Installing MS-DOS on an AMD Ryzen Gaming PC

Greetings and welcome to an L G R thing .

And today let me introduce to you this fine computer .

A buddy of mine was recently wanting to build a PC .

So I said I'd help him do it with his chosen specs being an MD Ryzen 5 1600 X C P U 16 gigs .

Of course , Air Dominator Platinum Ram .

A 500 gig 9 60 IVO inda two S S D A six gig G force 9 80 T I super clocked video card , a fractal design define C case and MS Dos 6.22 .

I'm kidding .

He didn't pick that .

I did suffice to say this is just for a bit of fun .

I do not recommend installing dos on a modern PC .

There's a whole host of compatibility issues , but that's kind of what I want to explore in this video .

Legacy support is an interesting subject to me is , you know , the fact that modern P CS still technically run all sorts of older compatible software including old Microsoft operating systems like MS DOS .

And so I figured , hey , why not try to install this on there , this straight onto the S S D from floppy disks and everything .

Um , yeah , let's try to make that happen because I've actually never done this with a computer this new .

So what we're going to be using to accomplish all this is an external USB 3.5 inch floppy disk drive with an MS DOS boot disk .

And , you know , I've actually never tried this out on a modern machine just booting from a USB floppy .

But we'll see if it works .

Just gonna go into the Bios here and check the boot settings to see if it sees it as a boot device and if it does a USB floppy drive showing up right there .

So just hoping it'll work and it works perfectly fine , MS DOS is booting just like that .

Of course , we can't actually install anything to the C drive yet .

It hasn't been partitioned or formatted or anything .

So I'm gonna see how FDI handles this 500 gig M 5000.2 S S D .

This is asking if I want to enable large disc support because this version of the program I'm actually using is from Windows 98 it does recognize it as a fixed disk drive .

So I'm going to tell it to use the maximum available size for a primary dos partition .

So , all right , let's just go ahead and try to format the C drive and well , it says that it's 18 comma 18.5 megs .

I'm assuming that's 18 gigs and 100 and 80 megabytes or something like that .

I'm not entirely sure .

It might be actually seeing the whole 512 gigs and it's just not displaying it properly .

Either way this is going to take far too long for me to mess with .

That's gonna take a long time .

I don't know if I want to do that .

I don't want to do that .

So I'm just gonna go back and not even mess with trying to have it see the whole drive and just limit it to the two gigs that I know that MS Dos will work with .

And that time around it is doing it just fine and formatting very , very quickly .

We'll give it a volume label right here that is appropriate for this particular situation .

And there we go , we have a formatted C drive ready to install MS Dos , which I have on another floppy disk here and the setup is just gonna go through and , well , this is MS Dos 6.22 .

So it's pretty standard .

It just sees it as any other PC that it would see it as because do it don't care .

All it knows is that there's an A drive AC drive and there's a PC , it can be installed on .

So that's what it's gonna do once those three discs are complete , MS Dos is completely installed , but it's gonna restart the computer and well , it's not seeing it at all .

I completely disconnected , the disc drive went into the bios and made sure that it's only trying to boot from the one internal drive and it is just not doing it .

So , whatever the system is looking for , it's just not finding with MS DOS , 6.22 .

However , if I started up with a boot floppy disc and then go over the C drive , you can see everything is there and MS DOS is now working just for the heck of it .

Let's run scan disk and see how that works .

Well , that was instantaneous .

I mean , I guess I shouldn't expect anything less .

But , uh , yeah , I just thought that was kind of amusing .

All right .

Time to try out some games and I have Commander Ken episodes one and four on a floppy disc here .

We're just gonna copy them over to the C drive and then try out Commander K one .

This is a 16 color E G A game and it's booting up just fine .

However , it's kind of hard to see in this because my camera was correcting for it a little bit , but the colors are wrong .

They're not nearly as vivid as they should be .

The white is tinted a little bit green and there's no sound effects whatsoever .

Just the melodious echoing tones of the model , a keyboard .

Now , this is not a game that uses like a sound card for sound effects or anything , but that's one reason I was wanting to try this first because it uses the PC speaker , but it's not even playing that .

So I was thinking maybe it was just disabled .

So I went in the bio again and checked and saw that there was a boot beep that you could enable there .

But I also saw that it says , please note that a buzzer is needed .

Sure enough that made absolutely no difference in game .

There's still no sound effects , keen walking here .

It should be making a little sound .

It doesn't turns out that this board does not have any kind of PC speaker or buzzer installed .

Just one last thing to check though .

I thought maybe it might be pushing the PC speaker tones through the sound card output .

I've seen some systems that do that .

So I plugged in some speakers here and nope still no sound whatsoever .

So apparently you just have to find a PC speaker and install it in this computer .

There is a motherboard header that you can plug it into PC speaker is a thing of the past , many of them on board indicators and lights and things like that instead nowadays .

All right , time to try Commander Ken four here .

And amusingly , it does say that the PC speaker is detected , but that probably just means that while there's a thing on the motherboard that allows it so whatever , it's not gonna get any sound because there's just not one installed .

However , I did want to check to see if the E G A would be weird here too .

And it certainly is .

Again , everything has this sort of greenish hue going on .

It's just tinted in such a way that does not look right whatsoever .

Yellowy green pea colored mush going on top of everything .

And I've seen this happen on a bunch of more video cards like this one .

This is a 9 80 T I .

So while they do have legacy compatibility for C G A&E G A graphics , it's not quite accurate for games like this .

In fact , you can see some corruption going on here with some of the tiles or whatever it's using for the graphics .

They just don't look right at all .

Text modes seem absolutely fine .

Asy characters are showing up .

It's all good there , but E G A is just not quite compatible .

All right , I want to try some other larger games out , but I don't want to copy them over by floppy or anything and I don't have an external CD drive on hand .

So what I'm going to try here is free DOS , which as the name implies is a free alternative to DOS .

And it has all sorts of extra options for more modern hardware , including USB support .

So you can plug in USB sticks and this version of DOS will allow you to open programs and stuff from those .

And once I had it installed it booted up just fine whereas MS Dos was needing a boot disk .

Free Dos was perfectly cool .

The computer saw it and booted to it , no problem .

So I'm gonna go to the D drive , which is a USB stick that I have here and installed on it are some games I wanna try .

We're gonna start with Jazz Jackrabbit here , the CD ROM version and it boots up to my surprise .

Absolutely fine .

Again , of course , there's no sound whatsoever but it does have the V G A graphics displaying properly and in game it's good .

It's colorful and responsive and as fast as it needs to be for the most part , it's very smooth .

I did notice some stuttering every so often , but that could be because I think the game actually runs at 75 Hertz or 70 or something like that .

So it's dropping some frames every so often which causes a stutter .

But otherwise , yeah , I mean , it's running perfectly fine , which is awesome .

No color corruption or anything .

Next , I wanted to try Duke Newcombe 3d and I'm gonna try it in 6 40 by 4 80 Visa compatible mode .

And , well , this was a little bit of a surprise .

It runs like total garbage and there's some weird corruption going on here , all sorts of choppy stuttering texture issues from the menus to the game itself , mostly in the overlays of the different graphics , like your user interface , bits and overlays of the weaponry and whatnot .

But it is even worse once you get into certain areas of the game where you have a mirror , it's just abysmal the game completely craps itself .

And this is not an uncommon problem even on like late nineties , early two thousands video cards , they just weren't quite compatible with these S V G A kind of visa modes going on .

So it does not surprise me that a more modern video card like desk would not have the compatibility for those modes built in .

And to confirm that it is the visa mode .

That is the culprit .

I tried to run it in 3 20 by 200 it is absolutely fine .

Runs full speed .

No problems that I could really tell there's no corruption .

All the colors are good .

Yeah , this is just Duke New 3d and it's running nicely except there's absolutely no sound effects once again , but that's just gonna be how it is and yet the areas with mirrors are no problems whatsoever .

Yeah .

Turns out the A MD Ryzen is great for running Duke Newcom 3d in do in 3 20 by 200 non visa two point oh mode , stick that on the box and sell it .

One more thing I want to try here .

It occurred to me that I hadn't actually tried a game in C G A yet .

So I was going to try out the C G A version of lemmings just to see if the colors were messed .

Up like E G A was and yes , it is .

Everything has that sort of greenish tint to it .

Anything that's supposed to be like white or blue has a yellowy green overlay on top of it is what it looks like .

It's just rendering the colors completely incorrectly and just associate those wondering if maybe it's the monitor that I'm using .

I'm gonna try it here on another monitor , which I know for sure runs E G A and C G A stuff perfectly well , when it has the correct video card .

And yes , you still get the same weirdly mismatched color going on with the pallets of C G A&E G A .

It's just wrong and that pretty much satiates my curiosity for testing out legacy compatibility on this machine here .

Time to install boring old windows .

10 for the guy that is , this is actually his computer .

So I'm sure he would much rather have that than free dos because , uh , Bradley actually wants to be able to use his computer he bought and , you know , there's always DOS box .

So , what is the life lesson ?

What did we learn here today on L G R ?

Absolutely nothing of value .

I can tell you that .

Uh , hopefully it was something at least of slight curiosity and , and interest .

Yeah .

You know , I don't really know that I have a point here to be honest , but that's ok .

Uh One other thing though that I did want to mention before I finish up here is the sound card issue because obviously it wasn't just the PC speaker .

It was the fact that I was getting no sound whatsoever .

I did try a couple of other things like uh adding the sound blaster variables to auto exact I bat and whatnot to see if I could force it to get some sort of sound blaster compatibility off of the built in sound chip .

But you can't do that .

These real tech integrated things just don't have that sort of dos compatible sound in there at all as far as I know .

So that's why I wasn't able to get sound blaster stuff to work .

I just didn't go into that much earlier .

The other thing is maybe you could theoretically get it to work if you had a PC I sound card , like sound blast or 16 PC I or something .

Uh E S has audio drive , whatever and plugged it in here and got that to work .

That might actually work .

But you would need for one either to have a PC I slot or a PC I two PC I express in here , an adapter and whatnot .

Retro man cave the channel on youtube actually did a topic video on that and he had some real problems even getting that to work with free doss .

Maybe if you have a modern motherboard of the PC I slot natively , you might be able to get like sound blaster sound on a , a Horizon computer .

I'm not aware of any configurations like that .

Anyway , I'm just rambling at this point .

Now , who cares this ?

This is a pointless project .

And I hope that you enjoyed watching .

And if you did enjoy what you saw here , then perhaps you'd like to see some of my other videos .

I occasionally do weird crap like this and other times it's something a little more serious like the history of Blue Led S but whatever the case may be .

Thank you very much for watching L G R .