PC Dos

Type: Computer (OS)
Publisher: Microsoft
Firstly released in: United States
First release: 1981
Release and compatibility details: Operating system used by variety of computers by various manufacturers.

Success and unsuccess:

Most popular years: 1991-1995
Most popular countries: USA, in 1993-1995 slightly moved as nr. 1 also in Europe after finsishing the era of 16-bit computers.
Amount of games in database: 5775 (list)
Amount of music records in database: 729 (list)
Amount of downloadable MOD tunes: 137 (list)
Amount of downloadable MIDI tunes: 525 (list)
Importance on the market in the most popular years: Very high

Characteristics:

This operating system was most common in IBM PC (or PC generally in the future) computers, with very long lifetime, because of thousands of combinations of various hardware configurations expanding possibility. That's why it's hard to determine exact hardware configuration, it continually raises as the time flew.

Media type was floppy disk (5.25" DD,HD, later followed by 3.5" DD, HD, and in 1994 slightly replaced by CD-ROM medium).

Games and music info:

Most common media for storing games: Floppy Disk
Average packed game size: 1985 - cca 10kB, 1990 - 1MB, 1995 - 650MB (CD)
Music formats: WAV / Redbook Audio / MP3, MOD / XM / S3M / IT, MID, AdLib

Emulation info:

Windows is backwards compatible with MS-DOS, so old DOS games should be run normally, though you have often spend long time with configuring the memory in some of them (because of complicated memory handling) and external devices, especially sound card. To not do this, you can use also some emulators:

DosBox - Emulator of MS-Dos, which focuses to emulate all game-related hardware like joysick, sound-cards etc., focuses to be able to run the games properly.
VDMSound - Emulates properly an MPU-401 interface (for outputting high-quality MIDI music) and SoundBlaster compatible output (SB16, SBPro 2, SB2, SBPro, etc.) in DOS games under Windows NT. This will allow you to run some Dos games from this system without using of other peripherals emulation.

This emulation info was written on 20.June 2004. (This time is very important, because emulation info very depends on the time it was written - emulators can improve a lot after this time..).