999 when there wasn’t much choice left. I remember I had crafted a multiboot menu into my config.sys and autoexec.bat but I think a lot of that knowledge has leaked out of my brain over the last 20 years.

So any advice on what to do with hardware and drivers would be appreciated. I have looked on the Free DOS wiki pages and unfortunately there are a lot of broken links in them. As far as I know NIC manufacturers stopped making packet and ODI drivers a while ago – so does it mean I need to keep looking for vintage network cards like a RealTek RTL8029 or RTL8029AS?

Any advice about sound cards too? I don’t think I’ve understood Free DOS enough yet to know whether it can make use of modern drivers, but I presume there is support for new PC BIOS types than MS-DOS would support.

Any advice here would be welcome!

Many thanks
Dave