FreeDOS 1.4 is the retrocomputing system you’ve been waiting for

The 1.4 release adds game-ready sound emulators, image tools, and system fixes—perfect for playing your favorite DOS classics.

The FreeDOS Project is a fun open source retrocomputing operating system. Started in June 1994 as an open source replacement for the classic DOS operating system, FreeDOS is also one of the oldest open source projects still around. FreeDOS recently celebrated our 30th anniversary, and we’re still going.

Earlier this month, the FreeDOS Project released the FreeDOS 1.4 distribution. This version is mostly an “updates” release, following FreeDOS 1.3 which was released a few years ago in 2022. FreeDOS replaces DOS, which stopped being a “moving target” in 1994, so FreeDOS doesn’t really need a fast turnaround with new releases all the time. We have a monthly test release that includes all of the recent updates so developers can test everything together, and we make a new official release when enough things have changed.

We reached that point at the end of last year, so our January 2025 test release became our first release candidate for FreeDOS 1.4. We shared release candidate 2 in February, and release candidate 3 in March. And in April, we released the official FreeDOS 1.4 distribution.

What’s new in FreeDOS 1.4

FreeDOS 1.4 is mostly an “updates” release. We intentionally avoided making big changes, although we did make a few changes.

Read more: 5 FreeDOS editors I love

Updated command.com. Jeremy has been working on FreeCOM, our version of the command.com shell. The new shell fixes several noticeable bugs and makes it more stable. Thanks also to TK Chia, Emir, Andrew, Yu-Shih, Bernd, Jiří, and others for contributing fixes to this new version.

Updated networking. DOS doesn’t have a built-in networking “stack” like Linux, but you can still get FreeDOS on a network by using drivers and tools. FreeDOS 1.4 includes an updated version of Michael’s mTCP, which provides several TCP/IP applications to get you online.

Rewritten Help content. Thanks to Willi and the other folks who helped write the documentation and translate it to other languages, FreeDOS 1.4 includes FD Help 1.1.0, the updated help content that should help new users get started on FreeDOS.

New programs and tools. FreeDOS 1.4 includes a new image viewer called Dosview that can read 16 different image file formats like BMP, PCX, JPG, PNG, WEBP, and GIF. It can also write to different image formats, so you can use Dosview as an image converter, like to convert PNG to BMP. Thanks to SuperIlu for this great work.

Updated FreeDOS commands. We also updated several core DOS commands like Bernd’s updated FDISK program to partition your hard drive; this version fixes critical errors that could have occurred with a disk containing a lot of logical partitions. And Jeremy’s updated XCOPY command that can do a recursive copy of files, and Jeremy’s new MOVE command; both of these have fixes that avoid stack errors under certain conditions.

Read more: How to write your first FreeDOS program

New sound emulators for modern hardware. You can run FreeDOS on more modern hardware, as long as it has an Intel CPU and a BIOS (UEFI that can run in Legacy mode to emulate a BIOS). Unfortunately, many DOS games assume a Sound Blaster card for sound, which was typical of the era. FreeDOS 1.4 includes two new packages, SBEMU and VSBHDA, that can emulate a Sound Blaster.

What you can do with FreeDOS 1.4

You can do lots of things with FreeDOS. Over the years, we’ve run a few surveys to ask how people use FreeDOS, and we see the same themes coming up again and again: People use FreeDOS to play classic games, run DOS applications, and develop new DOS programs.

Play classic DOS games. Just because a game is old doesn’t mean it’s stopped being fun to play. There are a lot of great classic games that you can play on FreeDOS. I like to play a bunch of classic games. I replayed Commander Keen recently, and right now I’m replaying Jill of the Jungle. There’s also Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem, and many other classic DOS games that you can find on places like GOG.com or other DOS game archive sites.

You might wonder why not use DOSBox instead. And while DOSBox is great for some things, and I play a few DOS games under DOSBox, I find that there’s nothing like actually running a real copy of DOS for that classic DOS gaming experience.

Run your favorite DOS applications. DOS had a lot of great applications, something to suit pretty much every need. If it runs on DOS, it should run on FreeDOS. For example, WordPerfect and WordStar were classic word processors for DOS, and both run great on FreeDOS. George R. R. Martin could install WordStar and continue not writing the next Game of Thrones book.

I was a huge fan of DOS spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro. My favorite DOS spreadsheet in the 1990s was As Easy As, and TRIUS Inc released their As Easy As spreadsheet for free via their forum, and I still use it today. Dan Bricklin also released VisiCalc for DOS as a free download that you can run on FreeDOS.

Create new DOS programs. We include several compilers, assemblers, and editors that anyone can use to write their first FreeDOS program. For C programming, I like the Open Watcom C compiler or the IA-16 version of GCC. I love using FED to write source code, although I sometimes switch to Open Watcom’s Vi. We also have compilers and environments for other programming including Assembly, Pascal, Fortran, BASIC, Perl, and others. We include all of those, and more, on the FreeDOS 1.4 BonusCD.

More from We Love Open Source

• 5 FreeDOS editors I love
• How to write your first FreeDOS program
• Getting started with FreeDOS 1.4 Release Candidate 1
• Explore the five steps of the FreeDOS boot sequence
• A throwback experiment with Linux and Unix