I'm still a firm believer that DOS was the best operating system so far. MS-DOS 5.0 was as stable as anything built ever since. I've collected here a bunch of DOS goodies. At one point in time, this page probably helped people get ahold of things they could use. Now, it's somewhat of a dinosaur. Not a lot of people live in a text-based world anymore. Too bad in a lot of ways, they still haven't made a program as good as Display for viewing images. Perhaps you do still have some use for some of my time-honoured faves, or perhaps you're just curious! Have a look and enjoy....

Display is the greatest graphics viewer / converter ever created. To go and check it out, jump to the Display Page.

Paint Shop Pro is the best image editor but for a much faster DOS alternative, give NeoPaint a try. Use this serial number to register it.

Need to convert that Video for Windows AVI file to QuickTime MOV format or a MOV to AVI? SmartVid (Version 1.02.006) is the tool for the job.

Now that you have all those AVIs and MOVs sitting around and want to play them at the right speed (which, of course, you can't do with Window's overhead) jump to the QuickView Site and grab the best DOS movie player around (yes, even better than Display - QuickView supports many more modern codecs including DIVx!).

Is there anything cooler on the net than MP3 files? The best player for DOS is MPXPlay. It also play CDs and other audio formats, including OGG Vorbis.

In order to make MP3 files, you may want some CD Ripping software, which allows you to make wave files directly from the digital data on the CD (as opposed to recording the output sound while the CD is playing). CD-RIPpers produce perfect copies of the original songs and thus give you the best source files to make MP3s. CD2WAV is a very small but great CD-RIPping program. I chose this one to put up on my page because unlike all the other programs I've tried, this one will rip songs off of a Mitsumi drive. Authors of other programs say that this is impossible, but I guarantee that it works on my Mitsumi FX-800.

Making MP3s in DOS used to mean Fraunhoffer's L3Enc or MP3Enc programs. I recommend using the newer and far higher quality (as well as free) LAME for DOS. This ZIP is based on LAME version 3.97beta2 and will rival any MP3 encoder in the world in terms of quality and speed.

My favorite DOS MP3 tag editor (for adding little information blocks to your MP3s like "Artist" and "Title") is SetID3.

For a great Norton Commander clone, try DOS Controller. For a more powerful Norton clone with a lot more features, DOS Navigator is a great choice. A clone project of DOS Navigator is Necromancer's DOS Navigator, which is also worth checking out.

Right here is where you can get a great freeware RamDisk driver that can be run, resized, and unloaded from the command line. Useful for a whole world of things.

CD Quick is a great CD-ROM cache that can speed access to your CD-ROM drive by a factor of 30 or more!

HTMStrip (version 2002.08) is the best HTML to Text program I've yet seen. It handles formatting, entity references, and tables. You can use it to reprocess your entire cache if you like.

Can't get into your setup because you've forgotten your password? Click here for an incredible program that'll crack any BIOS password for you. You may also want to visit the homepage and check for updates.

The Ranish Partition Manager (version 2.40.00) is an unbelievable program for creating, resizing, and managing your hard disk partitions. It can easily set your system up for multibooting up to 31 different operating systems from a simple to use menu at startup. It will also verify and format many of the most popular partition types that it can create (such as FAT-16 and FAT-32). That way, you can have a computer set up to run Windows 98, Linux, BeOS, or any of 28 other OS's and still be able to run pure DOS when you want to do some *real* computing ;) A must for any computer. The author is still developing a shareware version of the program (no nags or anything) at his site here that incorporates several enhancements.

In my opinion, video games reached their ultimate peak in the early to mid eighties some time. The greatest of these was the ColecoVison. Rebel Assault may be ok, but nothing beats a good round of Coleco Moustrap. Great Emulators for the ColecoVision and other classic systems (like the Atari 2600) are popping up everywhere on the web lately. Excellent emulators (like MAME) for classics arcade games have hit the scene too. For the best site to download these emulators, go to Dave's Video Game Classics.

For a small, yet powerful chess program for DOS, try Siberia Chess. It has a great mouse-driven graphical interface and many options. An extremely strong freeware chess program that you may also want to try out is EXChess. It is under constant development and already holds a strong grandmaster rating on ICC. Possibly the best freeware chess program out there is Rebel Decade. Check out the Rebel Decade Website to download it.

If you really like chess (like me), then you may want to check out my shortened version of the Encyclopaedia of Chess Opennings. All the opennings are there just like in the "real" ECO, there is just no commentary.

Browsing the web with DOS used to mean text-only dial-up. Not so with the latest version of Arachne. Atachne is a graphical DOS web browser complete with web, news, email, telnet, and ftp capabilities.

For a vast collection of DOS-stuff (way beyond the scope of this page!), vist the Interesting DOS Programs Site. This site has absolutely everything that you'd ever imagine on it... and all for DOS!