#DOSember isn't JUST about gaming, so I want to celebrate the season by doing something new to me: giving #FreeDOS a try! I've known about it for ages but I've never actually used it before. I'm going to give it a try in 86Box, and once I've got a feel for it there I'll set it up on my Win98 machine.
It seems to have a nice package collection and I get the impression that dev and networking on it are pretty solid. And of course we'll do some gaming!
Yak shaving level: trying to get DR-DOS 7 to mount a FAT32 partition. It can create them but can't read them. There's a semi-official driver called DRFAT32 but it complains about the filesystem being improperly aligned.
Might just have to make four FAT16 partitions and call it good.
Hmm... it works if I create the FAT32 partition with Win98 `fdisk`. Not yet sure if it's because it's now a "logical" partition instead of a "primary", or because it's positioned differently on the disk. Further experimentation is called for.
Cool it works in any case!
dd'd the disk image to a CF card and got it going on hardware. It's more stable on the real metal; stuff that crashed on 86Box works fine here.
Next up is getting the Zip drive and 3dfx cards going, but I don't expect any difficulty.
Hmm, guess not. I've got a couple Intel Pro/100's, another 3c905 (like the one I'm using now), and a 3c595. That and a few ISA cards but there's no room for them in this rig.
I took one of the Intels out, might try it later.
No luck with the Intel card either. 😑 At least the driver doesn't completely hang the machine like the 3Com one did, but I'm still not getting any traffic in or out.
Can't rule out a compatibility issue with DR-DOS yet though; I'll have to retry it with MS-DOS later.
If THAT doesn't work, I'll see about grabbing an RTL8139 card off Feebay. Probably won't get anything I order now until after DOSember, but I wanna get online from DOS damnit!
@PurpleJillybeans I don't even try to understand the technical info anymore.
I just see that chonko in the corner and hit "fave." 🤭
D-Link DFE-530TX+ PCI Ethernet Adapter Driver ProgramJUN.01.1999Copyright by D-Link Corporation 1998,1999Includes RTL8139 network card divers for Windows 98,...
Hmm... the card appears to work, but my BIOS complains about a resource conflict and Linux fails to load the module for it.
I thought PCI was supposed to fix resource conflicts. 
I put the Intel card back in and was at least able to confirm that it works under Linux and Win98SE. Detected, driver loads, passing traffic. I'll do some more DOS experiments later.
@PurpleJillybeans i love getting driver floppies
Although I have also gotten "random disk that says driver on it". They showed it in the pictures and I was fairly confident that it wasn't related when I bought it but still, less exciting
Got #SvarDOS installed and online! Tried a different packet driver for the Intel NIC and that worked.
@PurpleJillybeans Interesting - I didn't even know about SvarDOS. Last year, El Reg had a good article on it.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/23/svardos_drdos_reborn/
Note that Descent is open source and been ported to modern operating systems.
PurpleJillybeans 
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