FreeDOS 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. 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.
Developers have been updating and adding Unix-like utilities for FreeDOS. Javier Gutiérrez Chamorro has updated his UPTIME utility for FreeDOS. The latest version (2.40) includes separate 8086, 186 and 386 optimized versions. Previous versions added dash (-) and slash (/) switches separator, and uppercase switches. You can download it from the UPTIME website. Find all of the Unix-like utilities at the Unix directory at ibiblio.
Ercan is working on a DOS Coreutils project, to recreate several Linux commands in DOS. So far, DOS Coreutils includes commands like beep, cat, clear, cp, date, ls, mkdir/rmdir, pwd, time, and other commands. Source code is in C and compiles using OpenWatcom. Version 0.4 has minor fixes. Download from Ercan's DOS Coreutils Github.
For those of you who prefer to boot FreeDOS under Linux, you may be interested to know that the DOSEMU2 PC emulator for DOS is under development again. The mailing list is not very busy, but the DOSEMU2 Github is very active. They are looking for contributors, so if this interests you, consider joining and helping out.
DOSMid is a MIDI and MUS player for DOS. It's a real mode application designed to run on very modest hardware configurations. It plays standard MIDI files, as well as MIDI in RIFF (ie. RMID), and MUS tunes (as used by Id Software in numerous games like Doom, Heretic, Hexen, etc). Mateusz Viste has released a new version of DOSMid (version 0.9.2), with these changes: - fixed parsing of the /SBMIDI=xxx value (bug reported by James-F) - sequential playlist playing (inspired by a patch from Graham Wiseman). Download the new version from the DOSMid website.
Over on the FreeDOS Blog, we're capturing some interesting moments in FreeDOS history. This is part of a monthlong celebration of FreeDOS as we look ahead to our 23rd "birthday" on June 29. Check out several posts that present a visual history of FreeDOS, starting with a brief history of the FreeDOS logo. We also have a collection of FreeDOS banner ads and FreeDOS web buttons that our members once put on their own websites to help others discover FreeDOS.