FreeDOS 1.3 images

These are pre-made hard disk images for FreeDOS, both in the 5150-optimized “minimized” variety, and a standard 527MB image for 5170 machines.

FreeDOS doesn’t distribute hard disk images of this nature, instead they were recreated from the installation medium. In order to reproduce the images (thereby proving an untampered state), the inp recording files can be used to recreate them. To work around the pcipc BIOS inability to boot from CD-ROM images, the “allinone” floppy disk is used to load the El Torito CD-ROM image distributed by FreeDOS.

With updates to MAME’s emulation in the various aspects of its code, these INP files may not playback correctly, or generate the same hard disk image, in versions that aren’t identical to the original version. If you find problems, first try using the exact version of MAME.

• freedos13_8086.inp was recorded with MAME 0.269.
• freedos13.inp was recorded with MAME 0.272.

freedos13_8086.chd

This is an unofficial “minimized” version of FreeDOS for the IBM 5150 (original PC). It is a significantly stripped down version of the operating system, designed to be small and lean on the old hardware from 1981.

To recreate freedos13_8086.chd:

1. Have the ibm5150/freedos13_8080 disk image set. This can be done by grabbing the FD13-D[12].IMG files from https://archive.org/details/free-dos-1.3-8086-minimized and placing them into a folder of that name (in your rompath).
2. Create an empty CHD: chdman createhd -o freedos13_8086.chd --chs 615,4,17
3. Run MAME’s ibm5150 driver with these parameters: mame ibm5150 -floppydisk1 freedos13_8086 -harddisk1 ./freedos13_8086.chd -playback freedos13_8086.inp -nothrottle -exit_after_playback
4. Since this runs under -nothrottle, you’ll have to be quick about bringing up the file manager window (Scroll Lock, TAB, File, floppy, switch to flop1) when setup.bat prompts to do so. I give about 15 seconds of ibm5150 “real time” to do it; it should be just enough for a fast finger to achieve it even in nothrottle mode. Press F10 to turn the machine back to normal speed if you wish to not miss it.
5. Once done, freedos13_8086.chd should represent the hash in hash/ibm5150_hdd.xml, but you’ll have to copy it first: chdman copy -i freedos13_8086.chd -o freedos13_8086_compressed.chd
6. This whole process takes about 7 minutes of real time, but should happen in under a minute in nothrottle mode.

freedos13.chd

This is an installed image of the official FreeDOS distribution, containing a lot of software and primarily intended for newer computers (ct486 and better).

Since the full installation option is selected, about half of the 500MiB disk image is already used by the operating system, but it at least represents FreeDOS in the intended state. It is easy to trim this down by deleting files, if necessary. Or you can add a second hard disk to your MAME machine used to run this OS. That choice is left to the user. (Hey, one could install FreeDOS manually and ignore the preconfigured image…)

To recreate freedos13.chd:

1. Have the ibm5170_cdrom/freedos13 disk image. This can be done by grabbing the CD-ROM of FreeDOS from https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.3/official/FD13-LiveCD.zip, running chdman createcd -i FD13LIVE.iso -o fd13live.chd, and placing this in a ROM path so MAME can find it (or specify the full path to the file…).
2. Have the ibm5170/allinone disk image. This can be done by grabbing the floppy image from https://schierlm.users.sourceforge.net/bootdisk/allinone.img and placing it in a ROM path, like the CD-ROM image.
3. Create an empty CHD: chdman createhd -o freedos13.chd --chs 1015,16,63
4. Run MAME’s pcipc driver with these parameters: mame pcipc -floppydisk1 allinone -cdrom1 freedos13 -harddisk1 ./freedos13.chd -playback freedos13.inp -nothrottle -exit_after_playback
5. This whole process takes about 20 minutes of real time. pcipc is slow enough that nothrottle mode probably won't help much in speed, but this is still faster than using ct486. FreeDOS should boot on any system that can use the hard disk.