<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Japofran @ May 27 2007, 12:43 AM) [snapback]291489[/snapback]</div>People say that the DOS version doesn't matter but in my experience it does matter. Up to v6 the backwards compatibility was exquisite of course, but with v7 (Win98 "restarting in DOS mode") some games stopped working. Not just a couple of games but quite a lot of them, at least in my old machine, I can't tell for others' machines. So if what you want is a DOS which will be compatible with your old games, go for v6. Of course you're limited to 2 Gb but there's no way you're going to need more in a DOS partition, is there? Otherwise you could enable more than one partition or move files to and from the FAT16 partition in Windows.

As for the changes between DOS v6 and v7 I know of a certain one. When I set up a DOS v6 partition in my old Win98 machine I encountered the problem of getting sound with a SBPCI128. Of course I used the SB16 emulation drivers that the card came with, and that Win98 used when booting DOS v7. But at first they didn't work, until I replaced the v6 EMM386.EXE with the v7 one. It was the only way the drivers worked and, even a DOS v6 with a v7 EMM386.EXE ran a lot of games which didn't run in DOS v7. So EMM386.EXE is different, but also surely MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS. What I mean is that there's a different between DOS v6 and v7, not to talk about using FreeDOS and such.
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I confirm. In my experience, Dos7 was not the right choice and many games crushed, even if sometimes it's the only way to make a Dos boot disk running on Windows. Dos 6.22 is a garancy of compatibility, but it's not so easy to handle. It's all about a boot sector issue.


I think the games who suffer major problems using Ms7 are the games with Dos4gw. Several times it happens that games suddenly crushed during games with huge codeline, and this does not happen with Dos6 instead (Ex: theme park, Manic Karts)

I'm back. In 2007, I spent a few months without a proper computer and had to fall back on my mom's old PC. I dual-booted Ubuntu with XP, got sick of XP, deleted it and thus had a partition left over. I figured I'd give FreeDOS a shot.




I hate FreeDOS. I tried 5 times, didn't get one clean installation. And I have tried everything.

My sentiment exactly. Got Freedos with the drivers for my computer, but never could really get anything working. Never could really install it at all!

Same for me no games works for me under freedos I only us it then I flash bios e.t.c. Native dos in Vmware works much better or dosbox.

With freedos I couldnt even get the sound to work so I said enough of this. Dosbox is heck of alot better than freedos.

It would be nice to test freedos then it works 100% on my computer with sound and everything.

I'd go with MS-DOS 6.22 since it's mainly compatible with all old DOS games, except the type you have to use with SETVER. Although I am surprised no one mentioned DR-DOS.

It will work fine with serious applics (read:non-gaming software).
Same problem as with Freedos, almost 100% MSDos compatible, but that 'almost' gives troubles with the more troublesome games.

Oh my, reminds me, still haven't tested the DOS32A mem extender on it.
Hmmmm, will probably never do, not much reasons to do so, is it?

More like, "it will work fine with console apps without sound", be they games or not (of course most are). :P And for that, you can rely as well on running it in Windows 32 bits (ntvdm.exe) 100% of the times... Actually ANY solution will do for a console app without sound--using a slowdown utility at most, if really necessary (won't be for most "serious" apps).

DrDos has SB drivers, SB16 works fine in it ,(Tested by moi), don't know how other cards behave on it.
Try out that ntvdm joky in Vista ..... XD