I want to go to the next step to give the Datalight device more life. Also the Datalight is limited to 10Mb max, 2Mb internal and 8Mb on a PCMCIA ATA card. The only interface I have is a COM at 115200. I've setup a VM on Win10 which runs FreeDOS 1.1 so that I can compile C programs that run on the Datalight ROM-DOS. Hello, I have a device which boots Datalight ROM-DOS v6.22. I would recommend to play with PCem for a bit (there you could have floppies of various sizes easily) and practice the whole installation procedure there (without wasting tons of CDs) before going to real vintage computer. which kinda creates "chicken and egg" problem.
There are some DOSSHELL related games, though: īut all that requires deep understanding of DOS, floppies, CDs and so on. You could use "fdisk" and "sys" commands to make your HDD bootable, then just copy that directory from one computer to another.
You would need to install MS-DOS on virtual system from virtual floppies first, but then you could make bootable CD (with MS-DOS and CD drivers) and transfer your DOS installation to the desired system (because, practically speaking, MS-DOS setup only unpacks files and puts them into "C:\DOS" directory). Heck, it's even possible to do that using external USB CD if you system's BIOS supports that! That being said it does not mean you couldn't put MS-DOS on a new system without floppy. All versions of DOS (MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, etc) could be only and exclusively be installed from floppies, never from CDs.