FreeDOS is an open source DOS-compatible operating system that you can use to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software, or develop embedded systems. Any program that works on MS-DOS should also run on FreeDOS.
It doesn’t cost anything to download and use FreeDOS. You can also share FreeDOS for others to enjoy! And you can view and edit our source code, because all FreeDOS programs are distributed under the GNU General Public License or a similar open source software license.
You can play your favorite DOS games on FreeDOS. And there are a lot of great classic games to play: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Commander Keen, Rise of the Triad, Jill of the Jungle, Duke Nukem, and many others!
Need to recover data from an old business program? Or maybe you need to run a report from your old finance system? Just install your legacy software under FreeDOS, and you’ll be good to go!
Many embedded systems run on DOS, although modern systems may instead run on Linux. If you support an older embedded system, you might be running DOS. And FreeDOS can fit in very well.
The FreeDOS Project turned 25 years old this year! And to celebrate, we've made a special anniversary t-shirt. Available in mens and womens styles, but you can also transfer the design to other products on Zazzle, like stickers or coffee mugs or hats. If you prefer a different color t-shirt, you can change that too. You can find them in our FreeDOS @ Zazzle store. Direct links are: mens t-shirt + womens t-shirt.
The FIND command is a classic DOS utility that finds a string in a text file or files. Version 3.0 had a bug where FIND would access the A: drive for no reason. Thanks to Tom Ehlert, this bug has been fixed. "whatever the reason for the bug is/was: the makefile requires some file lfnchk.asm that is neither there nor required. when the makefile is changed to ignore this missing file, the resulting FIND runs without (immediate) problems." I've put the updated FIND 3.0b on the files archive at ibiblio. Thanks Tom!
FreeDOS turned 25 years old this weekend! 25 years is a major milestone for anything, especially an open source software project. I just wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone in the FreeDOS community - past and present. Open source software is about people coming together to work on something, and that's you. If I ever meet any of you in person, I'll buy you a beer/beverage.
Over the month of June, a bunch of tech magazines and websites published articles about FreeDOS, or did interviews with us. For example, Slashdot's Interview with FreeDOS founder Jim Hall and OpenSource's FreeDOS turns 25 years old: An origin story and SourceForge's Today in Tech - 1994 - 25th anniversary of FreeDOS and Category5's Interview with Jim Hall about FreeDOS {YouTube}. Jim also answered a Reddit AMA about FreeDOS and hosted an open Facebook Group Chat on the FreeDOS Facebook group. I've captured the coverage on our FreeDOS History page. Let me know if I missed anything.
On Saturday, June 29, FreeDOS will turn 25 years old! That's a major milestone for any open source software project, and definitely a big one for us! I'm planning a few live chats to celebrate. I'm planning an "Ask Me Anything" chat on Reddit /r/AMA at noon US/Central (1700 UTC) for an hour. And at 1:30pm US/Central (1830 UTC) I'm planning a live chat on our Facebook group, also for an hour. Join us in either forum!
Edit: Thanks for the great questions!
We've mentioned this project before: If you want to create some stuff for DOS but you did only web programming so far, try DOjS - a javasctipt interpreter for DOS. It supports sound (digitized and FM syntesis) and graphics (JS canvas, BMP support). You can find it on Github. From the same project, jSH is now also for text mode only. For now, jSH comes only with a single bigger example: JsCommander. A minimal file manager in the style of the well known Norton Commander. Find it also on Github.