SvarDOS community forum

Hello! New here; and just wanted to share a success story. My journey to SvarDOS was a rocky road. - Original MS-DOS 6.22 install floppy failures - Made a FreeDOS floppy set with my remaining blank disks; but those were sketchy. - DISCOVERED SVARDOS! (Why, by the way, isn't this the primary DOS for retro, vintage and modern-retro hardware? The resource budget on this is insane!) I played on a lovely aged monochrome LCD with SvarDOS: - Star Wars X-Wing Commander - Epic Megagames: Jill Saves The Prince (Yes; that was Tim Sweeney's company and side-scroller; company now called Epic Games) - Epic Pinball including like 7 different pinball maps - Sim Tower - Sim City - Doom - Installed Word Nothing raged at me about memory, everything played as great as the LCD would allow it to seem. I do not have ethernet so copied over some packages to install via floppy. `pkg` for installation was a breeze! -----THEN; I decided to Try Windows 3.1----- - I already had the floppies - Installed without a hitch; rebooted and everything works great. - Able to use its native DOS features to open QBasic or Word 5 for DOS just fine. QUESTION: *Which 16-bit WiFi and ethernet cards are best for DOS; and then especially SvarDOS? Would love to be able to to browse, test, play around with multiple packages quickly*

Hello!

> Hello! New here; and just wanted to share a success story. My journey to SvarDOS was a rocky road.

I'm glad it worked for you. :-)

> Which 16-bit WiFi and ethernet cards are best for DOS; and then especially SvarDOS?

Wifi is not realistic in DOS - there are, in theory, some ancient wifi cards that can work in DOS, but these use very old wifi standards anyway, so hardly usable nowadays. Your best bet is to use a normal (wired) Ethernet card and connect it to some cheap wifi bridge. As for Ethernet cards, I do not know many of them. I use 3COM cards on my machines (3C509, 3C59x and 3C90x) and I am very satisfied with them. The packet drivers are stable and very small (ranging between 6K and 11K, IIRC). The one bad experience I had was with a Realtek RTL8139 card. These cards are dirt cheap and quite widespread, but I had occasional packet drops with it and the packet driver (rtspkt) is a memory hog (26K). Alternatively, there is the PicoMEM project from FreddyV. I never used this card but I talked with Frédéric and it does look like a very practical tool for retromachines, although a bit pricey if compared to some old ISA cards bargained on eBay. You can also connect a PC without having a network card. For this, you need to connect the PC to another (network-capable) machine using the parallel (LPT) port and use PLIP to push Ethernet over this connection. That's how I connect my 8086 laptop. I described the process on my gopher: gopher://gopher.viste.fr/1/notes/?a429d810b Mateusz

Great to hear that Windows 3.1 ist working for you, Vintage86Fella. So seems that the recent switch to the EDR kernel seems to pay off :) Please also tell us if something is NOT working, so we can try to improve things. Thanks for the positive feedback :) Bernd