Running Dos 6.22

I want to run Dos 6.22 on a PC to run old games and programs. I don't have our old 486 any more, will it run on an Intel Celeron chip and board

Sort of, but there are no drivers generally for most modern hardware. Most newer graphics cards will run in basic vga mode, but sound probably won't work at all (unless you have an ISA card). DOS uses the FAT16 file system, with a size limit of (I think) 2 GB.

The graphics and sound are coming straight off the main board, does that make a difference? I just check FAT16 does have an upper limit of 2GB. I'm probable better off looking for a old machine with everything in it.
Whats the story with emulators? How do they work, can you suggest one to run in Win XP PRO.

dosbox 0.70 was just released. It runs several games pretty well. There are a few graphical front ends for it, but noneof them support the new version yet. Heres a linky:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dosbox/DOSBox0.70-win32-installer.exe?download

Thanks for the link, looks like it'll do what I want. Is it possable to play multiplayer Doom over a wireless router with Dosbox on two laptops?

Dosbox will probably work. It's a significant degradation in speed, but if the game ran on an old dos pc, even with a significant speed loss, you'll probably be ok anyways.

Even if the sound and graphics are on board, they are probably still pci and unsupported in dos. If you really want, you can custom build a pc that will work decently well with dos. Get a 2 gb drive, an old trident or et4000 isa graphics card (pci may work? not sure), and an isa 16 bit sound blaster card. This should be reasonably easy to make work with dos. The modern cpus actually work fine, since they are backwards compatible.

I just loaded Doom on to the Celeron PC through cmd.com. It runs just a bit sluggish now and then. I haven't played this game in nearly 13 years!!

get doom legacy(Google it), its way better. Unless you are hardcore retro.

CrazyIrish said:

dosbox 0.70 was just released. It runs several games pretty well. There are a few graphical front ends for it, but noneof them support the new version yet. Heres a linky:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dosbox/DOSBox0.70-win32-installer.exe?download

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure the D-Fend beta works. Just install the latest release version and then download the beta .exe from the D-Fend site and replace the release exe with the beta.

It's pretty easy to configure and you can usually minimize any slowdowns from using dosbox (well, except with Tie Fighter ).

Also check out vdm sound. It allows a lot of games to run in winxp without have to emulate the enter dos machine, so its good for things that take too much of a speed hit from dosbox.

hmm, I wonder if using a virtual PC environment will do the trick. You can set up a DOS environment on a 'fake' hard drive, and the hardware is specified by the software (i.e. if you use a utility such as Virtual PC 2007 from M$, it emulates an older GFX card, whereas VMWare emulates a different older gfx card. You might find that since these [may] have DOS drivers, it actually performs better than on your real PC.

Normally, I have heard that Dosbox is the best bet. A virtual machine is not supposed to work as well and a dedicated platform can be hard to find.

If you want to do a dedicated machine then you REALLY need to go old school. Newer hardware would cause issues as mentioned previously. Also, some games will not like you if put on hardware faster than they expect.

Dosbox does have multiplayer by the way, so I hear. I haven't actually used that feature yet. In general, I use Dosbox for all my Dos gaming needs and the software does improve throughout time. For faster machines, the emulation overhead shouldn't be a huge issue.

Finally, look around for open source Dos programs. (I don't have much time right now) People have made free software that takes the data files from Dos and makes them work well in Windows with graphical and other improvements too. If that is the only Dos game you are interested in, it might be better just to get this solution.

Finally, while cmd.exe can run Dos applications... there is usually additional problems due to this. The most common ones are lack of sound, unusual video modes causing crashing, and finally the program simply not working. If it serves your needs... great! If not, there are the solutions above.