Games - FreeDOS

	Games - FreeDOS

FreeDOS is an open source project with the stated goal of creating a free operating system that is 100% compatible with MS-DOS and its device drivers. Although still in its beta phase, the projected has achieved most of its goals and is currently highly compatible with MS-DOS. The Dell computer manufacturing company currently offers a desktop computer with FreeDOS pre-installed as an alternative to the Microsoft operating systems that are usually packaged with new desktops.

Differences from MS-DOS

Open source/Free license (GPL)
User-editable internationalization support
FDAMP - APM control/info, energy saving TSR/control, cache flush, rebooting, and ASPI support
UltraDMA driver and support for big disks (LBA
) (can also be used in MS-DOS)
LBACACHE - disc cache (SMARTDRV in MS-DOS)
FDCDEX and CD-ROM driver (MSCDEX in MS-DOS)
CTMOUSE - Mouse driver with wheel-support (can also be used in MS-DOS)

FreeDOS supports FAT32 file system (except for a few FreeDOS commands, such as DEFRAG), whereas MS-DOS versions prior to 7.10 do not. Also, Long File Names (LFN) APIs (which can be provided by the DOSLFN driver or similar) and large disks (LBA) are not supported by MS-DOS 6.x (or earlier), and most of the FreeDOS programs.

Compatibility

===Windows 1.0 through 3.xx=== FreeDOS seems to work fine with 1.0 and 2.0 versions of Windows. 3.x versions are harder to run; the simplest command that currently works for version 3.1 is WIN /S, which forces the Windows kernel to run in 16-bit 286 mode rather than the preferred 32-bit 386 mode.

To date Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) has not been successfully started under FreeDOS.

Windows 9x and ME

Those Windows versions contain and are linked to MS-DOS. One cannot run them in FreeDOS, but it is possible to install Windows and FreeDOS on the same drive, with help of a boot manager like LILO or GRUB.

Windows NT through XP

A parallel installation with Windows NT/2000/XP doesn't cause problems because these versions don't use a DOS system as a base operating system anymore and they are shipped with a simple boot manager. The FreeDOS kernel can simply be added to Windows' boot.ini to enable its selection in the boot manager (by adding a boot sector file or drive to the list - FreeDOS will always search the first FAT16 or FAT32 drive for fdconfig.sys or config.sys, even if you boot it from another harddisk drive letter...)

ReactOS

FreeDOS interacts with ReactOS in a similar manner to Windows NT, 2000, and XP.

Memory Management

The EMM386 memory management program included with FreeDOS now supports VCPI, which allows programs and DOS extenders which use DPMI to run. FreeDOS also contains an UDMA driver for faster disk access, which can be used for other DOS versions, too. The LBAcache disk cache buffers recently-accessed disk data in Extended Memory Specification memory for even faster access and less direct access (reduced noise) to the harddisk.

With help of the ability of the FreeCOM command line shell to swap itself to XMS, it is possible to get much low DOS RAM free: With kernel and BUFFERs in HMA and drivers (where compatible with this) loaded to UMBs, 620k (620*1024 bytes) and more can be available. This can be useful for memory-hungry DOS games.

Characteristics

There are many ways in which FreeDOS is considered better than MS-DOS. The license is free and the software is actively being developed. FAT32 support is implemented and it is possible to boot from FAT32 drives using FreeDOS. Depending on the BIOS used, up to four LBA hard disks up to 128 GB or even 2 TB in size are supported. Some BIOSes support LBA but have a bug for disks bigger than 32 GB. One can use a driver like OnTrack or EzDrive to "repair" that problem. FreeDOS can also be used with a driver called DOSLFN which supports long file names (see VFAT), but most FreeDOS programs do NOT support long file names even if the driver is loaded.

There is no planned support for NTFS or ext2fs but there are several shareware drivers available for that purpose. To access ext2fs, you can use the LTOOLS (counterpart to MTOOLS) which can copy data to and from ext2fs drives.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for FreeDOS ]

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