Installing FreeDOS 1.3 in 86Box
Because why not?
I decided to make another tutorial on installing FreeDOS. This time instead of DOSBox-Staging we will install it inside of 86Box. Why would we do this? Well the short answer is why not? But the longer answer is: Accurate emulation!
Compared to DOSBox which can take some shortcuts, liberties or even due to it’s very nature approximate things. 86Box accurately emulates(or tries too) everything about the system. This has some downsides as you need rom files from the systems and it can be quite hardware intensive.
An example of that is an R9 5950x is essentially required to properly emulate a Pentium II @ 233mhz. So do be warned if you opt to use DOS this way depending on your setup you may not get desirable results. Fortunately emulating 486 CPU’s is quite a bit of a different story as they are vastly slower than their Pentium successors.
Another useful reason to use 86Box is that some things work better in proper emulation over DOSBox. Such as FreeBASIC! FreeBASIC’s built in graphics modes tend to crash after running inside of DOSBox. This has to do with a known issue with CWSDPMI.EXE and FreeBASIC. I am hoping they fix it someday though.
Some downsides to using 86Box though aside from the performance impact. Is that getting files to and from 86Box can be quite the pain. If you have a network card installed you could just use FTP or some other way to transfer data back and forth. Another alternative would be to make a CD/Floppy image and copy files to the Floppy/CD image and then just extract it out of the ISO.
I’ll definitely be covering a useful video on copying files back and forth in various ways in the future!
Sound is another reason to use 86Box over DOSBox aside from accurate emulation is sound. 86Box supports a significantly wider array of sound cards over DOSBox and it’s family(DOSBox-Staging and DOSBox-X). I enjoy having a working AWE32 sound card even though very few games ever supported it :(.
So all of this begs the million dollar question! Why do any of this?
Well quite frankly because it’s fun and it’s a great way to see how far computing have come and regressed.
Useful Links:
86Box - Awesome emulator for older hardware.
FreeDOS - Best version of DOS hands down ever!
FreeBasic - Great open source QuickBasic like language that still supports DOS!
Thank you for reading The Retro Dev! Please consider supporting us if you like our content.
Site * Forum * Odysee * YouTube * Merchandise