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SDL Now Supports DOS

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Re: SDL Now Supports DOS

#81

Post by [deleted] »

zozbot234 wrote: post #73
kjs3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother is in manufacturing. DOS is everywhere . Older things too (PDP-11? DG Nova? Seen both, semi-recently). Not just because "ain't broke, don't fix", but because when you have a cloth dying machine or brick forming machine you spent >US$5M for, that is often a bespoke install for your plant, you don't replace it because some guy who prolly slings Javascript all day sez "DOS is oooold, boomer".

These DOS machines for industrial control could probably be replaced by an Arduino or a far more reliable MCU, whereas running an actual legacy PC as a business-critical component in manufacturing has to be a bit of a nightmare by now. AI could probably do a good enough job of working out how the legacy DOS executables were intended to work.

[deleted]

Re: SDL Now Supports DOS

#82

Post by deaddodo »

pjmlp wrote: post #54
ronsor wrote: post #2

All that's left now is SDL for UEFI, and then all our games can run in a pre-OS environment.

Welcome to Amiga games, in many cases the floppy would contain the boot loader that would directly jump into the game. At least on the Amiga 500 you would not go through the trouble to start Workbench, only to load the game, unless you were a lucky owner of an external hard drive.

PC had bare metal games too. They were called “booters” and you can find an entire category of them on mobygames:

https://www.mobygames.com/platform/pc-booter/

Re: SDL Now Supports DOS

#83

Post by kjs3 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #73
kjs3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother is in manufacturing. DOS is everywhere . Older things too (PDP-11? DG Nova? Seen both, semi-recently). Not just because "ain't broke, don't fix", but because when you have a cloth dying machine or brick forming machine you spent >US$5M for, that is often a bespoke install for your plant, you don't replace it because some guy who prolly slings Javascript all day sez "DOS is oooold, boomer".

These DOS machines for industrial control could probably be replaced by an Arduino or a far more reliable MCU, whereas running an actual legacy PC as a business-critical component in manufacturing has to be a bit of a nightmare by now. AI could probably do a good enough job of working out how the legacy DOS executables were intended to work.

This isn't hackaday or adafruit. Everything is easy when you don't have to actually do it. You are wrong on every point.

Re: SDL Now Supports DOS

#84

Post by kjs3 »

ale42 wrote: post #68
kjs3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother is in manufacturing. DOS is everywhere . Older things too (PDP-11? DG Nova? Seen both, semi-recently). Not just because "ain't broke, don't fix", but because when you have a cloth dying machine or brick forming machine you spent >US$5M for, that is often a bespoke install for your plant, you don't replace it because some guy who prolly slings Javascript all day sez "DOS is oooold, boomer".

Given the implications, I guess nobody is going to touch those setups to put an SDL-based program on them, though...

Yeah...this is "if you screw around with it enough, you void the warranty and we will no longer support it" for a potentially multimillion dollar machine.

Re: SDL Now Supports DOS

#85

Post by zozbot234 »

kjs3 wrote: post #83
zozbot234 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These DOS machines for industrial control could probably be replaced by an Arduino or a far more reliable MCU, whereas running an actual legacy PC as a business-critical component in manufacturing has to be a bit of a nightmare by now. AI could probably do a good enough job of working out how the legacy DOS executables were intended to work.

This isn't hackaday or adafruit. Everything is easy when you don't have to actually do it. You are wrong on every point.

You might notice that I never once claimed that the replacement I described would be "easy" or, for that matter, even advisable given the broader real-world constraints involved; just technically feasible in the barest sense. I don't think many people would want to use DOS to design a greenfield system of that kind today, and there's a reason for that. Yes, you can buy newly made "DOS PCs" today, but can you really ensure that today's brand new DOS PC will behave in every way that matters like the actual 30 years old DOS PC that used to control the machinery? That's not a trivial question to answer.

If you design the system from the outset to work with an actual PLC/SCADA or similar (the typical solution for hooking up to big industrial machinery of that sort) that's a bit less likely to come up as an issue, and the hardware will actually be designed for that kind of environment.

Re: SDL Now Supports DOS

#87

Post by kjs3 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #85
kjs3 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't hackaday or adafruit. Everything is easy when you don't have to actually do it. You are wrong on every point.

You might notice that I never once claimed that the replacement I described would be "easy" or, for that matter, even advisable given the broader real-world constraints involved; just technically feasible in the barest sense. I don't think many people would want to use DOS to design a greenfield system of that kind today, and there's a reason for that. Yes, you can buy newly made "DOS PCs" today, but can you really e…

Yes, if you ignore everything that was discussed, invent time travel do you can "design the system from the outset" as the prescient you are, and pretend anyone was talking about greenfield, you get to be right. Good for you...some people just need the 'win'.

Re: SDL Now Supports DOS

#88

Post by ronsor »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #74
mananaysiempre wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That... Shouldn’t be terribly difficult? Though I don’t believe UEFI has sound drivers (you’ll have problems writing one yourself because even frickin’ sound-codec chips have NDA-only datasheets these days), and the stupidest thing is that the “graphics output protocol” doesn’t indicate vsync so you can’t do tear-free blitting, which is literally worse than VGA.

Most support Intel HDA. The problem is that people don't use onboard audio anymore (because its incredibly and audibly noisy). They use USB or Bluetooth. Bluetooth absolutely isn't standardized and is a mess, and USB miiiiiiight be okay if you limit to a subset of EHCI and USB Audio Class 1.0 devices. At this point, its easier to just use Linux and run your game as pid 1.

You can strip down Linux significantly as well: no multi-user, no extra syscalls, no FS support beyond initramfs/tmpfs, etc.

Re: SDL Now Supports DOS

#89

Post by mayama »

jlokier wrote: post #30

Perfect! I was just doing some Turbo C development inside DOSBox-X inside Debian GNU/Linux inside VMware Fusion inside macOS this morning.

Is there a turboc variant for linux, I vaguely remember working on turboc decades ago
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