Minimal option for refining a vanilla DOS 6.22 install?

[Arkaium]

First off, this core and the fast progress it’s made are AMAZING. I got my MiSTer setup this past week and ao486 was one of my first stops and I cannot believe how simple and easy it is to zip around IMGs, VHDs, and ISOs.

While I’ve downloaded the Top 300 collection by Flynnsbit, I’m not really keen on using a launcher like Exodos. I love the experience of actually using DOS, the commands, recalling it all from my childhood. I’m ok with just one big VHD mounted to C and no secondary drive; it’s more like how I used to use my old system back in the day anyways.

I just want to find the easiest possible way to get a basic DOS 6.22 install up and running with CD, mouse, etc. So far I’ve been mounting the Top 300 1-0 boot drive and copying files over, but I’m basically having to check each one against what’s in the autoexec or config sys, and I’m still not sure I’ve gotten all the drivers that would work. SB Pro, for example. There are also three versions of CTMouse it seems, and I’m not sure if I should ge using 19, 20, or 21?

Basically, for those of us who want a more vanilla DOS experience but who would love to be able to quickly install drivers and maybe automate the editing of autoexec and config.sys, are there any Floppy images that are barebones, just what is needed?

If not, any recommendations on the best ways to make a floppy image? I haven’t setup the sharing with my PC; I copy over using WinSCP, and I’m not sure I want to get more elaborate than that, so a floppy that has just what I need is appealing. Or can I just duplicate a floppy like the Mister driver one floating around and format it within DOS and make that my “quick setup of a new VHD” disk?

Lastly, I tried to install DOS 7.1 (before I find out it’s actually not really an official DOS?), from a CD image on Archive dot com, and it doesn’t install? It gives me an error about the file system but I’ve almost certainly created the partition and formatted the drive within ao486, so I don’t know what the issue is? Is there a specific trick?

Excited to see how this core continues to evolve!

[Caldor]

The top 300 collection Flynnsbit has made is based on DOS 7.1 which is also why it has that nice boot logo. Its just a replacement for the Windows 98 boot image. I can recommend taking that and just not using the second VHD, then you should be able to use that for booting DOS games in general, manually from the DOS prompt, and it should give you different boot option for different memory configurations. I copied its boot settings to replace my own and added 4DOS to it instead of using DOS key and use that for booting in general. I think I just put REM around some of the last parts of the disk to stop it from trying to access the 2nd VHD with all the launcher stuff.

I now have made space enough to try out the top 300 games though which I am looking forward to doing, but then Cyberpunk 2077 got released and I am having a hard time getting out of that world again so I can try out some more DOS and other MiSTer stuff.

Another option is this floppy image I have made. It should be highly optimized and work for most games. Its a FreeDOS based boot disk so everything is open source, but that means it does support FAT32, high amounts of RAM, very large disks, CD drives and it also has boot options for different memory setups.

If you get DOS4GW errors you can either use DOS32A or try the 16MB option in the hardware RAM options as that should often fix DOS4GW errors. Turns out DOS4GW often just did not support more than 64MB in the early versions of it.
https://dionysus.dk/software/DOS/FreeDOS_Floppy.7z

The disk is compressed with 7zip. It is also setup to have DOS32A in its path, and there is a file manager called Volkov Commander. So you can use DOS32A or type VC anymore to use those tools. Volkov Commander is a Norton Commander close that is made in assembly I think it is, making it very small and efficient, but also its open source and can fit on a floppy

[Caldor]

I have yet to setup a DOS 6.22 with CD support. I have some without it though.

[Arkaium]

The top 300 collection Flynnsbit has made is based on DOS 7.1 which is also why it has that nice boot logo. Its just a replacement for the Windows 98 boot image. I can recommend taking that and just not using the second VHD, then you should be able to use that for booting DOS games in general, manually from the DOS prompt, and it should give you different boot option for different memory configurations. I copied its boot settings to replace my own and added 4DOS to it instead of using DOS key and use that for booting in general. I think I just put REM around some of the last parts of the disk to stop it from trying to access the 2nd VHD with all the launcher stuff.

I now have made space enough to try out the top 300 games though which I am looking forward to doing, but then Cyberpunk 2077 got released and I am having a hard time getting out of that world again so I can try out some more DOS and other MiSTer stuff.

Another option is this floppy image I have made. It should be highly optimized and work for most games. Its a FreeDOS based boot disk so everything is open source, but that means it does support FAT32, high amounts of RAM, very large disks, CD drives and it also has boot options for different memory setups.

If you get DOS4GW errors you can either use DOS32A or try the 16MB option in the hardware RAM options as that should often fix DOS4GW errors. Turns out DOS4GW often just did not support more than 64MB in the early versions of it.
https://dionysus.dk/software/DOS/FreeDOS_Floppy.7z

The disk is compressed with 7zip. It is also setup to have DOS32A in its path, and there is a file manager called Volkov Commander. So you can use DOS32A or type VC anymore to use those tools. Volkov Commander is a Norton Commander close that is made in assembly I think it is, making it very small and efficient, but also its open source and can fit on a floppy

It’s a good suggestion I guess I hadn’t thought to do that because it was only 100MB and I didn’t know how to make it larger while keeping everything. I wasn’t having luck mounting a secondary VHD just to install games to. I was trying to do an extended partition with logical DOS but maybe that was a mistake and the second one should be primary too? I saw where he has the text warning about “you need to mount a secondary VHD for games” in his autoexec so I could remove that if it gets annoying but the issue there is the capacity.

Freedos is a great idea. I worry about compatibility but that makes me more comfortable than using DOS 7.1, which seems to be some sort of Frankenstein of stuff developed out of China, right? Using win98 dos elements? I was surprised to find out it wasn’t official.

[Caldor]

You can just make a new bootable VHD. Here is a list of premade VHDs in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=981&p=8282&hilit=vhd+images#p8282

After they are partitioned, and I think all of these are already partitioned. If you format it with... I think its format d: -s -q it should become a system disk that is quick formattet. Assuming the disk you are formatting is drive d: with the c: drive being the disk you want to make bootable. Then you can copy over all the files from the 100mb disk... but you can also just use the 100mb disk as the boot disk. You can mount 4 at the same time after all.

[Arkaium]

You can just make a new bootable VHD. Here is a list of premade VHDs in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=981&p=8282&hilit=vhd+images#p8282

After they are partitioned, and I think all of these are already partitioned. If you format it with... I think its format d: -s -q it should become a system disk that is quick formattet. Assuming the disk you are formatting is drive d: with the c: drive being the disk you want to make bootable. Then you can copy over all the files from the 100mb disk... but you can also just use the 100mb disk as the boot disk. You can mount 4 at the same time after all.

Thanks for the advice, Caldor. It's actually not so much an issue of how to get a VHD ready to go, there's a boot floppy or two that works nicely for booting, fdisk'ing, and then formatting.

The bigger issue I have is that some OSes simply refuse to install.

DOS 7.1, using the WinWorldPC image (floppy and CD), refuses to install. It claims there's no FAT compatible file system to install into, despite FDISK showing the FS as being FAT16.

FreeDOS doesn't install; it claims it can't find the installation data then restarts.

I managed to install Windows 95 although after getting it running, I sort of wondered what the point was, since it's pushing the limits of what the FPGA can do, and most of the games I want to play run from pure DOS.

DOS 6.22 installs beautifully, and I think I have most of the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS stuff figured out, though I'm still not clear on the "SB Pro" drivers. I tried to install from the floppy but it doesn't let the install finish because it doesn't detect the 220 address correctly. I copied over the SBCTL driver from the Exo boot VHD and added it to CONFIG.SYS... is that enough to get SBPro or SB16 support?

Also, the OAKSYS CD driver is really slow, like painfully slow, compared to the floppy speed. Is this a limitation of the FPGA in general? Or are the other CD drivers faster?

It feels JUST on the cusp of being perfect for me, but I still run into too many things not installing inexplicably, and I'm not yet sure exactly why :-\ DOS 7.1, even unofficial, would be nice as it would let me use the 32GB VHD I created as a main all-in-one image, but I can't even find a boot disk now that let's me format the full thing. Maybe I can try formatting it in Win 95? My DOS 7.1 floppy, once booted, does not have FDISK. I tried to FDISK with the W95 floppy but it seemed to cap out at 2GB. Sigh.

At this point I'm just not sure exactly what I could be doing wrong, seeing others talking about DOS 7.1 installing fine, considering I've tried multiple images and no dice.

[Caldor]

But its not enough to boot from some floppy and use FDISK, you need to boot with the type of DOS you want to use on that disk, so you can use it to format the VHD as a bootable system disk. After that you can copy all the files.

I do not think there is any actual install disks for DOS 7.1, so it has to be done manually. DOS 7.1 is just part of Windows 98.

The only thing you need is his 100mb VHD expanded to have more space, or you could also just use other VHDs instead of his. Expanding it to have more space is a bit manual, but the process is as I tried to explain. Boot with his VHD, except not going into the launcher.

Then format another VHD you have prepared using the format command, but ensure its set to format it as a bootable system disk... and the quick option as it otherwise takes forever. Then copy all of his files to the new VHD and you got a DOS 7.1 VHD.

[Arkaium]

But its not enough to boot from some floppy and use FDISK, you need to boot with the type of DOS you want to use on that disk, so you can use it to format the VHD as a bootable system disk. After that you can copy all the files.

I do not think there is any actual install disks for DOS 7.1, so it has to be done manually. DOS 7.1 is just part of Windows 98.

The only thing you need is his 100mb VHD expanded to have more space, or you could also just use other VHDs instead of his. Expanding it to have more space is a bit manual, but the process is as I tried to explain. Boot with his VHD, except not going into the launcher.

Then format another VHD you have prepared using the format command, but ensure its set to format it as a bootable system disk... and the quick option as it otherwise takes forever. Then copy all of his files to the new VHD and you got a DOS 7.1 VHD.

Thanks for being so responsive, I'll give it a shot!

I had one final question I simply couldn't figure out the answer for. If I want to take a 2GB VHD and format it as an OS-less D: that's just for installing games, I do that as an extended partition with a logical DOS, right? I never could get it to work, maybe when I formatted I was missing a modifying option.

[Caldor]

I am not really sure what extended partitions are for, I actually use the same type for everything.

Pretty sure what makes the difference is when you format it, whether you make it a system partition or not. Also some types, like extended cannot be used as a bootable system partition.

[ash2fpga]

Some light reading on partitions:
https://www.rigacci.org/docs/biblio/onl ... /fdisk.htm
https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/ ... pes-1.html

IIRC, DOS 3.3 could only have up to 32mb partitions (FAT16). For example, if you had a 80mb hdd, you could have a 32mb primary partition (C:), but then an extended partition for the rest of the space. Then you could have another 32mb (D:) and 16mb (E:) logical partitions in the extended partition.

[Arkaium]

Some light reading on partitions:
https://www.rigacci.org/docs/biblio/onl ... /fdisk.htm
https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/ ... pes-1.html

IIRC, DOS 3.3 could only have up to 32mb partitions (FAT16). For example, if you had a 80mb hdd, you could have a 32mb primary partition (C:), but then an extended partition for the rest of the space. Then you could have another 32mb (D:) and 16mb (E:) logical partitions in the extended partition.

The scenario everyone mentions is slotting secondary VHDs in and out with different main VHDs, but that didn't seem to work for me last night, though I'm not entirely sure I wasn't mixing DOS versions and/or FAT16/32.

That said, it would be nice to know how best to format the second VHD (primary or extended) in order to be able to slot around between a few VHDs? I've settled on a 2GB DOS 6.22 setup, it just feels purest, and I'm slowly stealing the bits I want from the Flynnsbit Boot VHD.

I don't want to keep making threads and since folks are being so responsive here... I have a lot of the basics in my CONFIG.SYS, and Space Quest 3 and Space Quest 5 are running fine, but Space Quest 4 is giving me an error about running out of memory. Can't seem to find what I need to tweak to solve... Maybe I need to setup QEMM (haven't yet). Wanna do one of those fancy menu boots like the Flynnsbit one.

[ash2fpga]

I think extended partitions were only needed when the physical drive was larger than the max partition size.

To that end, I think using VHDs that fit into single partitions, and using primary partitions on all the drives would be simplest.

[Arkaium]

I think extended partitions were only needed when the physical drive was larger than the max partition size.

To that end, I think using VHDs that fit into single partitions, and using primary partitions on all the drives would be simplest.

Thank you. I think I just fundamentally misunderstood what primary meant. Could I have two primary partition drives, for example. Sounds like I can and should, which makes life a lot easier for me as I get to the point where I just want to install all my floppies and CDs onto a DOS 6.22 2GB VHD (I figure that's the most universal option, so I can potentially slot it in with later versions of DOS, maybe? I guess I'll find out).

Love this community, thanks for all the help. And I read elsewhere that maybe the order of my CONFIG.SYS is why I'm running out of memory for Space Quest 4, so I'm going to test reordering those lines a bit before trying QEMM or some such.

[ash2fpga]

Could I have two primary partition drives, for example.

It should work. I vaguely remember having two IDE drives at one point, both with primary partitions (and both set as active), and, I think, depending on which one I had hooked up to IDE-0 was the drive that the computer used as the boot device. Pretty sure this was in the days before you could choose boot order in the BIOS.

[flynnsbit]

I think extended partitions were only needed when the physical drive was larger than the max partition size.

To that end, I think using VHDs that fit into single partitions, and using primary partitions on all the drives would be simplest.

Thank you. I think I just fundamentally misunderstood what primary meant. Could I have two primary partition drives, for example. Sounds like I can and should, which makes life a lot easier for me as I get to the point where I just want to install all my floppies and CDs onto a DOS 6.22 2GB VHD (I figure that's the most universal option, so I can potentially slot it in with later versions of DOS, maybe? I guess I'll find out).

Love this community, thanks for all the help. And I read elsewhere that maybe the order of my CONFIG.SYS is why I'm running out of memory for Space Quest 4, so I'm going to test reordering those lines a bit before trying QEMM or some such.

Yup, FYI, my secondary IDE 0-1 Top 300 VHD actually has 2 partitions not 1 and they are both primary partitions. The stub partition is to trick dos in allocating a disk to it so I can take it back over and use it for a CD. Saved a bunch of script changes that expect the D: to be a CD drive.

top 300 vhd disks.PNG (22.64 KiB) Viewed 4762 times

[Caldor]

I think extended partitions were only needed when the physical drive was larger than the max partition size.

To that end, I think using VHDs that fit into single partitions, and using primary partitions on all the drives would be simplest.

Both should be primary and when switching between drives you have to reset each time you do. DOS 6.22 only supports up to 2gb drives. I think you could take one say 16gb VHD and then partition it into several 2gb VHD, but not sure if that would make sense.

But that is why I usually stick with DOS 7.1 and FreeDOS. They support drives up to 127gb in size. You can hot swap CDs though in the first CD drive and you can use the shared folder to just freely use the space on the SD card. But there might be read and write issues with that if you try to use the shared folder directly.

[pgimeno]

Lastly, I tried to install DOS 7.1 (before I find out it’s actually not really an official DOS?), from a CD image on Archive dot com, and it doesn’t install? It gives me an error about the file system but I’ve almost certainly created the partition and formatted the drive within ao486, so I don’t know what the issue is? Is there a specific trick?

No idea what the issue may be, because I don't know what image you got, but to install DOS 7.1:

a) Install Windows 95.
b) Disable the auto-starting of Windows.
c) Disable the Windows logo, and optionally the Windows "safe to turn off" image.

To accomplish (b) and (c), edit MSDOS.SYS (it's hidden and system, so unhide it if necessary) and ensure the [Options] section contains this:

Code: Select all

BootGUI=0
Logo=0

Additionally, rename or remove \WINDOWS\LOGOS.SYS (note: \LOGO.SYS is actually a BMP file with the loading screen, \WINDOWS\LOGOW.SYS is the "Please wait while Windows is shutting down" screen, and \WINDOWS\LOGOS.SYS is the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen). This way, when you type 'win' from DOS you can enter Windows, and when you shut down Windows, you will return to DOS.