There are many reasons to dabble in retro hardware and software, and the good news is that you don't need much to get started. From old beige towers to discarded netbooks, you can get MS-DOS or FreeDOS running on almost anything. But Yeo Kheng Meng isn't one to do things halfway. He decided to build a machine with modern components: a Ryzen 5 processor on an AM5 socket, a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, 64 GB of RAM, and more storage than those operating systems can even address.
Some people want to experiment with obsolete software or hardware. Others have unfinished business with a classic game they never managed to beat as a kid. Then there are those who hate seeing machines go to waste and want to give them a new purpose. But in the end, the most common justification for any retro adventure is simply "because we can."
Yeo Kheng Meng, whom we remember for his ISA graphics card with HDMI and his ChatGPT client for DOS, is no newcomer to the retro scene. This time, though, he took a different approach: instead of resurrecting an old machine, he decided to install MS-DOS on a modern computer, mixing new parts with components from his previous platform.
MS-DOS on a Ryzen 5? Yes, Please
Of course, running MS-DOS is just one of many tasks Yeo has in mind — modern games, video editing, virtual environments, machine learning, and more. But when it came to picking the hardware, he went with a Ryzen 5 7600 (6 cores/12 threads, 3.8 GHz base clock), an Asus GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Dual EVO OC, 64 GB of DDR5 RAM at 5600 MHz (2x32), and, most interestingly, an ASUS Pro B650M-CT-CSM motherboard. Why that particular model? Because of its legacy support: it includes headers for a serial port, LPT, a PS/2 port, and CSM mode in the BIOS/UEFI. The only catch is that it only works with a dedicated graphics card, as the integrated graphics in the processor lack a compatible BIOS.
Yeo also managed to connect a floppy disk drive, though not directly. The motherboard has no connector, so he had to use a standard floppy-to-USB adapter, available on AliExpress and similar stores for about ten euros. He also configured a Xircom Pocket Ethernet 3 network adapter (10 Mbps), but its driver refused to detect the high-speed modes on the LPT port, so the maximum bandwidth is 100 KB/s. Some MS-DOS games are simply too fast for this machine — Descent and the Wing Commander series are common cases — but everything worked better than expected.
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