I would like to start playing games through MS-DOS or FreeDOS because my laptop has trouble running DOSBox with some games. Daggerfall and Blood are a special kind of the pain in the butt. I have to change the cycles in game depending on what's going on. If there is a video I have to lower it or it stutters and I have to raise it in game and adjust as I play because it alternates between sound stutters and choppy gameplay.

I got the idea to dual boot with MS-DOS since I play so many DOS games and I really can't run many Windows games on my old laptop. I feel it might be better purposed as a MS-DOS machine for gaming and having Windows for browsing the web.

I have never used MS-DOS before. The earliest OS I remember using was XP. I really don't have much of an idea how to use DOS at all.

I managed to make a USB for booting into FreeDOS because MS-DOS wouldn't work for some reason. FreeDOS would be fine as long as it works.

Can someone help me with learning to use it? I can't seem to get any games to work. Daggerfall said it needed to CD, which really has nothing to do with DOS, but when I tried SimCity I got a message saying that it couldn't write to the C Drive (I think that's what the message was). I've tried three or four games and haven't had any success yet. It seems that this isn't a very popular thing to do because I didn't find much on it through Google searches. I'd appreciate any tips on getting this to work and sorry for the long winded post.

I would say use FreeDOS. FreeDOS SHOULD be able to do just about everything MS-DOS does, except it isn't owned by MS. If something refuses to work with it and does work with MS-DOS then you should use MS-DOS.

But i'm sure MS doesn't regulate or care how much MS-DOS is shared or copied or packaged... but they still do own the rights for another 80 something years...

For Blood, I'd recommend just using BloodCM if possible, if you don't mind a few minor issues or changes. Current version supports 3 of the episodes:

http://www.moddb.com/games/bloodcm/downloads/bloodcm-v082015

From what I've read it seems like that.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I looked up MS-DOS on ebay to see how much it's going for and it's not awful, but if free works just as well then that's what I'll go for.

Thanks! I've heard of BloodCM but that was a long time ago and I think I read about problems with it. It looks like it might be a bit better now. I freaking love Blood. It's actually one of my favorite first person shooters. I still haven't beat the expansion, but I've gone through the main game a few times.

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out and see how it goes.

So you want to play old dosgames without soundsupport? Because I doubt you can find sounddrivers for your hardware.
I also don't think a dosgame will run properly on anything faster than a Pentium 2.

You might want to fiddle in the Dosbox .conf file and see what's causing the stutters, trying a different video output can make a lot of difference in some games and I think buildengine games need to have core=dynamic.

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf

FreeDOS should be fine and it supports "modern" things like USB mass storage, which MS-DOS never did.
No matter which DOS you use, you will most likely encounter problems with sound in your DOS games, because pretty much no modern sound hardware is compatible with the good old sound blaster (which was pretty much the de facto standard for sound in the DOS days).

I doubt you'd need to go as far as Ebay... most floppy disks had most of what you needed for the MS-DOS on it, yeah maybe they didn't contain all the utilities but you mostly needed the 200k boot file and you basically had MS-DOS. Half of DOS programs were using the BIOS hooks and calls, which provided a lot of functionality. MS-DOS at it's base, is the command prompt, and access controls to the FAT16 filesystem.

I could probably refer you to some shareware game compilation that includes DosBox, FreeDos and Win3.11 all ready to go, minor adjustments needed with the batch files and configuration files to run most games but otherwise ready to go. Hmmm maybe... When i say Maybe, i know some BIOS motherboards would take a thumb-drive that's plugged in before the start and just attach it as a hard-drive so you COULD use MS-DOS with USB drives, but it wasn't technically supported by actual drivers.

I prefer FreeDOS to MS-DOS, and I recommend to use it. If you need a very good DOS Extender, use DOS/32.

That would be appreciated. You can PM me if you don't want to post them on here. I appreciate the help. I'm completely lost on this stuff. I just recently started messing with different operating systems so I'm not well versed in these things yet.

My physical DOS box is running FreeDOS. Nice to have support for some modern things like FAT32, for instance. Compatibility is good but I recall there were also some problems. Frontier comes to mind, but the details escape me.

However, you're going to face severe problems regardless of your pick. For one, your laptop is probably way too fast. Some games will be okay with this, others will just fast-forward to game over without giving you much room to interact with them.

You probably won't be having any sound. DOS games talked directly to particular kinds of sound hardware, and your laptop doesn't have any of these. I used to run MS-DOS in a semi-modern computer with a SoundBlaster Live! card, for which there were drivers that emulated a legacy SoundBlaster in a hardware-assisted way. Even this didn't work with everything, and I have some doubts you'll find anything like that for an integrated sound chip..

Well that sucks. I've tried running the games I have problems with through Lubuntu as well, thinking maybe a lighter OS would help the game run better, but it was even worse than on Windows XP. So the only option I have is to buy an old computer with MS-DOS on it?

Does MS-DOS even run on modern hardware? What's more, in order to run MS-DOS, you'd have to have a floppy drive, which most computers don't have and I'm not even sure that USB floppy drives are still manufactured, assuming they'd even work wtih MS-DOS in the first place.

What Hedwards and others said. If you want to run real MS-DOS, you should really have MS-DOS era PC hardware. which mainly means some 1996 or before desktop PC with Soundblaster 16 sound card etc. Laptops and MS-DOS don't really mix, at least as far as gaming goes. DOS games expect certain kind of (desktop) hardware, and DOSBox emulates those for you nicely, something that real MS-DOS doesn't.

Also, if your main issue was how some game needs different system speed at different points, why do you think running real MS-DOS would fix that? Then you would be fixed to certain speed all the time (either too slow or too fast), without DOSBox's ability to change the system speed on the fly.

Also. I actually ended up having much better success running my old DOS games on a modern system running DOSBox. than my real old MS-DOS desktop PC. It may be because different DOS games prefer certain CPU speeds etc., and DOSBox can better cover them all.

You mentioned Blood and Daggerfall, and they both run fine for me in DOSBox (on modern hardware). For Daggerfall, use the DaggerfallSetup_en. Or maybe the GOG version runs fine too.

Anything before 2000 should be able to handle MS-DOS, those Windows OSes still made heavy use of it behind the scenes. IIRC, it was even possible to have Win ME boot directly into DOS without the GUI at all.

Personally, I don't see much to be gained from buying such an old machine. They're not going to be appreciably cheaper than newer machines and the benefits of DOS over FreeDOS are probably not going to exist at the present time. FreeDOS has been in development for long enough that it probably does most, if not all, of what DOS did.

Now that I think about it, I think I'll install FreeDOS into a virtualbox and then set it to cover the whole screen.