• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Pentium II MMX and MS-DOS 6.22

T

TravisHuckins

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2017
Messages
322
Location
USA
There's a great price for a Pentium II MMX 350mhz PC where the motherboard has USB. If I get it I would like to put MS-DOS 6.22 on it... even though it has USB. Which would just be ignored? I know there are no USB drivers or it? Or are there?

Or on a machine like that should I use Windows 95/98? I mean I don't really care about USB just want a retro gaming box again after my P5-90 crapped on me. And I'm thinking about getting a slightly newer system where the motherboard uses CR2032s for CMOS rather than RTCs. It costs about what I'd pay for a new motherboard.
 
Believe it or not, there is limited support for USB mass storage devices (i.e. flash drives) available for MS-DOS.

Here's a YT video that covers things Check the comments.

There is also a later driver called DOSUSB that claims USB 3.0 support. But it's not a freebie.

I like Win98SE's DOS 7 command prompt (non-GUI) mode for running DOS programs. Add DOSLFN as a driver and you even get long filename support.

Also, check out bootdisk's drivers
 
I use the Panasonic universal usbaspi.sys driver and the Motto Hairu USB Mass storage Driver (di1000dd.sys) for my DOS USB drives with excellent results on my 233 MHz board with a PCI USB card.
 
I wonder if there would be a way to get my Gravis Eliminator GamePad Pro to work with this as it's USB. But I guess then I'd need Windows 98. It's a nice controller for Shoot'em'up games as it's kinda like a joystick.
 
The problem with DOS and USB is that you have to keep the driver model pretty simple. Adding special drivers makes things complicated. Basically, most of the DOS USB drivers reduce the commend set to ASPI-type SCSI commands. A game pad doesn't fit well into this model.

Some of the mass-storage drivers that you'll run into aren't even hot-plug (i.e. you can't simply remove or add a USB drive after booting the system).
 
My Tweener is a K6-2 400 box with PLOP boot manager allowing a dual boot between Dos 6.22 and Windows 98 SE with full USB Mass storage capability, it's on the internet, and it has a 3.5, 5.25 and ZIP drive as well.

I find this works well for just about anything I need to transfer from one medium to another.

You should pick it up, grab a few DOM's and load up both OS's like I did. It's a great setup to have and can do absolutely anything I've asked of it.
 
While your thread has already had everything answered...
If I get it I would like to put MS-DOS 6.22 on it... even though it has USB. Which would just be ignored? I know there are no USB drivers or it? Or are there?
Click to expand...
MS-DOS exclusively on a Pentium II is pretty overkill. USB included, half the hardware by that point was expecting a higher-level operating system to be installed. That isn't to say as others have pointed out that aftermarket support was eventually added but I find a lot of it is a real hack and not worth the effort. (EG: USB support under Windows NT 4 even is really, really primitive)

Windows 98 Second Edition is a good combination for this board, minimum 64mb ram (and your limit is 512mb). It included by that point a "useable" implimentation of USB support, support for DVD drives, enhanced filesystem support and a few other goodies that either did not yet exist with Windows 95 or was not fully supported. DOS gaming is as easy as opening an MS-DOS prompt for everything but the most picky of games (and by that point you should be running something much older anyways).
 
But I just like MS-DOS... I do have Windows 98 SE... are there drivers for Sound Blaster Pro 2 for it? I know it would be overkill to put pure DOS on but for $60... why the hell not?

I can get most of my Win9x games to run on my Windows 7 32bit machine and those that have real issues work on my Windows XP laptop... I just loved the MS-DOS/Windows 3.11 combo.
 
Should be fine. Skip USB. I burn CD-Rs to transfer files. :) SB Pro is a strong hardware DOS card.
 
Stone said:
I use the Panasonic universal usbaspi.sys driver and the Motto Hairu USB Mass storage Driver (di1000dd.sys) for my DOS USB drives with excellent results on my 233 MHz board with a PCI USB card.
Click to expand...

Ditto, Works great with my USB flash drives, I also use 'LoadSys' to load / unload the driver when needed.
 
Some games may not work properly. I have a Pentium 200 system where I pulled 64MB out so I just have 16MB left. That solved a lot of stability / not running issues for older games.

Got a Pentium 120 CPU in the mail yesterday. Will probably put that in. Some games run a bit too fast in a Pentium 200.
 
NeXT said:
MS-DOS with an expanded memory handler can only address up to 64mb.
Click to expand...

FreeDOS can handle up to ~4 GB with memory expanders IIRC. I've installed it on machines with 512 MB+ and I recall it seeing all of it as expanded/extended memory, but that was a long time ago.

I'd question the need for such a ridiculous amount of RAM on a DOS machine unless you were writing your own OS or something to take advantage of it.

PeterLI said:
Some games may not work properly. I have a Pentium 200 system where I pulled 64MB out so I just have 16MB left. That solved a lot of stability / not running issues for older games.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I remember running into that problem back when I had Windows 98SE as my main rig in the late 90s. Some DOS games like Duke3D had a bug where if you had over a certain amount of RAM, the RAM check would overflow and it would refuse to install. DOS4GW also seemed to have a lot of problems with lots of memory installed and applications that used it frequently crashed.
 
FreeDOS can handle up to ~4 GB with memory expanders IIRC. I've installed it on machines with 512 MB+ and I recall it seeing all of it as expanded/extended memory, but that was a long time ago.
Click to expand...
FreeDOS is a bloated sack of open source trash. I never consider or suggest it as an alternative.
 
^^ FreeDOS works great and I run it on everything. There's no way I'd bother with MS-DOS unless I needed to run an old version (3.3, etc.) on something ancient. YMMV.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top