Hacker Neue

Preferences
dardeaup parent
Curious as to whether there are any real-world use cases for doing this (other than curiosity) in DOS. If so, I'd love to hear about them.
comprev
I used FreeDOS once to run ancient software which controlled an industrial size oven. The client was having an ever increasing challenge of sourcing IDE disks (in 2008) so I was contracted to find a solution.

Eventually we settled on industrial PCs, solid state media and FreeDOS.

It was significantly cheaper than replacing the oven at £1M each.... in 50 of their factories worldwide.

LeFantome
Lots of solid state to IDE adapties out there too. But great example.
anthk
An IDE->CF one would have been cheap enough.
1313ed01
I hobby-code for DOS, partly because of nostalgia, but much also because it (specifically DOSBox, or DOSBox-X) is such a fantastic and stable virtual machine. No one is going to deprecate even some minor part of the API. And some emulators give you fun features like allowing any screen resolution to be set up to run in fullscreen on a modern monitor (exposed using standard VESA API inside of DOS).

There are some other retro computer or consoles that could probably be just as useful for this. But DOSBox (as well as QEMU+FreeDOS, for those that prefer that) are nice because they have fully open source implementation from the CPU-level up to the user utilities, so there is no need to mess with dodgy ROM downloads or such to get things working.

erremerre
What do you hobby code? Can we have a glance at it?
grg0
I have it on my to-do list to install FreeDOS on bare metal to set up a retro gaming box. Tried once, but for some reason the installer failed writing to disk. Anyway, if anyone is making new FreeDOS games, I'll gladly pay for them, and it'll give me an excuse to go down that avenue again.
dlcarrier
If enabling CSM in your BIOS isn't an option or isn't enough for FreeDOS, there is a translation layer that can get it to run on UEFI hardware: https://github.com/FlyGoat/CSMWrap
grg0
That had not occurred to me and I'm also not sure. FreeDOS was able to boot just fine into the live environment. It was the disk part that failed.
1313ed01
OK, I just posted a comment saying FreeDOS will no longer run on hardware because of lack of BIOS support, but that might change things I guess. Hope it can be made to work.

Another big problem for FreeDOS is the lack of sound card support. I do not know if anyone has solved that yet.

coolcoder613
For old DOS games and programs, there is this: https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU
jabl
(Not development in C)

I've used FreeDOS for doing BIOS updates. In the pre-UEFI days it was common for manufacturers to provide BIOS updates as a DOS executable, apparently with the expectation that the customer would be able to dig up some old MS-DOS disk somewhere.

I suppose nowadays there isn't much use for that anymore thanks to doing FW updates via UEFI capsules. Though at least on the Linux side (LVFS/fwupd) it seems most PC clone vendors aren't on board yet.

unnouinceput
Almost zero, the non-zero ones are about supporting legacy software/hardware. Also I would not touch C on any DOS platform, since the great Turbo Pascal exists for it. Nothing else even compares to it.
kragen
MS-DOS was a reasonable bootloader for Linux and Windows 95; I imagine FreeDOS might be a better one if you wanted to do hobby OSDev. Historically you could get hard real time performance for things like controlling steppers from your parallel port under MS-DOS, but nowadays you'd just use Freeduino or an iCE40. Also maybe brushless motors.
1313ed01
FreeDOS is no good at all for booting anymore, since BIOS support is increasingly rare. No way to boot FreeDOS (or MS-DOS) from UEFI. And of course also no point in trying to run it on ARM or any other non-x86 CPU. Looks like the future for FreeDOS will be to run in virtual machines only. A bit sad, since running FreeDOS on the bare metal of a 21st century computer (even one from 10-20 years ago) has been a nice way to experience just how fast modern hardware is.
actuallyalys
I suppose there could be a use for programming for computers that would otherwise be ewaste, although I'm not sure how much ewaste is out there that can run DOS but not, say, Linux or a BSD. Lots has already been trashed or recycled, and my impression is that retrocomputing enthusiasts are thinning out the market as well.
nineteen999
We were recycling e-waste computers back in the 1990's for community groups and disadvantaged users running Linux with full X desktops, internet connectivity (sometimes via multiple dialup modems with EQL load balancing!)

https://www.computerbank.org.au/ <- charity my then partner and I started at the time. Still going strong after all these years, even though she passed away a few years ago.

This item has no comments currently.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

j
Next story
k
Previous story
Shift+j
Last story
Shift+k
First story
o Enter
Go to story URL
c
Go to comments
u
Go to author

Navigation

Shift+t
Go to top stories
Shift+n
Go to new stories
Shift+b
Go to best stories
Shift+a
Go to Ask HN
Shift+s
Go to Show HN

Miscellaneous

?
Show this modal