Can MS-DOS Run on a New Modern PC 2024?

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The latest official release of MS-DOS is 6.22. What you have here is an unofficial build from a newer version ripped from Windows 9x builds. And you are correct, the BIOS is emulating the keyboard, mouse and storage. Without emulation nothing would work.

The out of memory issue is probably mostly because you were not using a memory manager and didn't load system and drivers into high memory. Games like Wing Commander need nearly 600KB of the 640KB base memory. I remember having about 4-5 config.sys and autoexec.bat configurations to be able to play everything I could throw at my PC. The most I got was like 612KB free memory but that had nothing more loaded than DOS itself, keyboard, mouse and soundcard initialisation. None of the extras that would make a DOS environment more comfortable. Fun times!

One thing to mention is that motherboards that only suport EFI booting are coming out now. As soon as legacy booting is removed completely; you will not be able to use dos anymore at all on these machines. There are already some laptops out there that can't run dos because of this.

In all fairness, getting "Out of memory" errors is part of normal DOS operation and very common with period-correct DOS machines. Real mode DOS programs are restricted to conventional memory, which is the first 640KB of RAM, and most drivers are also loaded there by default. This is why newer games worked, as they are protected mode (32-bit) software and are able to use extended memory. Just like back in the day, setting up an MS-DOS machine requires a lot of memory management tweaking to free up as much conventional memory as possible. The first common trick HIMEM.SYS (and most XMS memory managers) tries is to use some trickery to load part of the system in HMA (which is a region of memory just above the first megabyte). For compatibility with the original PC, real-mode segment+offset addresses that cross the 1MB boundary wrap arout to the beggining of the memory, but that can be disabled on demand, allowing an extra 64kb of RAM to be use. According to the startup messages HIMEM.SYS was failing to enable that, you might've had more luck with XMGR.SYS. The other trick are UMBs (upper memory blocks). Normally conventional memory is restricted to 640KB, followed by a 384KB addressing space reserved to be mapped to hardware devices (like video ram). EMM386.EXE (and some other memory managers) can scan the upper memory area, find address ranges that are not used by any hardware, and map regular RAM there. DOS can then move parts of itself and load some drivers there, freeing up portions of conventional memory. Since enabling UMBs in DOS setup prevented it from booting, we can assume EMM386.EXE has compatibility issues with newer machines. Using JemmEx (the same memory manager FreeDOS uses by default) could remedy that. One other thing is that your unnoficial distribution of MS-DOS 7.1 loads DOSLFN by default. That can cause some software to believe they are running inside Windows (as DOS isn't supposed to support long file names). This is what probably prevented AIDA16 from running. FreeDOS ships with more modern memory managers, both HMA and UMBs are enabled and working normally and it loads very few drivers by default, so you were getting 618kb of memory out of the box. Sadly I did not see a "mem" output from your MS-DOS install, but it was probably below 520KB, as Duke Nukem didn't work.

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Getting the sound to work is also somewhat possible if you either get lucky and your sound hardware has a compatible driver, or you get a PCI SoundBlaster card. Using DosBox is still far more convenient.

I think the green flickering is due to non SVGA compliance in the video bios. i bet something like sci-tech display doctor would fix that. i cant remember the name of it, but i recall some programs (mostly games) coming with some basic SVGA driver that was developed using DD code.

Seeing those games again made me smile! Thank you!

nice job! I use PCem to emulate my old pc from the late 90's. So far I haven't found anything I can't run on it. Not as cool as getting dos to work on modern hardware, but perhaps more functional and with full sound support, unlike other virtual pc programs.

Been a PC tech guy since DOS 3.3. Neatest thing I'm seeing here is that DOS 7 has a startup logo!

Do you ever use MS-DOS? P.S. I made a mistake. 7.1 is not the latest version and not official. The latest official version is 6.22. Wikipedia misled me. Also may you notice a grammar error at 3:51 “Congulations”

Very impressive and out of box thinking. Great!

Amazing channel, Bro! Thanks! of course i used DOS for a long time! Do you remenber Warcraft Orcs & Humans?

Awesome videos man. :)

Great work

Can you try Windows NT4/2000? Old NT Kernel-Based Windows don't seem to work well with BIOS emulation in Modern UEFI.

Back in the day I had to run an included expanded memory utility to get some of those games to work. Just type in memaker at c: prompt, if I remember correctly. I also remember some of those games really required a soundcard to work nicely, kind of like video cards today. Wondering if one of those cheep USB SoundBlaster cards would work in DOS? One worked for me in XP playing win 98 games.