Slashdot Mirror
FreeDOS Not Dead; 1.0 Release Imminent
Lisa writes "Jim Hall, creator of the open source MS-DOS operating system project FreeDOS, says that while work on the project may have slowed recently, he isn't ready to throw in the towel just yet. In fact, Hall says he hopes to see version 1.0 released as soon as the end of the month." (So rumors to the contrary can be safely ignored.)
Yes. Embedded systems vendors, firmware upgrade disk image producers, people who like the simplicity of DOS, PC manufacturers who want to get around Microsoft's refusal to OEM-licence windows to them if they sell PCs without any Operating System (Microsoft has a big, nasty industry campaign against "naked PCs"...). There'll be a niche "market" for FreeDOS pretty indefinitely, it's pretty much the "last DOS standing", since Microsoft gave up on MS-DOS. No, not _many_ people will care. But with Open Source, a few are enough.
Everyone that builds network imaging boot CD's does.
Freedos rocks. Tcp/ip stack and all the goodies to make imaging machines from a network image repository with ghost of other dos based imaging apps a real treat/breeze.
universities love freedos, researchers do as freedos works on old Pc104 386 based boards for space based or rugged terrain data collection on hardware that the only collection app is an old dos one that will not run under linux. most machine shops love freedos as it's the only way to keep those old machines that use dos running instead of buying new CNC hardware and software for tens of thousands of dollars when the old machine works just fine.
I can go on for hours if you really want me to list everyone who cares about FreeDos....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Check out DOSBox (...) You may need to do a little fine tuning, but I haven't found a better way to run old DOS games.
Good old Dosemu works pretty well for me, especially on a Pentium III @ 750 MHz. I've heard DOSBox requires several GHz to acceptably emulate a 486DX2 @ 66 MHz. Dosemu does not emulate the CPU, so it is an order of magnitude faster.
Dosemu used to be hard to configure and used to require root privileges and direct acces to the hardware; recent versions have pretty much gotten rid of those problems. I run most of my games with xdosemu in a regular window, I can easily switch to full screen if I prefer, I get very nice MIDI thanks to ALSA + Sound Blaster Live, etc. Of course the experience depends on the games, some of them had funky ways to address the hardware, there are a few cases where Dosemu doesn't cope that well (jerky mouse in a few games). But I can play Day of the Tentacle, Duke Nukem 3D, Dungeon Master, Lands of Lore, Arkanoid, Ecstatica, the Elder Scrolls: Arena just fine, and that's just those I tried this past week-end.