Having a separate DOS hard drive on a year 2000 main board

[Boojakascha]

Hello

 

I have built a Windows 98SE gaming PC. It runs very fine and I can play all the games I want, except West Phaser and Crazy Shot. These are strict DOS games, and they run bad from DOS mode of Windows 98SE.

 

I had the idea of inserting a second HD into the PC, from which I would boot if necessary. This one would contain an version of DOS of the needed era.

 

The main board is form the year 2000 though. The CPU is a Pentium III. Is it feasibly, or is the plan absurdly impossible? Did someone else tried something similar? I am afraid that DOS wont work with any component on my whole main board, but I don't have any experience in performing such a crude down grade.

 

With kind regards

Ben

[Osgeld]

Onboard cards like sound may have an issue unless dos drivers exist

 

As far as dos working I have it installed on a secondary hard drive on a 3 core phenom 2 I have to have my sata in legacy mode and it doesn't see the 4 gigs of ram network or sound but otherwise functions and That's a 2008 era machine

Edited October 2, 2017 by Osgeld

[Boojakascha]

Onboard cards like sound may have an issue unless dos drivers exist

 

As far as dos working I have it installed on a secondary hard drive on a 3 core phenom 2 I have to have my sata in legacy mode and it doesn't see the 4 gigs of ram network or sound but otherwise functions and That's a 2008 era machine

 

Yes, I expected most cards stop functioning.

 

Ha, that's darn new! You give me hope, kind Sir!! =)

 

Do you swap cables manually, or just simply alter boot priority in bios? (to choose OS)

[Osgeld]

nah its got a popup so if you hit F11 during post it brings up a menu letting you choose, that machine is what I do all my retro puter fartin around with so I have that and one of those IDE slide out caddy's, so if I need to bootstrap a hard drive without other drive support I can just pop it in the caddy, power on F11 and MS-DOS

 

often when I make up a retro puter to put up for sale it starts with a old mothboard and maybe some ram, good luck ... and I am not spending money on a case etc till I see a post

 

to give you a little more hope I am selling a pentium II/3 era 98 machine, and when I installed its integrated Cmedia sound card software it added an entry into autoexec.bat with the usual set blaster command, its really on the newer XP era machines that dos support for at least sound kind of drops off the map

Edited October 2, 2017 by Osgeld

[7800fan]

Doesn't Windows 98 still depend on DOS to boot? Disable auto booting of Windows (usually in autoexec.bat delete win) and you should boot to DOS mode. Or better yet, make 2 separate autoexec.bat file. One for booting into Windows, one with DOS mouse driver (if needed), sound card settings, etc and when you need to switch mode, rename the autoexec.bat to autoexec.win and rename autoexec.dos to autoexec.bat.

 

I had to do this long ago to play Ultima 7 games. It does not like emm386 at all so I had to make a version that only used the default 640k RAM.

[Boojakascha]

nah its got a popup so if you hit F11 during post it brings up a menu letting you choose, that machine is what I do all my retro puter fartin around with so I have that and one of those IDE slide out caddy's, so if I need to bootstrap a hard drive without other drive support I can just pop it in the caddy, power on F11 and MS-DOS

 

often when I make up a retro puter to put up for sale it starts with a old mothboard and maybe some ram, good luck ... and I am not spending money on a case etc till I see a post

 

to give you a little more hope I am selling a pentium II/3 era 98 machine, and when I installed its integrated Cmedia sound card software it added an entry into autoexec.bat with the usual set blaster command, its really on the newer XP era machines that dos support for at least sound kind of drops off the map

Wow, good to know! Thanks a lot!

 

Doesn't Windows 98 still depend on DOS to boot? Disable auto booting of Windows (usually in autoexec.bat delete win) and you should boot to DOS mode. Or better yet, make 2 separate autoexec.bat file. One for booting into Windows, one with DOS mouse driver (if needed), sound card settings, etc and when you need to switch mode, rename the autoexec.bat to autoexec.win and rename autoexec.dos to autoexec.bat.

 

I had to do this long ago to play Ultima 7 games. It does not like emm386 at all so I had to make a version that only used the default 640k RAM.

It does! As you said it works with a lot of games. However, there are two games from 1988 not running properly. So I resort to an older DOS. I start fishing with DOS 6.22

[ckrtech]

Hey what is your status on this? I am curious about why you needed an older DOS rather than a slower clock speed.

[Boojakascha]

Hey what is your status on this? I am curious about why you needed an older DOS rather than a slower clock speed.

 

Thanks ckrtech

I have all parts ready (presumably, until I discover something is missing). In the mean time I tried with the DOS of a Windows 95 machine (compaq, everthing original, nothing fiddled by me). It gave me the same result as with Windows 98SE's DOS. Especially Crazy Shot is hard to run. This weekend I won't be able to continue. The soonest next weekend, but I will see.

 

In the Windows 98SE PC I swapped the apr. 500 MHz CPU for a apr. 1 GHz CPU just for the LOLs and so far none of the games which are of interest to me are affected. I think I am lucky and all the games that intrigue me are made independent from clock speed.

Edited November 4, 2017 by Boojakascha

[Osgeld]

games being clock locked to the speed of the CPU pretty much died once they started putting 7mhz 8086's in computers, like old CGA era games, almost everything else uses the vblank of the video card

[Boojakascha]

games being clock locked to the speed of the CPU pretty much died once they started putting 7mhz 8086's in computers, like old CGA era games, almost everything else uses the vblank of the video card

 

"pretty much died" and "almost" is the perfect form to put it, as there were some very, very few exceptions =)

Edited November 4, 2017 by Boojakascha

[Keatah]

I thought that happened 5 or so years later. I could be mistaken however.

[Boojakascha]

Sorry for digging out old posts but I have an update:

I have my gaming rig now complete with multiple floppy drives and hard drives, from all of which I choose and connect before booting the computer, allowing me to enter e certain configuration for a certain epoch.

 

The lesson learned: The Windows 9X DOSs doesn't seem to be less compatible to the "real" DOSs. If you have DOS problems, better start fiddling with your graphics card and or sound card. However it will be your sound card's fault though^^

I don't regret this lesson, it was very exiting installing DOS from floppies and then putting Windows 3.1 over it =) Wasn't that pleased for a long time.