![]() ![]() qemu-system-i386 -m 16 -k en-us -rtc base=localtime -soundhw sb16,adlib -device cirrus-vga -display gtk -hda dos.img -cdrom FD12CD.iso -boot order=d Remember that the C: drive is the first hard drive, so the CD-ROM will show up as the D: drive. First, tell QEMU to use the CD-ROM image and to boot from that. The FreeDOS 1.2 CD-ROM "standard" installer ( FD12CD.iso) will work great for QEMU, so I recommend that version. The latest version is FreeDOS 1.2, released in December 2016.ĭownload the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution from the FreeDOS website. Now that QEMU is set up to run a virtual system, we need a version of DOS to install and boot inside that virtual computer. You can combine letters to specify a specific boot preference, such as order=dc to first use the CD-ROM drive, then the hard drive if the CD-ROM drive does not contain bootable media. Or to boot from a CD-ROM drive (often assigned D: by DOS) use order=d. To boot from the first hard drive (usually called C:) use order=c. To boot from the floppy drive (typically A: on DOS machines) specify order=a. You can tell QEMU to boot the virtual machine from a variety of sources. The Cirrus VGA card was a common graphics card at the time, and QEMU can emulate it.įor the virtual display, I set QEMU to use the GTK toolkit, which puts the virtual system in its own window and provides a simple menu to control the virtual machine. To use graphics, I like to emulate a simple VGA video card. Some older programs may use the PC speaker for sound QEMU can also emulate this. SoundBlaster16 and AdLib were the most common sound hardware in the DOS era. If you need sound, especially for games, I prefer to define QEMU with SoundBlaster16 sound hardware and AdLib Music support. I find it's easiest to simply set the virtual RTC to match your local time. But I like to specify it anyway.Įvery classic PC provides a real time clock (RTC) so the system can keep track of time. Technically, the -k option isn't necessary, because QEMU will set the virtual keyboard to match your actual keyboard (in my case, that's English in the standard U.S. When DOS was king, computers with 16MB or even 8MB were quite common. That may seem small, but DOS doesn't require much memory to do its work. I like to define a virtual machine with 16MB of memory. For that, start QEMU with the i386 command. QEMU can emulate several different systems, but to boot DOS, we'll need to have an Intel-compatible CPU. Here are the parameters I use to boot FreeDOS inside QEMU: Although this may seem laborious, it's really not that hard. Unlike PC emulator systems like VMware or VirtualBox, you need to "build" your virtual system by instructing QEMU to add each component of the virtual machine. That's more than enough to install and run DOS. To create an image file that's about 200MB, type this: qemu-img create dos.img 200MĬompared to modern computing, 200MB may seem small, but in the early 1990s, 200MB was pretty big. To initialize a file that you can use as a virtual C: drive, use the qemu-img command. Under QEMU, virtual drives are image files. Other media, including other hard drives or CD-ROM drives, are assigned D:, E:, and so on. In DOS, drives are assigned with letters- A: and B: are the first and second floppy disk drives and C: is the first hard drive. You'll need a place to install FreeDOS inside QEMU, and for that you'll need a virtual C: drive. Here are four easy steps to run old DOS applications under Linux by using QEMU and FreeDOS. Free online course: RHEL Technical Overview.Most popular Linux systems include QEMU by default. QEMU (short for Quick EMUlator) is an open source software virtual machine system that can run DOS as a "guest" operating system Linux. These days, it's much easier to install DOS in a virtual machine running under Linux. In the "old days," you installed DOS as the sole operating system on a computer. Any program that works on MS-DOS should also run on FreeDOS. Instead, you can run them right inside Linux with the help of a PC emulator and FreeDOS.įreeDOS is a complete, free, DOS-compatible operating system that you can use to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software, or develop embedded systems. Or just because you are curious about "classic computing." You don't need to dual-boot your system to run DOS programs. There are many reasons to run an old DOS application today. Maybe to extract a report from a legacy business application. Just because an application is old doesn't mean it's no longer useful. The classic DOS operating system supported a lot of great applications: word processors, spreadsheets, games, and other programs. ![]()
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