Pinball space cadet! Many fond memories of it on the family PC.
DOS Zone
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: DOS Zone
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, DirectX was win95 and later right? Windows Enhanced mode and future is kind of both on top of and underneath dos. There's a kind of wild layering that happens.
Fun fact, Win 95, 98 and ME booted DOS and autoexec'd win for you.
Yes, but like Windows for Workgroups before them, they didn't need to rely on DOS services once they had started. They were 32-bit multitasking OSes that could host multiple DOS VMs and (in the case of WfW) a 16-bit cooperatively multitasked GUI.
DOS basically acted as a bootloader. But all of those OSes had the very weird feature that they could switch back into a virtualised copy of their bootloader.
I do feel that Wikipedia understates the importance of Windows for Workgroups. Internally, it wasn't just Windows 3.1 with networking. It was a trial run for the fundamentals of the Windows 95 architecture.
Re: DOS Zone
#13For those unfamiliar with it, I highly recommend eXoDOS, it's literally every DOS game ever: https://www.retro-exo.com/exodos.html You can even get an extremely cool boxed version: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RetroeXo
I’ll give a different opinion that it’s really heavyweight to install exodos locally just to get a nostalgia hit when there’s plenty of sites like the above where it’s one click to run an old game fullscreen in a browser window.
Re: DOS Zone
#14Apparently this site is by the same person who created js-dos [1], which is an absolutely fantastic emulator for running and hosting DOS games in the browser. I used it quite successfully for an official sequel to an old DOS game a few weeks ago, and it even got to the point where it was pretty trivial to patch the js-dos ZIP bundle on the fly to modify how the original DOS game worked. [1] - https://github.com/caiii…
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Re: DOS Zone
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact, Win 95, 98 and ME booted DOS and autoexec'd win for you.
Yes, but like Windows for Workgroups before them, they didn't need to rely on DOS services once they had started. They were 32-bit multitasking OSes that could host multiple DOS VMs and (in the case of WfW) a 16-bit cooperatively multitasked GUI. DOS basically acted as a bootloader. But all of those OSes had the very weird feature that they could switch back into a virtualised copy of their bootloader. I do feel that…
In other words, they were bare-metal hypervisors which passed through the majority of the hardware, doing a minimum of virtualisation to allow sharing it between VMs. This is easy to see by comparing the responsiveness of a DOS box running something like EDIT in Win9x vs. NT/2K/XP's NTVDM; the latter is a full emulator of basically all the hardware except the CPU.
Re: DOS Zone
#16Oh dang, goodbye productivity for the next decade.
Re: DOS Zone
#17Pinball space cadet! Many fond memories of it on the family PC.
Not exactly DOS but give Balls of Steel a try [0]
Re: DOS Zone
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact: earlier Windows OSes ran on top of DOS.
Well, DirectX was win95 and later right? Windows Enhanced mode and future is kind of both on top of and underneath dos. There's a kind of wild layering that happens.
There was WinG (aka DirectX 1) that worked in Win 3.11 with Win32s.
Re: DOS Zone
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but like Windows for Workgroups before them, they didn't need to rely on DOS services once they had started. They were 32-bit multitasking OSes that could host multiple DOS VMs and (in the case of WfW) a 16-bit cooperatively multitasked GUI. DOS basically acted as a bootloader. But all of those OSes had the very weird feature that they could switch back into a virtualised copy of their bootloader. I do feel that…
In other words, they were bare-metal hypervisors which passed through the majority of the hardware, doing a minimum of virtualisation to allow sharing it between VMs. This is easy to see by comparing the responsiveness of a DOS box running something like EDIT in Win9x vs. NT/2K/XP's NTVDM; the latter is a full emulator of basically all the hardware except the CPU.
The unresponsive NTDVM was mainly due to its piss-poor text mode emulation. Win9x still virtualized the graphics card (so you couldn't use SVGA games in Win9x) but its emulation was implemented better.
Re: DOS Zone
#20What's with the slop cover art for Doom?