Feel like playing with DR-DOS in VirtualBox? Have a few virtual hard disk images!

[liam_on_linux]

My occasional project to resurrect DR-DOS and make something vaguely useful from it continues, and in the spirit of "release early, release often", I thought that someone somewhere might enjoy having a look at some of my work-in-progress snapshots.

So while there is nothing vastly new here, building a bootable DOS VM is not completely trivial without what is now some very old knowledge, so I thought these might help someone.

The story so far...

In the OpenDOS Enhancement Project, Udo Kuhnt took Caldera's FOSS release of DR-DOS 7.01 (which they had renamed OpenDOS) and added in FAT32 support and some other things. Caldera spin-off Lineo (later DeviceLogics) implemented these in later, closed-source versions of DOS, but they were not officially FOSS. They also used bits of FreeDOS and were later withdrawn. DeviceLogics has since gone out of business.

Udo's disk images are on Archive.org but they aren't bootable. I've made bootable images you can download. I have a bootable VM of DR-DOS 7.01-08 but I need to clean it up and give it some spit and polish. I also added back the ViewMax GUI from DR-DOS 6.

Meantime, what I have uploaded here are three Zip-compressed VirtualBox VDI files. A VDI is the hard disk of a VirtualBox VM. These contain FAT16 hard disks.

• DR-DOS 6 with ViewMax;


• DR-DOS 7.01 with ViewMax added back in from the above & very basic memory optimisation;


• The later withdrawn DR-DOS 8.

The quick way to use them:

1. Download the image.


2. Run VirtualBox. Create a new VM. Call it (e.g.) "DR-DOS 6". You must have "DOS" in the name for Virtualbox to correctly configure the new VM for DOS! Otherwise you must manually do that part.


3. When you get to the "create or add hard disk stage", stop!


4. Switch to the file manager. Unzip the file. Put it in the newly-created VM's directory.


5. Go back to VirtualBox. Pick "add an existing hard disk". Browse to the file you just moved into place. Click it, and click "Add".


6. Now you're back at the "choose a disk" dialog. Pick the newly-added one.


7. Finish VM setup.

Now you can start the new DOS VM and enjoy.

Comments

[killap]

Hi Liam! I first wanted to thank you for all the work you did around this. I have been using your floppy disk images from the other blog thread for the past few months and things have been great. It's been very nostalgic running DOS again and playing through games/demos of my childhood. It really is great to see people working on projects like this well past the prime DOS days.

I am curious what progress you ever made around bootable DOS USB keys that you mentioned on the other blog. That would make testing on some machines I'm building much easier. :)

I'm also curious if you ever created a single full DR-DOS 7.01-08 floppy image, so that it wasn't necessary to start with 7.01 and then copy your files over. Did that happen?

Separately here you mention a VM of 7.01-8. Was that ever polished and released? If a full _floppy_ image existed though, that would make my day and actually be more useful to me. :)

Anyway, thank you again for everything. This really helped me get DR-DOS up and running with the further improvements made by Udo.