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Operating Systems

Hobbyist Builds a Modern System That Still Runs MS-DOS (yeokhengmeng.com) 15

Posted by EditorDavid from the back-to-the-future dept.
He's the long-time Slashdot reader who installed Linux on a 1993 PC — and then installed a 1994 version of MS-DOS on a modern Thinkpad X13. (And somewhere along the way, he even built a ChatGPT client for DOS...)

But in a new blog post, yeokm1 reveals "I recently built myself a PC," salvaging parts from a previous desktop system to bootstrap an upgrade. And "I decided to build one with the ability to still reach back into the past to run MS-DOS..."

The result? A Ryzen 5 7600 and GeForce 4060 Ti system, but with a floppy drive, optical drive, Sound Blaster card, serial, parallel and PS/2 ports — that runs MS-DOS. The fact that a 30-year-old MS-DOS 6.22 can still work well enough on such a modern hardware is testament to the efforts made by the industry to ensure good x86 PC backward compatibility. AMD, Nvidia and Asus deserve to be commended on their efforts here.

I'm also impressed that the modern Nvidia Geforce 4060 Ti still supports some legacy video BIOS modes to a usable level although this is not complete. I didn't document in this blog post but brief tests with other VESA modes and resolutions didn't work so well. I wonder how long more this amount of x86 PC backward-compatibility will continue to last though... It definitely feels like the end is near.
Their blog post includes a video about their system. (And yes, it plays Doom.) But their ultimate goal is to use it to play modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Flight Simulator 2020 (as well as the upcoming Flight Simulator 2024) "at reasonably good settings and performance. (And also to experiment with light machine-learning workloads, do basic video editing, run virtual machines.)

After successfully building their DOS-running system, they asked ChatGPT what it thought. Would the system's specs be powerful enough to handle the 30-year-old operation system? And ChatGPT confidently replied:

"Neither the Ryzen 5 7600 nor the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is designed to run DOS natively. DOS is an older operating system that was primarily used on x86 architecture from the late 20th century, and modern hardware like the Ryzen 5 7600 and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti are not compatible with DOS due to their 64-bit architecture and lack of necessary drivers to interface correctly with DOS, which relied on much older technology..."

yeokm1's blog post concludes: "I think I just proved ChatGPT wrong :P"

Hobbyist Builds a Modern System That Still Runs MS-DOS More | Reply

Hobbyist Builds a Modern System That Still Runs MS-DOS

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  • Maybe he needs to push the Turbo button. But either way I'd like to see a Beowulf cluster of these.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      And now he can now run TSR programs on it! Boy did I have fun making those.
      (terminate and stay resident)

      • And now he can now run TSR programs on it! Boy did I have fun making those. (terminate and stay resident)

        The fact that you felt the need to explain what TSR stands for makes me feel really fucking old... :-|

  • Technically ChatGPT is correct: modern PCs by default come with EFI which will not run MS-DOS in any shape or form.

    What about CSM though? It will probably work but MS-DOS doesn't support AHCI, thus your disk drives will be invisible to it. OK, if your BIOS is powerful/old enough, you can enable IDE/ATAPI. Now MS-DOS doesn't support USB, so no USB keyboard or mouse for you. Still there must be PCI-E adapters for both IDE and PS/2.

    As for the GPU, MS-DOS requires so little, I don't see any issues as long a

    • If you're going to be technical, then get it right. They didn't ask if modern hardware could run the hardware by default. You are thus technically incorrect, which is the worst kind of incorrect.

    • The biggest issue with applications from that era is that many of them have hard limits in terms of how fast your CPU runs and they will simply crash or misbehave if the speed/frequency is too high, e.g. check this thread [stackexchange.com].

      If we are talking about GUI, e.g. Windows 9x is coded incorrectly, is extremely unstable or doesn't work at all. There [kennedysoftware.ie] are patches [github.com] to fix these issues though but they may not always work.

  • UEFI (Score:2)

    by evanh ( 627108 )

    Doesn't the PC implementation of UEFI initially boot similar to MSDOS? I mean it still keeps the files on a BIOS-like FAT32 partition ahead of the GPT.
    Ie: The legacy hardware is actually still used to get the modern OSes booted.

    • No. It doesn't.

      Modern-ish BIOS systems relied on the Master Boot Record (or the Partition Boot Record) which contained a small 218 byte reserved area outside of the filesystem for raw code to be written that would locate and load the second stage bootloader for the installed OS. (FYI: There are other formats out there, the classical one on Wikipedia allows for 446 bytes of raw code.) The reason for this size limitation is because it needed to fit inside a single sector so the BIOS wouldn't need to impleme

  • I wonder how long more this amount of x86 PC backward-compatibility will continue to last though... It definitely feels like the end is near.

    That's basically what emulators, or perhaps to some extent also VMs, will end up being useful for.

    While building an actual physical machine that works to do this is really neat, it's not (or will not be, as he suggest) practical - for example I still 'run' an Amiga computer, but through emulation; having a physical Amiga would be neat to have, but there'd be all the extra physical space needed (and costs!) for it, and in the end it wouldn't really enhance my experience much of 'using' the Amiga (in fact I c

  • In the interaction, the user challenges an LLM-generated statement that modern hardware like the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics card are not compatible with MS-DOS due to architectural differences and lack of necessary drivers. The assistant initially concurs with this statement, providing technical reasons such as the 64-bit architecture of modern CPUs, the absence of 16-bit real mode support, and the lack of DOS-compatible drivers for contemporary GPUs. The user then i
  • AI is braindead nonsense.
    In other news: Getting modern hardware to boot MSDOS isn't novel either, but even if you do, it's not like you can do anything too terribly useful with it in that state. You're not going to find MSDOS versions of things like graphics card or network card drivers for modern versions of those, and older versions of those are either going to be on ISA-bus or parallel-PCI bus cards, so you won't be able to integrate them into the system anyway unless you have some sort of bridge from P

  • ... it also must be able to run MS-DOS as all Windows systems first boot into MS-DOS then start Windows as a real or protected mode "application". This only changed with Windows NT which was able to run on "non-IBM PCs". So unless it's a special Windows NT only computer, for example with a PPC, Alpha or ARM CPU, MS-DOS should run.

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