Hi all,

I am planning on setting up a retro machine with DOS on it for playing older games, but here are my questions:

1. Er.. a but embarrassing as it is, I don't know how to install DOS - if it helps I plan on installing it on an old Compaq Pentium II with CD and floppy drives, and the hard drive itself will be formatted first.

2. I have a few games here on GOG that run through DosBox, will I be able to use them on it if I can get it working?

3. slightly offtopic, but as at the moment I have been using Microsoft Word 5.5 on my Windows XP laptop (kinda like a novelty thing, you know), I was wondering - is there any way to be able to print from it? I have a printer on the network, not quite sure how it is configured but I am able to successfully print over the network from my laptop, so the wireless connection is already there.

Thanks everyone in advance,

sv

Find (or make) a DOS installation floppy and boot from it, I suppose? Shouldn't be too hard; it's not a very complex installation, after all. Yes. You may however need to fiddle around with all that extended memory, sound card interrupts, dos4gw and other lovely configuration stuff… shudders. "M$"? Seriously?
XP should be able to handle network printers (Control Panel, Printers, Add or something), and that should be enough even for Word 5.5. Hard to guarantee this, but I'm thinking it shouldn't be a problem.

I'd recommend looking into http://www.freedos.org/ it should allow for you to install whatever you want and have it run as it would have originally. But with some added improvements.

Getting games from here to there should only involve copying the files as DOS games were self contained in their own directory and as such shouldn't take much work to get them functioning.

IIRC you shouldn't have to do too much configuration file editing as the RAM should be properly handled these days with the appropriate amount of lowmem available.

There isn't any advantage in having a "real" DOS machine over using DOSBox, imho. Apart from feeling cool, probably. ;) But practically, using DOSBox is superior in almost every way

1. DOS comes with install floppies. You insert the floppy in the drive and boot the machine. You may have to put the floppy on top of your boot order in the BIOS, though older mainboards should be configured this way already.

2. Probably yes, though compatibility will be worse than with DOSBox. You might not be able to get all games working.

3. It might be possible, but I'm skeptical whether there's a wireless network driver for DOS, and a printer driver for a modern printer. It will probably depend on how old the hardware is; the older the better (for compatibility) in this case.

Oh, wait, Word 5.5 is a DOS version. Well, all bets are off there.

I actually missed the part in the OP about the (apparently other) laptop which runs XP. I may have accidentally been right though. ;) But I'm actually not sure which kind of drivers would be needed for a DOS program running in Windows XP.

I've done some printing from DOS under XP, but it was so long ago I don't remember much about it. I do think it was relatively painless to get it just working, but any additional stuff like using compressed fonts etc. had to be handled with some external utility.

So just burn the FreeDOS iso onto a CD and make sure boot order is set to use cd drive first? I didn't really clarify in my first post, but I have two separate machines - one is a really old Compaq with Pentium II, floppy drive and cd drive (I don't know much else about it) and the other is a fairly modern business type laptop that I am using since I don't have a gaming PC (with XP on it).

So are you saying that I would need to install DOS drivers to get a DOS program running on XP to print, yes?

Regarding those, you might as well prepare to be disappointed as a lot of GOG's DOS games have some CD file trickery involved. I don't think that'll go over well if at all with the real DOS.