cttynul / f86-dos

💾 MS-DOS running on an 8086 and 80186 bare-metal emulator for Raspberry Pi

F86-DOS

Powered by Faux86: A portable, open-source 8086 PC emulator for bare metal Raspberry Pi

F86-DOS is an "Operating System" powered by Faux86 designed to be run bare metal on a Raspberry Pi. This means that the emulator runs directly on the hardware so no OS needs to booted on the Pi.

Features

• 8086 and 80186 instruction set emulation
• CGA / EGA / VGA emulation is mostly complete
• PC speaker, Adlib and Soundblaster sound emulation
• Serial mouse emulation

Installation

1. Download Release
2. Flash it on a small SD card using Balena Etcher or Win32DiskImager
3. Profit

Usage with Raspberry Pi

By default Faux86 boots from a floppy image dosboot.img, and filename is hardcoded in kernel.cpp

Since MS-DOS is accessing the SD card directly, it does not work for large SD card types. I have found the best solution is to use a small capacity SD card and flash the image as a 32MB card.

USB keyboard and mouse should be plugged in before booting - hot swapping of devices is not supported.

Partition scheme

• A:\ MS-DOS Read-Only floppy image.
• C:\ SD card; system file, kernel, etc, files are hidden to make partition easier to be browsed.
• D:\ Any attached mass storage device.

Features

MS-DOS boot up from dosboot.img floppy image, with some out-of-the-box customiztion you may like to know:

• C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT you can easly edit it using edit; that's the main reason why I forked this repo.
• PATH All executables included into MS-DOS floppy drive are in PATH.
• KEYBOARD.SYS Missing layout definition.

Compatibility

• Raspberry Pi [A, B, A+, B+]
• Raspberry Pi 2 [B]
• Raspberry Pi 3 [A+, B, B+]
• Raspberry Pi Zero

Where're Raspberry PI 4 and Raspberry PI 400?

I've never bought a PI 4 and/or the Commodre-Vibes PI400; so can't test it all but jepalza did and released binaries on Raspberry PI Official Forum!

• Download - The one originally published by jepalza | drive.google.com
• Download - The mirror on this repository | github.com

By the way if you got an RPI4 I suggest you to install DOSBox on RaspberryOS (formerly Rasbian) and make it start at boot; Faux86 is not able to run anything compiled for 386 architecture and it official support up to 186; instead of DOSBox that can run over the 98% of DOS-Softeca.

My Setup

I mainly forked originally repository cause of many software-related lack of features I've already mantioned in Features, like: missing keyboard definition, missing autoexec edit feature, etc.

I run this on an old Raspberry PI 1 Model B, the last one with analog video out with a 512mb SD card; it's just funny to spend a nice DOScember and running some old DOS software; for gaming pruposes I use different hardware and different software.

If you have my same setup and you want to connect RPI to an old analog monitor edit config.txt in SD root as follow:

hdmi_ignore_hotplug=1 # Ignore HDMI Output
sdtv_mode=0 # Set NTSC

Where sdtv_mode value can be different depending on encoding system used by your TV or Monitor.

Value	Encoding
0	NTSC
1	JAP-NTSC
2	PAL
3	BR-PAL

Credits

• Faux86 has been developed by John Howard
• Faux86 was originally based on Fake86 by Mike Chambers; now developed as XTulator. A lot of the code has been shuffled around or rewritten in C++ but the core CPU emulation remains mostly the same.
• Circle to interface with the Raspberry Pi

License

Released under GNU General Public License v2 as per LICENSE file stored in this repository.