Hi guys, I'm going to be restricted to a dual core 1.6ghz computer for the next year. So, I'm trying to get FreeDOS running so that I can run games that my computer isn't fast enough to run via emulation.

I have 4 primary partitions on the computer so I can't just add a new partition and the 4th partition is a rescue partition which I don't feel comfortable changing to an extended partition or deleting.

Does anybody happen to know of a good tutorial or way of installing FreeDOS directly to a thumbdrive for use? All the ones I've found so far are for using the thumbdrive to install to the computer which isn't what I need.

This is an entirely pointless and very complicated endeavour.

I had dual core 1.6 for 3 years. It is fast enough for everything you want to do with emulation.

Obviously, I don't agree. I couldn't get LBA running on this machine due to it being quite slow and extremely choppy. The GOG system requirements look to be fairly accurate at 1.8ghz. And that ought to be running just fine in FreeDOS as the original requirements are pretty low.

Eh. It's your frustration. Have fun.

I'll point out here that I do have a machine that can run these games, it's just not going to be available to me for quite a while and I'd rather be able to play as many of my games as possible while away.

Yes, you can.
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-bare-metal.htm

Remember to backup first (best on some external media). You can use BIBM for that purpose because it has in-built imaging tool - it can be run from removable media. They also have a good forum and tutorials (read about EMBR - this is important if you want to have 4+ primaries).

I tried this a while back, it is a nightmare, and not a smooth one. The biggest problem is drivers - they just don't exist for modern hardware.

I could barely get it to recognise the hard-drives, let alone the graphic and soundcards, so gave up in the end.

EDIT: I'll put it this way - if your videocard doesn't support VESA (which is highly unlikely) then it's not going to work.

DOUBLE EDIT: It may be worth trying an old copy of VDMSound - http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/ - It may be faster (but a lot less stable) than DOSBox.

TRIPLE EDIT: Just tried it myself...it's slower than DOSBox on my netbook and VESA modes are horribly broken, so I wouldn't bother...

QUADRUPLE EDIT: A few more things to try to speed up DOSBox - first of all, swap out the DOS/4GW extended with DOS32a - http://dos32a.narechk.net/index_en.html - this is a pretty big speedup.

Also, and this will depend on how far you're willing to go, try compiling DOSBox from sourcecode on the machine you're going to be using - it'll produce a DOSBox.exe that's tuned more or less specifically to your machine, and you could (but not definite) see a speed improvement.

Those didn't work with 1.1, but they did work with 1.0 and I don't really have to have 1.1 at this stage.

The main problem I was having was that nearly all the search results were for using a USB disk to install to the HDD, which is not what I was wanting to do. I'll try this out. If the disk performance is insufficient I can move it to my HDD as a plan B. I don't expect that to be a problem as a lot of the DOS games were designed to run on drives much slower than the average thumb drive. Now that I've managed to get it working on a thumb drive, I'll try this as a plan B if the performance isn't sufficient.


And thanks to all that helped out, hopefully this will work better than emulation.

You've intrigued me there... how does that work?

You'll have to speak to someone more knowledgeable about these things than me to find the truth, but as far as I understand it, it optimises it specifically for your processor. I know I saw a not-entirely-insignificant improvement when I compiled the .exe for my atom-based netbook.

More details here - http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/BuildingDOSBox#Building_your_own_version_of_DOSBox

And I reiterate what I stated above for the OP - you'll probably have no problem getting FreeDOS to run in itself, but good luck getting sound and VESA working. I'd be exceptionally surprised if you could get LBA working.



I'm still also quite surprised you're getting such bad performance on such a PC anyway - LBA works flawlessly on my netbook, and arguably the Atom processor is extremely weak (and the less said about the onboard Intel GMA the better). Are you positive it's not just a bad dosbox configuration?

It seems to be a bit dodgy, for some reason when I just installed it to steal the game files it's behaving strangely. The video clips are like slide shows, but the gameplay is appears to be playable this time around.

If it's a matter of something having just changed in the mean time, I'm fine with that, it just surprises me a bit because a game like this shouldn't benefit from running on a dual core processor.

That's because the default config GOG supplied is, to put it mildly, a load of crap. Adjust the cores in the conf file to be Dynamic and the cycles to Max and it should be a lot smoother.