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.
Jack Ellis has updated his DOS drivers. This update fixes old 386 errata and ATAPI flag bugs for UHDD, as well as handling of LBA48 drives above 128 GB size. The only updates are for UHDD, all other files are the same. You can download the new "February 15, 2019" version at ibiblio.
Update: Jack made a small update to comments in the sources, and the readme. I have posted that version as February 15, 2019(A) in the same directory: drivers-2019-02-15a.zip
This week, Mateusz Viste published Gopherus v1.1 - a multi-platform, console-mode gopher client. New features and fixes in this version include: - two DOS builds available: 16 bit (real-mode) and 32 bit (386+), - better checking for content overflows, - fixed crashes in the SDL output module, - lots of minor memory/speed optimizations, - improved up/down keys logic in menus, - relicensed to the '2-clause' BSD license. You can download it from the Gopherus website.
TK Chia has posted a new release of the GCC IA-16 toolchain build scripts, with DJGPP packages for FreeDOS. From the notes: "This is a DJGPP/MS-DOS-hosted (32-bit x86) port of the GNU C and C++ compiler toolchain to the IA-16 target (16-bit Intel x86), by Rask Ingemann Lambertsen, Andrew Jenner, myself, and various contributors. The toolchain itself is 32-bit, but it will output 16-bit code." Changes in this version include: - The C runtime library (Newlib) now defines a _heaplen variable similar to Borland's Turbo C. You can use it to control the maximum size of the malloc memory heap. - Writing programs that do not use the standard C library or startup files is now more convenient. - GCC now has an (experimental) -mmsdos-handle-v1 option, to output .exe files that will fail gracefully (rather than crash) when run on MS-DOS v1.x. - minor fixes and optimizations. Get it at Github, tag 20190224.
There is a new development tool for DOS available. If you want to create some stuff for DOS but you only web programming, you might be interested in DOjS, a javascript interpreter for DOS. It can handle sound (digitized and FM syntesis) and graphics (JS canvas, BMP support). For now you can type in a script with your favorite text editor and then run it on a DOS command prompt, using keyboard or mouse. The core DOjs code is MIT license, other components are similar free/open source. More info and download is on the DOjS GitHub.
Mpxplay is a commander-style console audio player for DOS and Win32 operating systems. Laaca announced that a new Mpxplay v1.63 (all console versions) is now released. Major changes between v1.63 and v1.62 include: -added minimalist XSPF playlist file loading (filenames only) -increased max number of audio channels to 11 -added new PCI ids to Intel HDA soundcard DOS driver -corrected ASX playlist file loading -fixed wrong ID3 info displaying after artist/title change -fixed possible buffer overflow at displaying header informations -corrected editor update at file copy from playlist "with Subdirs" -fixed possible crash at exit. You can download the new version at the Mpxplay website.