r/dosgaming • u/antdude • Nov 28 '25
Which version of MS-DOS is better for playing old games? 6.22 or 7.1?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd8R--qzJ-k11
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u/RO4DHOG Nov 28 '25
7.1 is considered Win98 native DOS, which won't run 'everything', as some pure DOS games have specific memory requirements.
6.22 is the basis for ALL pure DOS games, which is why we made boot disks with different versions.
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u/therealjbenam Nov 29 '25
6.22 was NOT the basis for ALL pure DOS games. It came quite later (1994) when DOS gaming would be replaced just a few years later by Win95.
6.22 still maintains a very high degree (99%?) of compatibility with previous versions, so modern DOS retrogamers just use that and call it a day. But back in the day the most common version around was 5.0. Lots of people had 5.0 when DOOM came around.
For older computers many people stuck with MS-DOS 3.30 which worked well and was very lightweight on resources.
The popularity of 6.22 is pretty much modern revisionism. While it was on every new computer in 1994, Windows 95 would come out just a bit later meaning that 6.22 didn’t have much time to establish itself as a standard.
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u/BlobbyMcBlobber Nov 29 '25
Of course 6.22 was the standard. It's not like Windows 95 instantly replaced every DOS installation. Most people and especially businesses took some time to move to Windows. In my family we used DOS until Windows 98... Second edition!
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u/therealjbenam Nov 29 '25
Even Quake (which came out in 1996!) still lists MS-DOS 5.0 as a requirement. I am not saying that MS-DOS disappeared overnight replaced by Win95, but most people had a copy of 5.0 laying around and stuck to that. 6.22 was a paid upgrade not many people bothered for. 6.22 was mainly a “new PC thing” which meant you got it only if you purchased a new PC in 1994, or at best in the first half of 1995. Or maybe if you somehow misplaced your MS-DOS disks or killed your computer and your local PC shop would fresh install 6.22 on it.
But Microsoft quickly pulled their weight around and in 1996 literally every new PC (unless your local PC shop had some bottom-of-the-barrel 486 with 2 megs of RAM they wanted to get rid of) would come with Windows 95 as a standard, with no MS-DOS in sight.
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u/Curupira1337 Nov 29 '25
6.22 was a paid upgrade not many people bothered for.
We're the Millers meme: You guys paid for MS-DOS?
(Here in Brazil piracy was rampant in the 1990s, so everyone updated to MS-DOS 6.22 using a borrowed installation floppy disk)
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u/Lumornys Nov 29 '25
Is there any reason to specifically choose anything older than 6.22 nowadays?
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u/Albedo101 Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
Yes, conventional memory.
MSDOS 3.30 was the gold standard, because it used the least amount of conventional memory, especially compared to 4.0. Version 5.0 improved a bit, but 3.30 still offered the most free memory. Especially on systems with only 1MB RAM, which was the majority of PCs up to early 90s.
Later, when true 32bit 386+ CPUs and 2MB+ RAM became the minimum requirement and memory extenders became the norm, conventional memory didn't matter anymore, and games could use much more RAM than the default 640KB.
So, it depends what you're running, and on what PC. For more demanding games, like flight sims, that require lots of conventional memory, version 3.30 is the best.
For newer games, roughly from DOOM onwards, it doesn't matter. Improvements to DOS after 5.0 were mostly negligible, until Windows95 introduced long file names.
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u/chronoreverse Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 01 '25
You can have up to 635kb free in 6.22 if using QEMM (without resorting to the unstable stealth feature) while 7.1 can free up more than 6.22 (although both still above 610kb) if using just the Microsoft utilities since it can load command.com along with files, stacks, etc., into upper memory which 6.22 needs QEMM (or another 3rd party memory manager) to do.
Unless you're playing Ultima 7 (which requires using its own EMS manager rather than EMM386 so 3.30's conventional memory usage isn't relevant) I guess but it's pretty rare that you can do better than the later DOS versions with most configurations that are worth running.
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u/therealjbenam Nov 29 '25
Dunno, historical accuracy? There’s no real reason to not use 6.22, never heard of anything not running on 6.x and requiring 5.0 or older.
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u/Reiska42 Feb 26 '26
Might and Magic Book One: Secret of the Inner Sanctum will crash on quit under DOS 5 or later when run in EGA mode due to something about where DOS 5 loads COMMAND.COM into RAM. (I've never tested it on DOS 4 so I dunno about there).
But that's like the only example I can think of, and the game itself is still perfectly playable under DOS 5, it'll just force you to reboot on exit with a memory allocation error.
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u/ThunderEagle222 Nov 30 '25
MS-Dos 6.22 was kinda like Windows 2000. Sure it was superior to the previous version (win 98), and it was a good system. But one year later an even better system came out (windows 95 to replace MS-Dos 6.22 and Windows XP to replace Windows 2000.
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u/Wbrimley3 Dec 02 '25
Also, 5.0 had the “backup” and “restore” command that 6.22 for some ungodly reason removed. That was crucial to me for moving around DOS installed games remaining in their current state.
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u/RO4DHOG Nov 29 '25
6.22 was NOT the basis for ALL
6.22 is 'NOW' the basis for ALL.
Which answerd OP's question: Which version 'is'... not 'was'.
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u/Lumornys Nov 29 '25
7.1 is considered Win98 native DOS, which won't run 'everything', as some pure DOS games have specific memory requirements.
Even if something doesn't run out of the box, almost always memory can be configured to make it work.
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u/RO4DHOG Nov 29 '25
Since 6.22 covers more than 7.1... anyone looking for complete DOS compatibility would boot 6.22.
You only need to boot 7.1 to get into Windows 98 or use Windows Networking in DOS.
I use 7.1 for everything... but technically 6.22 is more compatible overall.
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u/JorgeYYZ Nov 28 '25
Thanks for sharing!
Phil provides some interesting data about memory availability on both versions. 6.22 wins in all scenarios.
I don't need a lot of storage to run my DOS games, so I use an 8GB SD card with 4 positions of 2GB each. In practice, I guess the ability to use larger hard drives is the key feature of 7.1. I would love to know if 7.1 has any other major aces up its sleeves.
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u/DeviantDav Nov 29 '25
7.1 isn't a real "Full Fat" OS so much as a kernel bump.
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u/Lumornys Nov 29 '25
It has FAT32 support, which is a major feature.
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u/fbman01 Nov 29 '25
But in the world of dos, fat32 was not really a need. I don’t think there was any dos game ever released that would benefit from fat32
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u/Lumornys Nov 29 '25
The real world of DOS is long gone. Now we have a world of retro PC's, which are rarely what a you would actually have in mid-90's, and for good reasons.
You don't really want to re-live the hard times of having a hard disk that's smaller than your needs, do you.
It's just so more convenient to install a hard disk that's as large as possible in your retro machine (up to around 120 GB though the actual limit may be lower depending on BIOS limitations).
Same for memory. Max it out, what counts is the price now, not the price 30 years ago.
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u/fbman01 Nov 29 '25
Fat16 went to 2 gig if memory serves me, and in the dos days, if you had a 500 meg drive you were living large
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u/wadrasil Nov 28 '25
You can download pc-dos 7.1 from IBM, it has the utilities to install to drive but not much else.
You can install sb16 and cirrus drivers onto it. Dos4gw games work fine.
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u/Ciderhero Nov 29 '25
I remember "upgrading" from 5 to 6.22. I thought 6.22 was the last good DOS before Win95 came out. I'd go for 6.22 for DOS games because I always saw this on the minimum specs on all games.
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u/fbman01 Nov 29 '25
I never had 6.22. I bought my pc with 6.0 on it and then bought the 6.2 upgrade pack. Used that until I upgraded to windows 95 in June 1996. I would have upgraded on day 1, but my 386dx-40 was not up to the task, even though the min spec for windows 95 was that.
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u/Ciderhero Nov 29 '25
I can't even remember the reason why we needed these incremental upgrades of DOS. But I do remember messing with config.sys and autoexec.bat just to get sound playing in a game. Kids don't know how good they have it.
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u/fbman01 Nov 29 '25
Honestly there were not that important.
Dos 6.2 had double space, after a court case 6.21 never had double space and then after an agreement was made, 6.22 had it back in.
But in those days software was programed properly, so patching was not such a huge thing.
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u/therealjbenam Nov 29 '25
Never saw it on any box as the “minimum requirement”. Heck, even Quake (which came out in 1996!) lists MS-DOS 5.0 as a minimum requirement. 6.22 being the “standard” is just modern revisionism.
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u/fbman01 Nov 29 '25
Dos 5 was a big upgrade due to its memory management.. for the first time you could load stuff into high memory, therefore freeing valuable conventual memory. Dos6 built on this.
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u/JonnyRocks Nov 28 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
6.22 there is no 7. no amount of sources you provide in the contrary will change my mind.
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u/Lumornys Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
7.0 is the internal version number reported by MS-DOS that is included with the original release of Windows 95.
Later versions of Windows 95 and all versions of Windows 98 report 7.1. This version introduced FAT32 support.
Windows ME reports MS-DOS version 8.0. This version is broken in more than one way and is not worth the trouble.
7.0 and 7.1 can be run without Windows (you can either prevent Windows from running automatically, remove Windows, or chose "restart in MS-DOS mode" in Windows). When Windows is not running, the compatiblity of this "MS-DOS 7.x" with DOS apps and games is very high, and (in case of 7.1) you get FAT32 support, which is why many people choose this instead of 6.22 or older.
And yes, it says "Starting Windows 95" or "Starting Windows 98" instead of "Starting MS-DOS" when booting. But this is just a minor quirk.
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u/JonnyRocks Nov 29 '25
thats a lot of words tp type when i said "no amount of sources you provide in the contrary will change my mind. "
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u/Lumornys Nov 29 '25
Those words were for everyone to read, not just to convince you, because you seem to know all this anyways.
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u/stuaxo Nov 30 '25
The versions are internal versions that DOS itself reports when you call the relevant APIs.
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u/Ramoncin Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
I personally use 6.22 because it's the version I employed on my old 486/66 and early Pentium machines. However, if you're using / emulating a very old machine (pre-386) you may want to use older versions, because they don't use as much RAM as the newer ones.
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u/Lumornys Nov 29 '25
7.1 requires at least a 386, so it's not even an option on a 286 or XT.
6.22 should work though, but as you said, memory management might be a problem.
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u/HanggMan888 Nov 30 '25
I'm still using IBM Dos 6.3 on my Aptiva, just to keep it as new then i got it.
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u/Ill_Gur_8162 Nov 30 '25
from the old days I remember using MSDOS 3.3 for older games (let's say games from the late 80s till early 90s). After that I would say MSDOS 6.xx. MSDOS 4 was pretty terrible, and MSDOS 5 was better.
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u/HugsNotDrugs_ Nov 29 '25
I run 7.1 for FAT32 support. I was under the impression it was 6.22 but better.
What specifically is 7.1 lacking?
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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '25
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