DOS Software Compatibility

MS-DOS 1.0 was released in 1981 for IBM computers and the latest version of MS-DOS is MS-DOS 6.22 released in 1994. There are also many variants of MS-DOS from IBM, Digital-Research and Free DOS ports

All of these versions have various hardware issues and one of the main problems is that some versions use the FAT16 hard disk schema which has a partition size limit of 2Gb

This is a real problem as a complete MAME system including ROMS can be over 5Gb in size!

To get around this, most DOS MAME users run MS-DOS 7.0, which is part of the Microsoft Windows 95b/OSR2,98 and ME family of operating systems

This is acheived by installing one of the above Windows versions *

By editing the file C:\MSDOS.SYS and changing the options below you can prevent a Windows boot logo and will prevent Windows from completely loading, giving you MS-DOS 7.0

LOGO=0

BOOTGUI=0

* Windows ME does not have a standard method of booting into pure DOS, although there is a patch on the 'net to enable a DOS boot for Windows ME, or you could create an emergency boot disk and boot off that (a bit messy though). The Windows ME patch can be found in the DOWNLOADS section - I take NO responsibility for this patch, I have used it successfully myself on my PC, but this does NOT guarantee it will not trash your system and I can give NO support for it - just make sure you make an emergency boot disk before you patch your system! This patch will modify "IO.SYS", "COMMAND.COM" and "REGENV32.EXE" in order to unhide the Real DOS-Mode on Windows ME systems, resulting in a similar boot process to the one available in Windows 9x. This will allow, for example, to reach DOS directly by pressing "Shift-F8" at boot-up, to use "CONFIG.SYS" and "AUTOEXEC.BAT" before Windows loads, and to set up a startup menu