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Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

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Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#51

Post by ubermonkey »

jmspring wrote: post #18
avidphantasm wrote: post #7

Still don’t quite get the DOS nostalgia. Individual games were good, but the whole ecosystem was finicky and crash-prone by the early- to mid-90s, not to mention deeply ugly (ALL CAPS console, lousy inconsistent GUIs, unnaturally short filenames, etc.). My friends and I couldn’t wait to run Unix, NeXTSTEP, hell even classic MacOS. We only ran DOS/Windows because that’s all we had. Though don’t get me wrong, we still…

The OS itself was very basic. Learning to program things like TSRs, dealing with HIGHMEM, BASIC and BASIC assemblers vs C and other tools. It was a complicated environment by the restrictions, but those restrictions when explored taught one a lot about programming. Michael Abrash's graphics programming tutorials - https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/ It was a great environment to learn in. I spent time there,…

Doing a TSR under DOS was an exercise in trying to make a system do something that it really, really, really wasn't designed to do.

It was educational to try, but fundamentally not a path likely to result in anything but a painful educational experience.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#52

Post by gavinray »

tujv wrote: post #19

Related, Free Pascal has a text-mode IDE that's supported on most modern platforms. https://www.freepascal.org

I don't think the Free Pascal IDE is related to this

If you check the website demos and the "dos.h" source on GitHub, this is a library for making GUI apps whose UI has the appearance of being made with MS-DOS.

Unless I am misunderstanding the connection you're trying to make, which is also possible

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#53

Post by polpo »

ubermonkey wrote: post #50
avidphantasm wrote: post #7

Still don’t quite get the DOS nostalgia. Individual games were good, but the whole ecosystem was finicky and crash-prone by the early- to mid-90s, not to mention deeply ugly (ALL CAPS console, lousy inconsistent GUIs, unnaturally short filenames, etc.). My friends and I couldn’t wait to run Unix, NeXTSTEP, hell even classic MacOS. We only ran DOS/Windows because that’s all we had. Though don’t get me wrong, we still…

I feel like most of the folks on the DOS nostalgia train are people who didn't actually live through that era trying to make all those things work. As you note, it was finicky, crash prone, and very very annoying to work with. We did have fun, but we would've had more fun on a more capable, less slapdash OS. Which is why so many of us abandoned Win/DOS at our first opportunity -- either on (likely university-owned) U…

I wouldn't paint with such a broad brush. I've recently gotten way into retrocomputing, DOS included, I absolutely lived through that era. I spent my formative computing years in the early to mid 90s deep in DOS, mostly playing games, watching demos, listening to and writing tracker music, and doing pretty rudimentary C/C++ programming.

At the beginning of this year, I built an AMD K6 machine, got my Gravis Ultrasound card working again (which involved ordering a replacement mixer chip from China), and have had an absolutely wonderful time reliving my early computing experiences. And yes, that also includes fiddling with IRQ settings, maximizing low DOS memory, etc. Would I do day-to-day work in this kind of environment? Hell no! But it's a really fun distraction.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#54

Post by DHowett »

zozbot234 wrote: post #16
zetalyrae wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have fond memories of SETEDIT: http://setedit.sourceforge.net/ It was kind of a complete floating windows GUI in a TUI: http://setedit.sourceforge.net/se1.gif

PsychDOS is a very similar project: https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/INDEX.HTM I wonder if it would be possible to extend a terminal multiplexer to the point of providing such an intuitive interface to existing TUI software on modern *ix systems. I'm sure the effort would be quite non-trivial, but it would help a number of workflows. Adding support for the additional features that are found in these TUI environment…

> I wonder if it would be possible ...

Check out the VTM project[1]! It feels like that's the direction they're heading. No direct affiliation; they've filed some bugs on Windows Terminal, however. :)

[1] https://github.com/netxs-group/VTM

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#55

Post by mixmastamyk »

I like these and the other examples. However they all tend to use 16 colors while improving other aspects such as unicode and resizable large cell count terminals. Please use more colors, 256 at least. I’d like to see a turbovision style CUA TUI (haha) in a theme like Win 95 or 2k etc.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#56

Post by Narishma »

arduinomancer wrote: post #3

Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC83MTY0MTEyLnBuZw==/o... They have such a cozy feel, reminds me of simpler times. It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could make webpages like that.

I don't think VGA monitors had scanlines like that. Some older CGA and EGA monitors did though.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#57

Post by zozbot234 »

DHowett wrote: post #54
zozbot234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PsychDOS is a very similar project: https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/INDEX.HTM I wonder if it would be possible to extend a terminal multiplexer to the point of providing such an intuitive interface to existing TUI software on modern *ix systems. I'm sure the effort would be quite non-trivial, but it would help a number of workflows. Adding support for the additional features that are found in these TUI environment…

> I wonder if it would be possible ... Check out the VTM project[1]! It feels like that's the direction they're heading. No direct affiliation; they've filed some bugs on Windows Terminal, however. :) [1] https://github.com/netxs-group/VTM

Well, that's a terminal multiplexer but not very TUI like. I don't think it would be directly usable over a low-bandwidth SSH connection, which is the kind of use case people often have in mind for TUI's.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#58

Post by wizzwizz4 »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #38
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The users were pissed. They demanded the checkboxes be replaced with "Y" and "N" options to mimic what they were used to. If you removed my keyboard workflow, I'd be pissed too. Muscle memory means you don't have to think about it; with the mouse, you always have to think about what you're doing, and can't think of other things (e.g. why you're doing it) while you're doing the rote bits. Is there a particular reaso…

To be clear, we did support keyboard workflows, like Y/N They were pissed we replaced the Y/N text items with a checkbox. Any deviation, including things like lower case text, were pushed back.

> They were pissed we replaced the Y/N text items with a checkbox.

At this point, I'd probably factor out the UI, hand them the client-side source code and tell them to get on with it. If they want to customise the UI, then so long as you're not supporting it…

… but yeah; that's a less reasonable objection than I thought it was. (Still a change to their workflow, and still understandable, but there were legitimate business reasons that the workflow needed to be changed.)

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#59

Post by FpUser »

avidphantasm wrote: post #7

Still don’t quite get the DOS nostalgia. Individual games were good, but the whole ecosystem was finicky and crash-prone by the early- to mid-90s, not to mention deeply ugly (ALL CAPS console, lousy inconsistent GUIs, unnaturally short filenames, etc.). My friends and I couldn’t wait to run Unix, NeXTSTEP, hell even classic MacOS. We only ran DOS/Windows because that’s all we had. Though don’t get me wrong, we still…

>"lousy inconsistent GUIs"

For a second I thought you are talking about UI in "modern" web apps. Ok some of them are pleasure to work with, but the rest ...

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#60

Post by ffhhj »

pengaru wrote: post #27
arduinomancer wrote: post #3

Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC83MTY0MTEyLnBuZw==/o... They have such a cozy feel, reminds me of simpler times. It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could make webpages like that.

Eh, the Borland Grahics Interface (BGI) style TUIs were kind of awful. I hated the Borland Turbo C IDE in no small part because of that style TUI. It just wasted so much precious character space on TUI frames and other decorations. More of my fond TUI memories from that era were the bespoke ones in the demo/art/music/bbs scenes. Those in many cases were still character based but seemed to make better use of the scree…

Altought I liked Borland IDE's, did't liked their UIs neither. For me the best text UI's ever created were Symantec's, which used some custom icons (ie arrows, buttons), and nicer tech colors:

https://diarywind.com/blog/img/g13/fcf379da7cb57db6feb94d563...

https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/10-for-dos-54195b...

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