Last summer we took a look at FreeDOS as part of the Daily Drivers series, and found a faster and more complete successor to the DOS of old. The sojourn into the 16-bit OS wasn’t perfect though, as we couldn’t find drivers for the 2010-era network card on our newly DOS-ified netbook. Here’s [Inkbox] following the same path, and bringing with it a fix for that networking issue.
The video below is an affectionate look at the OS alongside coding a TRON clone in assembler, and it shows a capable environment within the limitations of the 16-bit mode. The modern laptop here can’t emulate a BIOS as it’s UEFI only, and after trying a UEFI-to-BIOS emulator with limited success, he hits on a different approach. With just enough Linux to support QEMU, he has a lightweight and extremely fast x86 BIOS platform with the advantage of legacy emulation of network cards and the like.
The point of Daily Drivers is wherever possible to use real hardware and not an emulator, as it’s trying to be the machine you’d use day to day. But we can see in a world where a BIOS is no longer a thing it becomes ever more necessary to improvise, and this approach is better than just firing up an emulator from a full-fat Linux desktop. If you fancy giving it a try, it seems less pain than the route we took.
You can read our look at FreeDOS 1.4 here.
FreeDOS logo: Bas Snabilie for the FreeDOS Project, CC BY 2.5.