Which MS-DOS for a Tandy 1000SL?

By Cèbe, . Permalink Retrocomputing

The Tandy 1000SL is a neat XT compatible with a few tricks: advanced mode with 16 colors and a sound chip!

Unfortunately, it only has 576 KB of available base RAM. So the trick is to find a MS-DOS with the best features for the lowest RAM.

So I decided to make some tests:

Total Reserved Used Free
MS-DOS 3.20 570 454 44 526
Tandy MS-DOS 3.30 (original) 576 448 47 529
MS-DOS 3.31 576 448 51 525
MS-DOS 4.01* 576 448 60 516
MS-DOS 5.0 576 448 59 517
MS-DOS 6.0 576 448 60 516
MS-DOS 6.22 576 448 62 514
FreeDOS 0.84 576 448 127 449

As usual, MS-DOS 3.31 wins for that category of machines. It has a quite low RAM consumption while allowing hard drive partitions to be greater than 32MB (the main limitation of MS-DOS 3.30). Higher versions of MS-DOS are overkill. Missing features can be borrowed from FreeDOS when needed: better fdisk, diskcopy, etc...

  • without SHARE.EXE which is needed for "large" 32+ MB drives and uses 6KB

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