Mastodawn

Looking good so far. Adding "TRY" to the FDNET.BAT call in FDAUTO.BAT was all I needed to get networking going under 86Box with a PCnet-III. I'll have to actually install the packet driver for my 3c905 when I set it up on the real rig, but should work the same otherwise.

Bleh, ran into problems while setting up games. Descent doesn't seem to like it; setup crashes on launch and the game itself only gets to the title screen before hanging.

Anyway, let's try something else...

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!

Tried remaking the partition as a primary, but with the same start/end sectors, and it still works. Also got some games going; stuff that didn't work in FreeDOS is working here. I think I've got a winner!

Dec 11

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.

Dec 12

I've just stumbled across #SvarDOS and now I want to give that a try...

Got #SvarDOS installed and online! Tried a different packet driver for the Intel NIC and that worked.

#DOSember