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What is the latest Digital Research x86 OS that will run CP/M-86 Programs?

K

Klee

Experienced Member
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Dec 24, 2010
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I'm unsure what is the newest version OS that will run CP/M-86 programs.

I have not played around with CP/M-86 in about ten years and been thinking about diving back in again.

EDIT: I will run on real hardware not an emulator. I have 8088, 8086 386, 486 boards that I can use, sadly no 286's since they all died.
 
Thanks!!

Looks like I have Concurrent DOS 386 ver 3.01 floppy images already.

Also the user guide.

Screenshot from 2021-10-11 21-10-54.png
 
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I think after that it became DR-DOS and I think I recall that CP/M-86 compatibility left the building.

Of course, there are third-party programs to provide CP/M-86 compatibility under MSDOS, but that's cheating.

There may be some vestiges of the CP/M-86 API in DR-DOS 3.31, but that was pretty much gone by DR-DOS 6.0. DRI never made a big thing of it and I wouldn't trust it to perform well, if at all.
 
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Wasn't Digital Research "DOS Plus" capable of running CP/M-86 programs, and slightly newer than Concurrent DOS?
 
It was newer than Concurrent DOS, but older than Concurrent DOS 386. DRI had a bunch of variations like Multiuser DOS, etc. I don't know about the CP/M-86 compatibility for most of those. The only time that I've seen DOS Plus was on Euro/UK systems. I don't know if it was offered in the US at all.
 
It looks like all versions of Concurrent DOS, Multiuser DOS, and Real/32 support the Int E0h interface. OpenDOS source code looks to be able to be compiled into a version that also supports Int E0h.

Concurrent DOS 5 and later support MSDOS 3 style FAT drives but do not support CP/M-86 disk formats.

Note that there were several utilities designed to permit CP/M-86 programs to run on top of MS-DOS. Two can be found at http://www.cpm.z80.de/binary.html The CPMEMU.zip is the one that should run with any PC running MSDOS 3 or later.
 
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How did Concurrent DOS work? Were you able to just run jobs in the background? Did it offer a way to hook terminals up via serial interfaces? It wasn't a GUI, right? Did is support multiple sessions from the console (like Linux does/did)? Any light, "2 page", introductions to the architecture?
 
I would suggest starting with Multiuser DOS to test multitasking of MSDOS programs. The support is much better including for graphical programs and background DOS applications won't accidentally display text in a visible window.

Concurrent DOS 5 has a chapter describing how to work with about 30 common applications; it might take an hour to figure out those settings for applications not listed.
 
Not real concerned about running MSDOS programs mainly want a never version that will work with newer hardware and be able to read MSDOS formatted floppy's to make transferring stuff a little easier.

I watched the video listed above and the other one that gave more details and I was concerned about the issues he had trying to run on real hardware but that seems like the main issue was using Windows 10 to create the install floppys.

I have a Pentium III pc that has three floppy drives, 1.44mb 1.2 mb and 360k drives, running Windows 98 and the programs that can deal with pretty much any floppy image formats I need to create either in Windows or rebooting into DOS.

Just need to look at my pile-o-stuff to see what I need and put a box together this weekend.
 
Some of the issues with multitasking DOS applications also apply to multitasking CP/M-86 applications. It may be necessary to spend time tweaking the values with CHSET to have CP/M-86 programs work.
 
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