DOS

About a week ago, I came across this Hackaday post about a UEFI-wrapper project that re-enables legacy BIOS on UEFI-only systems. Coincidentally, FreeDOS v1.4 was just released, so I decided to repurpose an old laptop as a pure FreeDOS machine. Because DOS requires a BIOS runtime (no native UEFI support), most modern machines can’t run it natively.

I tried CSMwrap on my janky laptop, but things didn’t quite work. Since I mainly wanted to try FreeDOS rather than dive into a UEFI rabbit hole, I opted to run FreeDOS inside QEMU on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Below are the exact steps—including FAT16 partitioning, QEMU command-line options, and networking tweaks… Mainly, so I won’t forget what I did.

So! This is it. After slacking off for a while, I think I’m ready to reverse engineer the Premier Manager 2 (PM2) image compression format for the background (.gnd) files. A year or so ago, I worked on the .vga files, so now it’s time to try decoding the .gnd files. I haven’t touched this in a while, so I’m not sure how far I got last time. Without further ado, let’s start!

About once every five years I fire up Premier Manager 2 — THE soccer management game before Championship Manager monopolised the genre. (These days, you can even play PM2 in your browser.)

Before starting to play, this time I noticed an interesting mix of files in the root directory — thingslike contract.gnd, icons.vga, anim.bin, goal.voc, and others—and wondered how hard it would be to decode them with modern tooling. Surely the .gnd and .vga files were graphic assets, the .voc files audio, and so on. A little reverse‑engineering later, here’s what I found about the image formats…