Need help building a pc for DOS

[Maggotry]

We have some old pc's here at work that run some very critical equipment. These are 386 and 486 systems running a DOS application. It's time we moved to a newer pc (actually, it's way past time). With that in mind, here are my concerns:

Can I run an AGP and PCI video card at the same time in DOS? How about 2 PCI video cards? The machine has 2 monitors. The DOS app only allows one monitor to be active at a time. One display is color and the other is monochrome.

How large a partition can DOS read? Ideally, I'd like to be able to run up to BB or Fry's and grab a hard drive when an old one dies. We currently have an old, shrinking stock of 500MB and smaller.

What other things should I be considering running a critical DOS app on a modern pc?

Recommendations for hardware? The pc's obviously do not need blazing speed. The pc's are sitting in a fairly warm environment, so I want to use hardware that generates as little heat as possible.

 

[Greenman]

Seems like you're going to have some huge driver issues with any new hardware. I know dos supports 2 video cards, I used to run VGA (or was it CGA?) and a monochrome card at the same time.

 

[jackschmittusa]

If I remember right, DOS can only use 512mb partitions, but you can use a drive overlay to increase that. I think all of the drive manufacturers still supply an overlay utility.

You can still find new Durons and mbs dirt cheap. Back in the days when I ran DOS a lot, I can't remember anything that wouldn't run with the 8mb of ram I had, so a single stick of 64 or 128mb whould do fine. Depending on the apps you use, you may have to tinker with allocations of extended and expanded ram.

I would use a mb with built in video as the primary display device and use a pci card with maybe only 8mb ram for the secondary to cut down on heat.

A 5400rpm hd will produce less heat than a faster one. Even sharing ram with video would probably leave enough for a DOS app so that diskswapping would not be a problem.

A case using a small form factor psu would reduce heat; even 150w would power a rig like I've been talking about. It doesn't have to be an SSF case either, as there are many mini-towers that use them and they are inexpensive.

I would install 1 hd, 1 optical drive (cd burner probably), and 1 floppy drive.

 

[Maggotry]

Thanks jack.

Our app is only a 5MB install, so we don't need anything over 512MB. Our app requires like 2MB of EMS which we setup with a pre-configured config.sys file. The 5400rpm drive is a good suggestion. Our app is installed from floppy so we don't even need an optical drive.

So you believe DOS will support color on-board video and a PCI video card in monochrome?

 

[OmegaXero]

Actually, I think dos supports either a max of 2 or even 4 gig partitions, it is FAT16, so the bigger the partition size the less utilitzation you'll get from it (cluster size goes thru the roof after about 700MB).

If I were in your position I would see if I could find some older refurbed Dell Dimension/Optiplex systems. They have excellent cooling, they run quiet, and they have enough PCI slots for additional video cards (they usually have onboard AGP video for the primary card). They'll run you maybe $100 and that's usually with 128MB of ram and at least 10gigs of HDD space.

 

[Zepper]

I think you can still get DR DOS and the latest version (7.x) can handle large drives and newer hardware. And it has other useful features too - it's my DOS of choice. I think IBM still sells its PC DOS 7.x version of MS-DOS that has also progressed beyond MSD 6.22... There are "free" DOSes out there as well, but I have no clue as to their hardware capabilities. Have you tried running the programs from DOS sessions inside of Win2k or from a DOS emulator within Linux?
. I think there are still some MultiUser DOSes out there that can deal with multiple monitors. Other than that, you'd be looking to the video card maker (or the program author) to have a special driver for DOS - it's possible that a company like Matrox might have something. Or if you write them a nice letter, they might be able to point you in the right direction.

.bh.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

DOSbox.

- M4H

 

[Googer]

Yes, dos works with agp and pci. I would recomend finding an older ATI RAGE graphics card. I have sucessfully used them with dos, however i do not know if ati still has a driver for them like they used to.