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Favorite DOS Applications

Lutiana

Lutiana

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So I have been doing a lot of googleling for useful DOS apps out there, and have found there is a plethora of them, so many in fact it is hard to choose.

So I decided that we needed a Thread for information purposes, so I challenge everyone out there to post their must have, favorite and fun applications here, preferably with a URL on where to get them and indicate if they will run on pre-386 machines.

Eventually we can turn this into a page for our wiki, which I am sure Terry I will like, and this may become Sticky material.

Perhaps we can build a shareware CD of the all the apps that we can make available in ISO format or something.
 
Cubic Player! - Not sure if it works on pre-386, necessary to play those amiga mods.

Fasttracker-II! - Probably dosn't work on pre-386. I'm no musician, but I enjoy the version of nibbles that comes with it :twisted:
 
Xtree Gold. I couldn't live without it until I was forced to by running Vista 64 bit. I've downloaded ZtreeWin to replace it.

I've been running it since I had my 286 - I can't remember if it ran on the 5160's at work though.

Its not shareware though so download link I'm afraid!
 

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arjoll said:
Xtree Gold. I couldn't live without it until I was forced to by running Vista 64 bit. I've downloaded ZtreeWin to replace it.

I've been running it since I had my 286 - I can't remember if it ran on the 5160's at work though.

Its not shareware though so download link I'm afraid!
Click to expand...

http://www.xtreefanpage.org/lowres/x60softw.htm

The 30 day trial version, and some clones of it.

I prefer Symantecs Norton Commander 5.
Check out: http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/Paradigm/Ch03/norton_commander.shtml#nc5.5 for the history of Norton Commander.
 
My favorites were the little TSR apps that could be called on anytime. Simon was a very cool utility app from the UK that was sort of a swiss army knife. Modesty prevents me from mentioning ConFormat...
 
In one of the virus collections I had there was one called "bugjoke.com". We looked through it and it wasn't a virus (not sure why it's considered one) but it's a tsr that you can hit some key combination and ascii "bug" looking things go around randomly on the screen (clearing the screen). I used to use it as the equivalent of a screen saver for dos.

Although it's better to just get an intro to programming and write your own. Later in my first C program I just had a smiley face (ascii 01) bounce around the screen to keep burnin from happening.

I didn't have that many 3rd party apps in dos that I relied on. My friends and I all used Norton AV for DOS after scanning our collection and finding which scanner (f-prot, NAV, mcafee, thunder something) would find the most. NAV always won.

I used debug to undelete files sometimes but that was mostly after they removed undelete from dos.

XE (hexedit) or hiew (hacker's view) were good hex editors but I don't remember if they ran on my 8088 or pre-DOS 5.x

Everything else I'd say qbasic/quickbasic or TurboC to keep yourself entertained and write any other missing apps ;-)
 
I agree with Chuck(G) that the TSRs are the best part. Until other OSs get that one working they will never compete with DOS in a truly functional way. :p However, the most used apps on my computers are DM and TED. If someone would write a file viewer and a functional text editor for Linux, I might think about switching for good. Actually the other thing that Linux doesn't do properly is cut and paste. I use SNIPPER for that. So, these are not only my favourite they are my essentials:

Code: 
DM       COM         8,564 08-25-91   3:44p
TED      COM         3,072 01-01-80   1:07p
SNIPPER  COM         2,048 10-20-92   3:00a
        3 file(s)         13,684 bytes
 
Regarding Xtree and NC: there is an interesting alternative. I don't use these kinds of programs myself, but it looks like the Danish DosCommander by Søren Kragh could be the better one. His documentation is interesting, so I'll quote a bit here:
DC is an optimized version of The Norton Commander, in that it's
faster and uses less RAM. ...

The Mail, Link and quick View facilities found in NC have been left
out of DC, as I've never had any use for them. On the other hand, some
things have been much enhanced. The internal editor, for example, can
now be used for more than fiddling with your autoexec.bat. - Also, the
coding errors I've found in NC have not been implemented in DC.

DC was coded in 100% assembly language for maximum speed and re-
liability and minimal RAM use. Thus, the program is not infested
with BASIC, C or other such toy stuff.

Søren Kragh
Click to expand...
hehe :p
It's freeware so here is a copy:
 

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Reminder - don't post links to things that are not legally cleared for distribution. If you are not the copyright holder you need permission to distribute it.
 
mbbrutman said:
Reminder - don't post links to things that are not legally cleared for distribution. If you are not the copyright holder you need permission to distribute it.
Click to expand...

Yes, please keep this in mind. I was mostly wanting to collect apps that are free for download and use, or available for purchase.
 
well, ok, skip qbasic, but the mario game is freeware and hocus pocus is shareware, so no harm in distributing those...
 
All of these work on an 8088 and are free:

PC Valet by John Junod is 23K and has everything you need to manage a lot of files. It's freeware as of 1994 and I've always liked it better than xtree gold.

Aurora is the best text editor I have ever seen for DOS. It's flexibility and capabilities exceed anything else you will find on a DOS machine, and . The author gave me permission to distribute a cracked 16-bit version (he has the free 32-bit version on his website) which you can get here: http://www.oldskool.org/guides/texteditors Only one problem: Lots of CGA snow, so if you have a CGA card that exhibits the snow problem, it might annoy you. But the speed is worth it.

For that matter, T.COM is a slow but feature-filled 4K text editor that I put onto all my boot floppies.

LxPic is the fastest *and* smallest viewer for JPG/GIF on an 8088 and works with CGA up to SVGA.
 
MY favorite DOS software?

Number one choice, the multi-tasking, Desqview.

Hands down.
 
lmao. What was wrong with edit? ;-) Ok I remember a few essentials I had.

pkzip/pkunzip (in general it's what I used, not to say other cli or algorithms weren't better but it was there at the time and worked great).

intersvr/interlnk = built-in but not sure what versions of DOS were required. Easy way to transfer programs from one system to another via serial/parallel port. I had my low end systems always mapped this way.

I ditto quickbasic 7.1 although I never knew about it in it's prime so I was stuck on 4.5 and tinkered with visual basic 1.0 (dos).

For slightly newer systems (I don't remember the oldest system (pre-386) I tried it on) I'd still recommend a parallel zip drive. Especially when you consider it being as big or bigger than your hard drive (slow though, but compatible).

I dunno though.. I guess DOS covered everything I needed pretty well. I really didn't have a lot of requirements for additional software, especially after sitting there and reading the dos command manual that came with the Zenith. Did everything I needed pretty well, and everything else was just games.
 
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