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

For context, the first computer we got at home was a PC at some point in '94 or '95. We had MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. Some years later we moved into Windows 95. While I didn't really use these kind of GUIs (DOSShell and so on) as often as I would like, I always thought they were very pleasant to use. There is something about that DOS font that makes me happy each time I see it, and there is a certain feeling of being a stereotypical movie-style hacker when you use these instead of modern, actually graphical UIs. And yes, the reminiscence of simpler times with simple software, way before the surveillance capitalism and the brutal omnipresence of ads, is easy to appreciate.

The nice thing is that early versions of Windows supported these GUIs as well. So, a few years later, during my degree in Computer Engineering, I learned some x86 assembly (using Turbo Assembler as a compiler); this was during the early 00s, and we still used EDIT.com as the main text editor, although there were some others available. I loved it since the first day, both in concept (super low level programming with direct access to the hardware, managing interruptions and so on) and in execution (everything was in that text mode I loved, since modern Windows and their restrictions didn't play nicely with such low-level programming). I learned a lot from Ralf Brown's Interrup.lst, and wrote a few simple GUIs of my own, using box drawing characters and all that. Aside from those I wrote for academic work, I mostly spent a lot of time creating a silly GUI that allowed you to modify the look of the console. There were a few resolutions available, from 40x25 to 132x60, and you could change the colours of the text, the background and the border (yes, there is a border, which you can set to a different colour than the background. And my program could get 2^18=262144 colours available, not just 16! Although 16 was the max simultaneous on-screen limit IIRC), plus the font (I was able to add an edition screen where you could see the aspect of all 256 characters, yet I could use box drawing and so on for the interface in this screen. Did you know that DOS allowed two different sets of characters in screen at the same time?). There were some other additions like pixel-level scroll as opposed to the usual line-level scroll, and background "music" using the PC speaker. It didn't have any practical purpose aside from these silly customisations (which, in the case of Windows, went away when you closed the windows, and some times, also when you moved from full screen to a window), but man, did I have fun coding it. It's still one of my best memories of programming, nearly 15 years later.

Then, in 2009, my last Windows 98-capable computer stopped working, and current hardware only supported Windows XP and newer, so all of this fun basically stopped being possible (especially considering that basically all state of the art hardware was already 64 bits, and 16-bit applications like EDIT.com weren't supported any more). With emulators it's not the same, because I know I'm not really accessing the low-level hardware registers. By that time I already had a job and there was less time for this kind of hobbies, so I eventually stopped. Currently my recreational programming is mostly oriented towards math (Project Euler and so on), which is very different, but I still remember those days very fondly. I still have all that code somewhere.

Yeah, it's all nostalgia, but that doesn't mean it doesn't hit hard.

But realistically, I also recall getting pretty frustrated at times. Such as when I just wanted to play Wing Commander: Privateer, but had to spend hours messing with memory settings in `autoexec.bat`/`config.sys` and rebooting just to get it to run. And then I had to spend hours more fiddling with the memory settings, IRQs and the like, just so I could get sound from my Gravis Ultrasound/Soundblaster instead of the PC speaker.

But still, I can't help but feel nostalgic!