What is dos98-english?

This project is an unofficial English translation of MS-DOS 5.00 for the PC-98, a Japanese computer platform. Before this project, that version of MS-DOS had never been fully translated into English, which made installing and managing the system difficult for anyone who could not read Japanese. The project specifically translates the eight floppy disk images that make up the MS-DOS 5.00 A installation set, numbered disk 0 through disk 7. For legal reasons, the repository does not include the original Japanese disk images themselves. Instead, it provides a set of IPS patches, which are files that describe changes to apply to an existing disk image rather than a full copy of it. To use the translation, you need to obtain the original Japanese FDI disk images yourself, rename them to match the expected file names, and then apply the patches included in this project. The project includes scripts to automate this patching process on Windows, Linux, and macOS, plus a plain Python script that works the same way across platforms. Before modifying anything, the patching script checks each original disk image against a known checksum to confirm it is the exact version the patches were built for, and by default it writes the translated results into a separate folder so the original images are left untouched. For anyone who prefers not to use the provided scripts, the individual IPS patch files are also included separately and can be applied with any generic IPS patching tool, though the README warns that using the wrong disk image version will produce a corrupted or unusable result. Once the translated disk images are created, they are meant to be used in a PC-98 emulator or written to physical disks so MS-DOS can be installed as normal, starting from the first disk.