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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

#101

Post by jaredsohn »

pronlover723 wrote: post #94
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…

WAT?! You didn't enjoy running QEMM, running the optimizer to figure out the best order to load things. Configuring EMS and XMS memory? Editing your config.sys and autoexec.bat. Manually setting dip switches and setting pins to try to get your cards to each have a unique IRQ I certainly have some fond memories but I'm pretty happy with modern UIs

>Manually setting dip switches and setting pins to try to get your cards to each have a unique IRQ

Also, thinking about which IRQs are available when buying a hardware device and how that maps with possibilities for existing devices.

Even more fun - realizing that the solution is to swap network cards amongst a couple of computers because the other network card has more options. So you do the swap (and update the software to use the new ports) and then hope that both computers will even load afterward.

Had to do the planning by hand since this was before I was on the Internet and I don't remember seeing web apps that help with this.

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

#102

Post by skissane »

jimmaswell wrote: post #68
skissane wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Defender is really bad at false positives. I think especially the "!ml" ones – I believe that means it is using heuristics rather than a direct signature match. I have my own parental control software I wrote. (Maybe one of these days I will open source it, but not in its current state.) I wanted to use text-to-speech to send audio messages to our son ("Your time is up in five minutes!" kind of thing). Wind…

I can't speak to every situation, but all computer/video game/whatever time limits did for me was make me resent my parents and do nothing with the remaining time out of spite. I don't think I'd ever do it to my own kids.

Our son is 8. If we let him, he would stay up until 1am using the computer. We've tried other approaches, such as reasoning with him, or positive reinforcement, but this is the only thing that has worked.

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

#103

Post by mysterydip »

lproven wrote: post #84
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

That was my preferred Linux text editor for a while, too. These days, I use Tilde, which is modern, maintained, and packaged for contemporary distros. https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/

Thanks for the link! I had been struggling to find something that "felt right", from changing themes in Kate or using vim or nano. This looks perfect.

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

#104

Post by tssva »

torgoguys wrote: post #42
pengaru wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I love all things text mode. For anyone searching for the Borland style text interface, it was actually called TurboVision, not BGI (which was a generic graphics library). TurboVision (and many GUIs of the time) largely followed the Common User Interface (CUI) spec by IBM for its interactions in text mode. It is fair to say there was a lot of screen space devoted to borders and such, especially in 80x25 mode, but tha…

The IBM spec was CUA( Common User Access) not CUI.

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

#105

Post by atombender »

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…

What still blows my mind is that there were vastly better technologies at the time.

Back in 1992 or so, I was an Amiga user. I was blessed with both advanced GUIs and advanced shells. AmigaOS wasn't quite Unix, but the shell had similar power. I had friends who used Apple Macintosh computers, and they also bragged about the stuff they could do. (And of course you had other things like NeXT, Acorn's RISC OS, SCO UNIX, and OS/2, all of which had pre-emptive multitasking, but weren't on my radar at the time.)

But the PC was everywhere, and the Amiga was fading, so I got a PC, even though it was ridiculously primitive. While building PCs was fun, everything was a struggle. DOS was crappy, you had to fiddle with memory managers, no multitasking, a terrible file system, and so on. Windows 3.0 was not the dominant player that it would become with Windows 95, and you still did many things in DOS, such as programming. On the positive side, the gaming situation was pretty much as good as it had been on the Amiga. The 1990s was a great time for games.

But it's insane that so much superior tech existed at the time, yet we lost of all that to MS-DOS. It wasn't really until Windows 2000 that we had something decent again, even then it was quickly derailed. I really appreciate that Apple came back and MacOS X became an alternative.

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

#107

Post by LocalH »

laumars wrote: post #96
pengaru wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> style TUIs were kind of awful. You might have disliked them but they were far from awful. They were some of the cleanest TUIs ever designed. The other screenshot you shared isn’t a TUI by the way. It’s a GUI. It just happens it runs atop of DOS (much like early versions of Windows did). So it’s not really comparable to TurboVision. Regarding TurboVision, I suspect you might be in the minority with your dislike for…

Pretty sure ScreamTracker ran in text mode, so it's a TUI. It just used a custom font, instead of most TUIs using the stock BIOS or video card font.

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

#108

Post by psd1 »

kristopolous wrote: post #41
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…

It's just a hobby and that's really it. The irrelevancy is the appeal. It's become something mostly disconnected from everything else. A world of computing that's not focused around networking or communications where the relationship is between the user and the machine as opposed to the machine being a vessel for a relationship with others. It is inherently a different kind of computing with a different kind of perfo…

Don't tell my wife. I promised her it'll do nearly 20mpg and be reliable

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

#109

Post by psd1 »

Delk wrote: post #48
anyfoo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installing Linux and seeing if it even starts is already a lot of effort, and then you've only "seen if it starts" and are very far from anything considered "tested".

Eh. Sure it's takes a bit of effort but installing a Linux distro in a virtual machine and pulling and compiling some C code isn't exactly a massive project. It would have been a much bigger deal before the widespread use of virtual machines. Or, I guess, if you don't have experience with building things on Linux. I completely understand that if someone doesn't use a platform themselves, there might be little motivat…

You're not wrong, but the author might have a day job and a family.

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

#110

Post by ddingus »

jimmaswell wrote: post #66
ddingus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. People who interact with those things just blow through them at high speed without even thinking! That frees them to think about other things. Arguably, more important things.

It calls into question if the original version had to be replaced at all. It probably didn't.

Indeed. My other comment has to do with meta info. Docs, procedures, training material. Cost of change is high, rewards or returns?

Low.

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