Ah, good ol' days of configuring AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to squeeze few more kb of RAM:)
And setting IRQs for some weird sound card that just doesn't work!
Open Sourcing DOS 4
201–210 of 382 posts
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
NT sources leaked, same for 2000. There is also leaked DOS 6 beta. The only thing releasing stuff this old brings is nerd goodwill.
All open-source projects that deal with reimplementing parts of Windows, particularly Wine and ReactOS, consider those leaked sources radioactive and would not accept any patches if there's even a slightest suspicion that the patch author gleaned anything from those sources. Those same sources officially released under an open-source license would change that.
I wouldn’t assume Microsoft execs view increased capabilities to run windows programs in Linux as a bad thing, when they think about the matter at all. They would certainly prefer that such a capability be developed by someone else, so they don’t have to support it.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt Microsoft would ever open-source any NT Windows versions because the current ones are based on the same code, just with added touchscreen nonsense, adware, and overt contempt for the user. We may see Windows 9x open-sourced. But then again, it's a stretch because Win32 API is still in wide use today. Releasing the sources for 32-bit Windows versions even this old may have an adverse effect on Microsoft's mark…
> Releasing the sources for 32-bit Windows versions even this old may have an adverse effect on Microsoft's market domination. I disagree that releasing Windows 9x source code would have any impact on MS market domination. > I doubt Microsoft would ever open-source any NT Windows versions because the current ones are based on the same code Nowadays releasing something NT like XP may seem crazy. But in 15 years it wil…
> But in 15 years it will be so far away from future Windows, that it won't be that crazy.
It's not like the NT kernel will be going away from current Microsoft products anytime soon.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's valid feedback. There is no clock, but there maybe should be. In this case, yes, Jeff and I had to PUSH. And that's a hassle. I'll ask around.
I appreciate your hard work on open sourcing this! If you’re taking requests I’d love to see MS-DOS 5.0 or at least QBasic next.
True, I don't know when Qbasic (and Edit?) went into dos (according to Wikipedia they were on 5.0)
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#205When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC. I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since…
>Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor. do you mean non-system ones?
MacOS is notorious for this. By default, it would only run binaries signed with an Apple-issued certificate. You can bypass this multiple different ways, of course, but that requires knowing that it can be bypassed in the first place.
Then there are mobile OSes where you don't get to see the binaries at all. Yes you can repack an apk but again, that's a more involved process requiring specific tools and knowledge (and very awkward to do on the device itself), and iOS is completely locked down.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#206Some fun things I found in the source code
* "TWIDDLE" [1]
; DO THE 2 SECOND TWIDDLE. IF TIME >= 2 SECONDS, DO A VOLID CHECK.
db '21',0,0 ;J.K. 11/8/86 This is my employee serial # !!!
[1][https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/2d04cacc5322951f187...]
[2]https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/2d04cacc5322951f187...
[3]https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amicrosoft%2FMS-DOS+BRAIN+...
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#207Whenever I think about the good old DOS days, QEMM and DESQview come to mind. Esp. DESQview which was a rather essential part of my DOS experience... Sources for these would be fun to look at.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#208When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC. I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since…
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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#209I was having a chat with one of the young guys in the office yesterday.
He was complaining that his first PC had windows 7 and was slow, because he only had 2GB of RAM.
And I was thinking: Gosh, probably he never typed "dir" or "c:" in his life...
I feel sooo old :/
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#210When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC. I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since…
I remember trying to rename LILO (from "Loading Linux" fame) to PIPO [1] by simply editing the bytes with a hex editor. Turned out that didn't work, because there was an additional sanity check that halted the boot process if the "LI" bytes were corrupted. Of course I put through and was a happy user of PIPO for some years, until Grub came along. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipo_de_Clown
When I was running Gentoo, I wanted to replace the GNOME foot that appeared on the dropdown menu with a Gentoo-fish-in-a-wizard-hat icon.
I found documentation suggesting that the icon shown on the menu was set in a certain configuration file, and changed that file.
This meant that, when I was using the normal UI to customize the GNOME topbar, the icon associated with that menu, in the GUI, was the fish-wizard icon. But it did not change the icon displayed in the menu itself.
I always resented that. I still don't like the concept of hiding configuration lest the user change it.