Earlier this month, hardware modder and retro computing enthusiast Yeo Kheng Meng shared footage of his "modern 2024" DOS PC on his self-titled blog, emphasizing its powerful internal specifications. When not used to "reach back into the past to run DOS," its specifications aim to provide an acceptable entry-level experience for modern games, video editing, and more.
The modern DOS PC's specifications are slightly modest compared to today's high-end standards. Still, of course, even modest hardware today is exponentially more potent than what the original generations of DOS users had to tolerate. The main two components are the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU and the Asus Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti, which firmly place the entire PC build into the upper tiers of entry-level. The system includes 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and two NVMe SSDs—one 1 TB and one 512 GB.
But enough background: how well does it run DOS 6.22?
It seems the PC can run DOS 6.22 and its related games pretty well, barring some exceptions prone to running too fast on newer processors. Most other games, like Doom and Planet X3, run fine on this modern DOS PC, which dedicates an entire drive partition to DOS 6.22, storing these games separately from Windows and the AAA tier of experiences possible with it.
So, while games like the Descent demo simply aren't going to work on this tier of hardware even if the rest of DOS does, it seems clear that this PC is well-equipped to handle modern AAA gaming at low-to-medium settings, and the majority of DOS games alike. With tweaks to throttle CPU speed properly, experiences like the Descent demo may also become playable.
A huge part of modern DOS efforts is getting the right sound setup working properly, especially when installing from scratch. This project uses an open-source solution called SBEMU (literally Sound Blaster Emulator) to emulate the sound of DOS Sound Blaster and OPL3 sound cards with modern sound cards.
A taste of the modern PC also sneaks onto this modern DOS 6.22 PC. In the latter sections of the video, the PC is tested with a DOS ChatGPT client, demonstrating how the most basic functions of generative AI can still be made usable with truly legacy hardware and operating systems.
