51–60 of 68 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the olden days we used SDL ports of games that used a framebuffer, just the same as in DOS.
I wonder, Does a version of Doom exist doing this? Every version of Doom I have seen for Linux over the years required X
Was DOS considered to be better than Windows back then?
Win 95 was when people really started to ditch MS-DOS and love the GUI. But for gaming DOS held on for a few more years and there was definitely a period of time where whenever you wanted to fire up Doom or other games you had to reboot out of Win 95 GUI and into DOS mode.
Less than a 2 years I'd say, with 2.5 years at the maximum: Win95 GA is August '95 and Quake 2 hit the last nail in the DOS gaming coffin in December '97
It was an absurdingly fast process, in Jan 1996 we got Duke3D, Quake in the summer, and dual boot with DOS was the norm.
In 1997 we got a bunch of Build-engine releases for DOS: Blood and Redneck Rampage in ~May, Shadow Warrior in September; while MDK, GTA, Carmageddon, Dungeon Keeper, Fallout got a mixed Win/DOS release and 3dfx was at it's peak.
Quake 2, Tomb Raider 2, Wing Commander: Prophecy are released for the Christmas sales and are Windows only.
Dual boot is still a thing for some games, but the new games are targeting Windows and DirectX.
Diablo (January), NFS2 (March) and AoE (October) are Windows only.
In 1998 there is no noticeable DOS-only or Win/DOS releases, except some add-ons for the earlier games.
Before mentioned Quake 2, StarCraft (April), Unreal (May), FreeSpace (June), Half-Life (November) are the ones which dictate the OS would be used. Win98 was released in May.
Even Derek Smart stops developing DOS versions of Battlecruiser 3000AD.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The transition to Windows was a lot more painful than the glossy history suggests. DOS had a huge eco-system of programs, TSRs to help you context switch, incredibly popular word processing and spreadsheet packages and solid networking if you had Netware available. Windows wouldn't even load on some PC's depending on which memory manager you had installed, what else you were trying to run and what kind of network sta…
The DOS Word was actually pretty good but, yes, there was a lot of competition for (incompatible) word processors at the time which basically continued until Office on Windows basically squashed it all. Latterly you had pretty good text-based user interfaces and, as you say, there were lots of kludges like TSRs, Double DOS, etc. that filled in a lot of gaps in the original DOS. The other problem is that PCs basically…
A PX XT (8088) with the graphical GEM was absolutely usable. I was impressed by it in 1986, at a time were Windows 1 was nearly unusable, and Windows 2 (from 1988) not much better.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/IBM_PC_G...
Was DOS considered to be better than Windows back then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Win 95 was when people really started to ditch MS-DOS and love the GUI. But for gaming DOS held on for a few more years and there was definitely a period of time where whenever you wanted to fire up Doom or other games you had to reboot out of Win 95 GUI and into DOS mode.
> a period of time Less than a 2 years I'd say, with 2.5 years at the maximum: Win95 GA is August '95 and Quake 2 hit the last nail in the DOS gaming coffin in December '97 It was an absurdingly fast process, in Jan 1996 we got Duke3D, Quake in the summer, and dual boot with DOS was the norm. In 1997 we got a bunch of Build-engine releases for DOS: Blood and Redneck Rampage in ~May, Shadow Warrior in September; while…
TIL the term "asperand" for the @ sign http://chebucto.ns.ca/~ak621/DOS/DOS-Char.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperand
Arobase is used a lot in France, probably like the other Spanish and Portuguese terms. However, the English ones not so much.
TIL the term "asperand" for the @ sign http://chebucto.ns.ca/~ak621/DOS/DOS-Char.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperand
You skipped that part of the Wikipedia article: "but none of these have achieved wide use." Arobase is used a lot in France, probably like the other Spanish and Portuguese terms. However, the English ones not so much.
I read that as DR DOS (Digital Research) which I was enamored of until MS DOS 5.0 came out. Digital Research made GEM (a Mac-like desktop GUI) and included a pared down version called ViewMAX in DR DOS 5.0 but ultimately didn't deliver on providing a Mac-like interface.
https://www.osnews.com/story/26322/apple-vs-dri-the-iotheri-...
But GEM ran on 2 different platforms: DOS PCs, and on the Atari ST. The Atari version was not affected by Apple's lawsuit and delivered a very slick interface.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On this note, the Royal Bank of Canada used a DOS-like system well into the 2000s. The tellers were amazingly proficient with it, entering data, hitting tab-tab-tab, entering more data, tab-tab-tab, etc. When they switched to Windows, you could see how much the point-and-click interface slowed them down.
IBM used a DOS-based OS called "4690" for their point-of-sale systems, which IIRC had 32-bit extensions and various forms of networking including a weird 56kbps "token ring" type system that tills could (s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y) netboot off. It's still in use, and although it's been replaced by Linux in current products there were bugfix releases at least as recently as late 2020.
The revised license for CP/M from DRDOS, Inc this month covers "CP/M and derivatives".
DRDOS is a derivative of CP/M, as is Concurrent DOS/Multiuser DOS, and arguably the FlexOS line too.
