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Dosemu v1.0 Released 163

Posted by Hemos from the have-fun dept.
Several people have noted that Dosemu has version 1.0 on their ftp servers. The comment that most people had was to test whether it could run Duke Nukem 3D *grin*.
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Dosemu v1.0 Released More

Dosemu v1.0 Released

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  • whee (Score:4)

    by VAXGeek ( 3443 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @08:09AM (#1222209) Homepage
    Too bad DOSEMU doesn't run on my alpha. I'm going to spend all tonight playing Commander Keen and Duke Nukem 2. BTW, if you want some classique DOS games, check out www.gangsters.org. They're the best for really old games. And I thought DOSEMU was dead!
    ------------
    a funny comment: 1 karma
    an insightful comment: 1 karma
    a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
  • Now I can run my old QuickBasic version of Q-Bert on my Linux box!!

    Oh, wait...Its on 5 1/4...

  • Cool (Score:5)

    by Zico ( 14255 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @08:12AM (#1222213)

    Nothing like using a rehash of a 30-year old OS to emulate a 20-year old OS.

    Linux Community, thy name is creativity. Hats off to ya.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Dosemu is a time machine (Score:5)

    by Uruk ( 4907 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @08:15AM (#1222216)
    Aaah, it takes me back to the time when I was about 14 years old, I had gotten my first computer, (it was a 486SX2 with 4MB) and I was using DOS as it was a REAL operating system. Sure, those other quiche eating wimps may use Windows 3.1, but I'm a real man (at 14, yeah right) who uses a REAL system. A CLI.

    I remember playing Doom, Doom ][, (always done with the backwards brackets) using some obscure phone program to dial my favorite BBS (it was called "Cyberia" -- how lame is that :)

    I remember ridiculing edlin. I didn't think that it was possible to have an editor that was worse than edlin. Surely, edlin was the most pathetic program ever written. (Well, it wasn't, but I thought it was at the time. In all actuality, the most pathetic programs ever written were my early attempts at QBASIC)

    And then all of the tricks shared with friends, like putting high-ascii characters in filenames so they couldn't be deleted by conventional means, (because you couldn't type the filename) and looking at virus source code trying to figure out what the hell "mov" and "cmp" stood for.

    My progression went from Dos->windows->linux. It reminds me of a Pearl Jam song ("I'm Open") -- "Illusion was traded for Reality...no tradebacks. So this is what it's like to be an adult".

    Dosemu is a total time machine for me. I use it every now and then to go back to my "roots" of computing. It's a personal thing, and probably isn't interesting to many people, but it's a holy shitload of fun for me. :-)

  • Now if only we could have a Mainframe emulator... :-) --Ryan

  • Re:dosemu (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yoda is on /.? Cool

  • "Illegal" once 100% functional? MPAA revisited? (Score:4)

    by pjbrewer ( 140003 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @08:19AM (#1222220)
    Hats off to the DOSEMU folks and the WINE folks too.

    Back in pre-1.0 days, I learned to like Linux and live without windows and dos. While I'm sure that dosemu and wine are a lot better than they were 4-5 years ago, I also suspect M$ is constantly coming out with new APIs and API extensions to create incompatibilities.

    One has to wonder, if DOSEMU and WINE became fully functional, if we'd just see a repeat of what is happening with DeCSS and the MPAA. Maybe M$ could claim that their contorted API is in fact a copy protection scheme.

    Also, big business has an incentive to let people slave away on free projects and then hit them hard as they are just hitting the market, so that the developers are fully demoralized. Helps convince others to go away.

    Opinions?

  • ppl from the uk and the eu may be interested that www.linuxuk.co.uk [linuxuk.co.uk] had this story online several hours ago.
    sometimes things can take a little long to reach /. so maybe you should drop by and see what we have to offer from time to time.
    BTW I love DOSEmu and think all the guys that have worked on the project over the last 8 years really deserve a big hand, DOS had so much hidden away that recreating all the undocumented stuff can't have been easy.
  • you mean complete emulation under linux! Great! Now I can run windows95 and their apps!
    <running>


    ---
  • This is the nice thing about emulators - so many classic pieces of software can be contained in a system. I hope that DosEmu will continue until you can run as amny pure DOS apps as possible.

    So - what versions of windows can run on DosEmu?
  • I would try if I could find my old Star Control collection CD,. Had Star Control I II for 9 bucks, and star control II was one of the best games I ever played on DOS.. What I wouldn' give to have that CD turn up.. In any case Your system should handle it, especially if it worked before :) Just some tweaking must be involved. But I'm no expert :)

  • Unfortunately... (Score:5)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <(imipak) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Monday March 06, 2000 @08:26AM (#1222226) Homepage Journal
    All these modern P3's, with Linux, run FAR too fast to play many of the older DOS games. Wing Commander II was bad enough on a 486dx-33, -without- the Turbo button.

    However, I have a solution to this problem. Simply run the user-land version of Linux under Linux. Then, run the Archimedes version of Linux under the xarch emulator under the user-land Linux. Then, run an xterm over to the original Linux layer, in which you run dosemu.

    You will now have a computer that will run at the "classic" 8086 speed, so that you can play all of your favourite games, without seeing just a horrible blur.

    (It'll also allow you to extensively test all these emulators for bugs, whilst you're at it. :)

  • A newer, better dosemu is all well and good, but I've yet to find a good TRS-80 emulator - I don't think those neat old nostalgiaware games like "Crush, Crumble and Chomp" or "Voyage of the Valkyrie" are going to be ported to Linux any time soon...

    *mope*
  • There is a huge body of work out there written for DOS.
    Most of it is forgotten crap, but there are some good programs too.
    It makes more sense to emulate DOS than waste resources
    reinventing every bit of useful code written for DOS.

  • Still no working sound. (Score:3)

    by jelwell ( 2152 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @08:30AM (#1222229)
    Dosemu has been working really good as far as emulation goes. It could be a little faster - but I'm not complaining there. I loved playing Carmageddon (the first one) under dosemu nearly 2 years ago. However one critical component still seems to be missing - sound!

    The README.txt for DOSEMU v1.0 pl0.0 says:
    " The sound driver is more or less likely to be broken at the moment.
    Anyway, here are the settings you would need to emulate a SB-sound
    card by passing the control to the Linux soundrivers."

    Until sound is working game play is fairly limited.
    Joseph Elwell.
  • windows 95 is a protected mode app and dosemu can't support it, windows 3.x runs on dosemu but why would you want to?


    hey come back ahhh I get it a flamebait ;-)

  • Is anyone aware of a list of games or other programs that run under dosemu? Specifically, I'm wondering about the old flight simulator Tornado.

  • Many third world countries still use DOS as it's operating system. Let's be real, not every country can afford $1200 systems to load $250 Operating Systems just to start rebuilding their old DOS apps written in Fox or Clipper or whatever...

    Anyway, I still want to know how good has became sound and joystick support in 1.0 ..err...well...some people in third world countries still likes those old dos games...

    Congratulations dosemu team!

    <flame>
    Yes, a 30 years old OS, emulating a 20 years Old OS, that's far stable that those supposed 0 years old OS that perform worse than 10 years ago...
    </flame>

  • Man, you've summed it up beautifully. I remember those days. People who used Windows were so lame.

    And looking at virus source code... I was one of those losers sitting around reading 40h in the dark thinking about how cool it would be to write a some really virulent code. As it turned out, I wrote a really lame com-infector that didn't even spread outside of the directory it was run in, making it pretty useless. But it did prevent programs from running on my birthday.

    Man, I really wasted my youth. Now I'm a bitter almost-20 who would gladly take a summer job doing web design for Joe's Auto Shop and Taxidermy. God, somebody please hire me.

    I think the moral of the story is: don't read 40h. It'll rot your mind.

  • Did you steal my memories or something.... I suppose a bunch of people did that, but still kind of spooky. I completly understand what you're going through man. Me too...

    ~Jester
  • Free Software projects need them.

    DOSEMU Only Seams to Emulate X86 Microcircutry Under Unix.

    The actual Dos you run with Dosemu is a separate package ( Freedos or Caldera Open Dos are prime candidates ). This of course is the only way to really do it since so many Dos programs did most of there work by going around the OS and dealing with the hardware directly.

    Now that Dosemu runs and has even used substantial hardware trickery ( AKA X86 protected mode ) it will let your 1GHz Athelon under Linux run the same software as that old PS/2 under Dos. But faster.

    A few questions though. Windows 3.1 actually sort of worked under some versions of it ( I'll check if it boots in the full 1.0 release ) and Windows applications still go around the OS when they feel like. What are the odds of getting this to help out the emulation mode of WINE? As an API for porting old application Wine is OK of course, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the emulation department ( maybe that's why they don't call it 1.0 ? ). Could running Wine and Dosemu together improve on that somehow ?
  • I remember using DOSEmu back in 1994 and thinking that it was pretty good, even back then. It ran WordPerfect, allowed me to access the NetWare file server, and even let me run DOS commands through a telnet shell! This has got to be some kind of record for 'longest time to 1.0 for an open source project'.

    Congratulations to the DOSEmu people and thanks for the many years of hard work!

  • Does anyone know if anyone is offering commercial support contracts for DOSEMU? I know of at least one company that is considering it as a means to gracefully migrate from DOS to Linux, and a commercial support option would certainly help. VMWare is also an option, but you need a much higher spec box to run it, so the gains from moving to Linux are negated somewhat. I this the sort of thing LinuxCare would offer?

    On a completely different note, I used to use DOSEMU to play Heretic and Descent under Linux in the days before there were native versions, and it was great. It can only have improved since then. I understand they've even got graphics working in a window under X now.

  • Great! (Score:1)

    by ceeam ( 39911 )
    But hey, dosemu was for a long-long time stable/feature-rich enough to "deserve" 1.0 label.

    My, what a shock it was when I ran "nascar racing" in an x-window and it run almost with no slowdown whatsoever.
    That was some years ago and the machine I had then was 486DX-66 with 8MB RAM and an VLB video.

    But of course, it's not just a game-runner.

    Cheers to dosemu team!
  • Well, now.. you can run your favorite DOS based TRS-80 Emulator under DOSEMU 1.0 ;) Who can live without "Madness and the Minotaur on the TRS-80".. I have to play every year or so, or I'll just keel over.
  • Please someone hack UFO: Enemy unknown so it's usable on anything higher that 486/33 or else I'll had to do it :)

    What a great game! Nothing even close was made after it.
  • Once you have DosEmu set up and running, check out

    http://underdogs.cjb.net [cjb.net]

    It's the most comprehensive and well-maintained archive of classic DOS games I've ever seen on the net.

  • Why not just run VMware and renice it to a very low nice?
  • I didn't have any problem on 0.98.8. I'm on a dual P2/266, though, so you might in fact be having problems with speed. You might also try turning off sound in the program and starting it with /g:bios.
  • Heh, I just picked up the Electronic Arts "Classic Gold" Ultima Collection, and have been wasting time playing them through in succession. I'm up to Ultima IV. :)

    However, I tried running Ultimas 6-8 on my Win98 laptop, and it refuses to recognise the mouse - 'cause there's no MS-DOS mouse driver loaded, and no obvious way to find and load one.

    So perhaps via DOSEMU I'll have more luck.

    Say, any word if DOSEMU correctly handles games that came with their own OS replacement?
  • Nope!

    I am a strong proponent of moving S/W announcements to freshmeat, however this is a 1.0 release of a useful piece of S/W and does warrant a note on /.
  • One has to wonder, if DOSEMU and WINE became fully functional, if we'd just see a repeat of what is happening with DeCSS and the MPAA. Maybe M$ could claim that their contorted API is in fact a copy protection scheme.

    Well, you should read up on the DMCA. Title 1 incorporates international treaties on intellectual property which prevent defeating technological protection measures that protect a copyrighted work. On one hand, secret APIs do not prevent access to or copying of Windows. On the other hand, DOSEMU and WINE do not attempt to access any protected Microsoft data.

    By the way for people who haven't tried WINE: -- it runs many Windows programs very well, well enough to do useful work with only an occaisional crash. It is not "fully functional" in that some of the more unusual and secret APIs are not implemented (which is why office doesn't work on it). The product usability ratings on the winehq page are usually fairly conservative.
  • Now if I could only get DosEMU for WinNT... :)
  • Actually, I could use a Tandem emulator at work. We're using Outside View and I frankly don't like it. I'd rather have a connection to the Tandem running in an Xterm or something.

  • ...although maybe that's a UK thing - I don't know how popular ZX Spectrums were in the US, but over here they rocked the home gaming world for a few years...

    A friend of mine recently got a spec emulator for windows, and seeing him playing all those old games made me wonder what happened to my youth, at my now advanced age of 26 ! :)

    Regards,
    Denny

    PS - this story broke on Linux UK [linuxuk.co.uk] much earlier today - something to do with the time difference I imagine, most slashdot stories seem to appear in our afternoon...

    # Using Linux in the UK? Check out Linux UK [linuxuk.co.uk]

  • Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5)

    by gleam ( 19528 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @09:14AM (#1222255) Homepage
    Why not just download Mo'Slo [hpaa.com]?

    It's described on its homepage as a set of "CPU Slowdown Utilities".

    It's crippleware, but the only thing the cripple keeps you from doing is slowing down in fractional increments. A friend of mine uses moslo extensively on his win box, unregistered, and it works fine.

    I would bet it works under dosemu as well.

    They actually have two copies, Mo'Slo Deluxe, and Mo'Slo BIZ. It even has in-program speed adjustment.

    Really. Check it out.

    -ed fisher
  • I recall a script called MOSLO that I would use to play my UltimaII...and so on with. Man, those little buggers moved fast without it!
  • You can. It's called Hercules [freeserve.co.uk]. It runs under Linux and emulates a S/370 or ESA/390 mainframe. Although not quite Open Source (and definitely not GPL), it's free "...for your own personal non-commercial educational and hobby use". You can use it run OS/360, MVT and other old stuff which is public domain. See Jay Maynard's page [texas.net] for instructions on how. You can just about run Linux/390 under Hercules :-)
  • Substitute the 486 and Doom with a 386 and Wolfenstein, and that was my childhood...scary. Was anyone else disappointed when they upgraded and discovered the new DOS didn't come with nibbles.bas?

  • Fusion (Score:1)

    by Phroggy ( 441 )
    Will it run Fusion (a Mac emulator for DOS that can emulate a 68040-based Mac Quadra and run Mac OS 8)?
  • Gosh, you young'ens sure had it easy.

    I remember getting my first computer, an 8088 (with turbo switch to go from 4.77MHz to 7.26MHz), while all my other friends were getting Commodore 64s. I spent hours trying to come up with ways to break the new copy-protection schemes that companies put on floppies. You did not have hard drives back then, they were to expensive! Ah yes, putting in one disk with a cracker util and inspecting the other floppy drive. Looking a pure assembly in DOS. Creating virtual drives in memory using DOS commands. Blah...

    I really did not understand the code until I started doing assembly programming on a Zilog Z-80 processors inputting in straight hex codes. At least it was not punch cards.


    --Ivan, weenie NT4 user: bite me!

  • What is needed now is a *86 emulator to run under DOSEMU.

    That way all the DOS application can instantly run on ANY linux system (with enough CPU power). A 300Mhz chip should be able to emulate a 30MHz processor no problem.

    See the pretty MAC,
    see the pretty MAC run linux,
    see the pretty MAC run DOSEMU
    see the pretty MAC run Windows 3.1
    see the pretty MAC run DukeNukem3d.

    See the IBM iron run VM,
    see VM run linux
    see linx run dosemu on any86
    see windows 3.1 run on IBM iron
    fall on the floor and laugh your guts out.
  • I guess the joke didn't come off as well as it should have. =P

    ---
  • I'm pretty sure that Ultima VI and VII will not run under dosemu due to the way that they mangle memory. IIRC, anything requiring 32-bit protected mode access isn't going to do very well under dosemu.
  • I just love Duke Nukem 3D. If you can ignore the blatant sexism of the game, it's got the highest giggle factor of any game I've ever played. I can play for hours and just laugh the whole time.

    I'm really really desperate to play this game again. The problem is that my WinBox is behind my Linux IP masq box, and I'm having a lot of difficulty.

    There's a program out there called iC, an add on for Duke that is great for two machines connecting via TCP/IP. Doesn't work behind IP masq... It suffers from the "your IP address is 192.168.*.*, the other comp can't connect to you" problem.

    Last night, I was trying Kali with their new kproxy software. It works great for Starcraft, but we just can't seem to see each other in Duke. I'd be eternally grateful for anyone willing to offer Kali/ipmasq/kproxy support for Duke. My wife on the other hand... :)

    Now comes DosEmu. I could just run Duke on the Linux server! Does anyone have experience getting Duke to run over the Internet with Duke3D and DosEmu?
  • Ok, who out there remembers compiling gcc?
    Its all ready to go for most people....

    When you compiled gcc, it assumed you started on an impure system/foreign compiler. Then after you compiled it once, it used the compiled gcc to compile itself again. Then it used the 2nd gcc to compile itself a 3rd time as a test. If everything came out the same size, you were golden. I haven't done it in several years, drawn in to the laziness of user friendly distributions. So pardon me if I missed a part.

    So, with DOSEMU, I suppose it doesn't REALLY work, until we can start DOSEMU, unpack LOADLIN and a linux installation kit, reboot linux within dosemu, and install linux inside linux.

    But then, what would be the point?
    Would this actually be useful for anything?

  • Re:Unfortunately... (Score:3)

    by Foogle ( 35117 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @10:03AM (#1222271) Homepage
    Well you could just as easily re-nice DOSEMU to a lower priority, but that wouldn't do it alone. If DOSEMU was the only application that was really digging for CPU time, it would still get free cycles, and it would still run too fast.

    I would think that, as an emulator, DOSEMU would have a provision for controlling how much CPU time it uses, and what sort of psuedo-CPU is represents itself as. Couldn't you rework the timing sequence in the emulation system to allow this sort of thing?

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • I know Vesptas's Bigfoot runs under Hercules, and I've heard rumor that Linux/390 will as well, although I have yet to try it.
  • Now I can run my old QuickBasic version of Q-Bert on my Linux box!!

    Oh, wait...Its on 5 1/4...

    Nah.... &nbsp gorilla.bas rulez. &nbsp Pop up a dosemu session and have at it.

    ;-)
  • I went just about the same way in OSes (though I was never really into using Windows). Then one time when I was re-installing Linux from scratch I gave the command to create the swap partition

    mkswap /dev/hda1

    And then started to wonder why it seems so big, until I noticed it should be /dev/hdb1... Well, I less'd /dev/hda1 and noticed only the first blocks to be wrong, so I created a DOS partition of exactly the same size and copied the first n blocks to /dev/hda1, and it worked! I could copy most of important stuff I had there.

    Later on again re-installing Linux I somehow mixed up the partitions and noticed at some point that I had overwritten my C: several times already.

    The first notion was of utter shock - many year's of work collecting pieces of software (I still had backups of what I had created) and interweaving them into the system - down the drain.

    The second notion (about two seconds after the first one) was one of relaxation and total freedom.

    I have never regretted it...
  • A few years ago, Ken and Roberta Williams sold their company to a larger corporation (forgot the name). They continued on for a while; but from what I can tell they're now retired. The entire facility near Yosemite, CA was let go about a year ago, so the old Sierra of adventure-game history is gone. However, I recently exchanged email with an employee of a game company that's setting up a new site there, and hiring lots of the former Sierra employees. And, he reads Slashdot, and is pushing for multiplatform development, so maybe there's some hope for the future.
  • Ultima6 might work, since it works fine in DOS emulation under OS/2 (which I keep around because it's better than DOS emulation in Win95, for some reason). But forget U7 and U8, as they have wierd memory managers that prevent them from running under anything but true DOS or a virtual machine like VMware.

  • VMware v2.0 Released (Score:3)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @10:17AM (#1222279) Homepage Journal
    Interesting timing. VMware [vmware.com] 2.0 was just released this past week.

    VMware has figured out how to get around the aspects of the x86 architecture that don't virtualize properly. If Dosemu could do those same tricks, that would be truly cool.

    Of course, there is the FreeMWare [freemware.org] project, which aims to do just that. From a brief look, it seems that they have to scan the instructions before execution to find instructions that have to be emulated.

  • ...I and a few others are working on reverse-engineering it to run under Linux using the original data files. This may take years, but it's GPL, and you can take a look at "exult.sourceforge.net".
  • I just have to laugh here....

    Not to bash M$ or anything, but

    "well enough to do useful work with only an occasional crash....."

    no better, no worse.
  • a fave trick is "mkdir " makes a nice almost invisible directory. "cd ", and "rmdir ".
  • I was :)

    Yeah! Wolfenstein 3D all the way! I remember when DOOM was too much for my old machine.....

    Sight, memories.......

    "Now you can see that evil will triumph, because good is dumb!"
  • Check out bochs [bochs.com]. I haven't tried it in a while, but it might do what you need.

    --
  • a fave trick is "mkdir <Alt-255>" makes a nice almost invisible directory. "cd <Alt-255>", and "rmdir <Alt-255>".

    That's better.
  • I tried a while back to run Autodesk 3D Studio release 4 under DosEMU but I got a crufty error about DPMI or something. I thne realized in the docs that 3DSR4 was specifically listed as non-op for this very reason.

    Now, after checking the docs on the website link above, I can't find anything that claims one way or the other if this app works.

    Any clues, .. anyone?
  • > Was anyone else disappointed when they upgraded and discovered the new DOS didn't come with nibbles.bas?

    I was a big fan of gorilla.bas myself.

  • Re:Cool (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

    ZicoKnowsSquat@hotmail.com

  • I've actually seen one game work with DOSEMU sound. I have no idea how or why, but it does. Star Control II, my favourite game of all time, plays music and sound in DOSEMU. I suppose it uses some kind of unorthodox method for poking at the soundcard because I've never seen another game produce sound in DOSEMU. It was a little latent from game events, but still good.

    This was with a SB16 clone (evil AVS mixer thing) with one of the newer developer versions. I'll have to try it again with 1.0 and my new emu10k1 (may not work without a real soundblaster, hrm...)

  • Man, I remember in *my* day, I used to have a 486 with DOS and I was the shit at my school. It was fun going to grown ups and say "Windows", pshhhh, REAL MEN use the command prompt. Kind of like what I tell them now with Linux. . .
  • You can play your AGI games on your UNIX system right now. Check out http://agi.helllabs.org/ [helllabs.org] for an AGI interpreter. It's not perfect, but it can run a bunch of games quite well. There's also an SCI interpreter being worked on; check it out at http://sci.helllabs.org/. [helllabs.org]
  • It didn't go away. Even Windows 2000 Advanced Server comes with Gorilla.bas, nibbles.bas money.bas and remline.bas Really!
  • It still works under win95 and so on. You can make directories that win95 can't handle. (You can only delete them through DOS) every once in a while at work people go around and put folders on people's desktops called: XXXGOATPORNO Which looks like "XXX GOAT PORNO" of course. You can't move it, you can't rename it, you can't delete it. Gotta try that on the PHB some time...
  • Nah.... gorilla.bas rulez.

    Didn't Bill Gates write that?
  • Please someone hack UFO: Enemy unknown so it's usable on anything higher that 486/33 or else I'll had to do it :)

    Now if there ever was a game that needed to have the source code released, this is the one.

    It would let us fix it so faster machines could run it, all the annoying bugs could be taken care of, and I'm sure there could be plenty of enhancements to give the game even more new life (net-play anyone)?

    On that note... anyone want to start a write-in campaign to see if we can get them to release the source? After all, they've got the X-Com Commander's Pack (or whatever it's calle dout), and I'm sure that releasing the source would generate quite a few more sales of it for them, and if a lot of people wrote in and said "we'd buy it if...", perhaps they'd notice?
    ---
  • Does anybody remember using Norton Disk utilities to create a "pruned" directory tree that existed as an isolated island in the filesystem so that it could be manually "chdir"ed to? That was cool :)
  • Okay, perhaps it should be:

    "Nothing like using a rehash of a rehash of a 30-year old OS to emulate a 20-year old OS."

    UNIX begat Minux.
    Minux begat Linux.

  • Want to know what is worse than using edlin? Worse even that using ed or ae? How about talking someone through using edlin? No just a person though, a /realtor/ (those of you who are realtors are excused from this rant).
    I did tech support for a real estate board, talking people through using the new dial in system to see latest listings and doing property evaluations etc. At one point (in between the guy wanting to hook up the TI-1000 and the one who got the PII (at that time the fastest thing around) (for the sole purpose of using our dos based dial in software and quicken or something), I had to walk some person who had 0 computer knowledge, who didn't *want* to learn anything, through editing their autoexec.bat or some such thing.
    What OS were they running? DOS 3.1 IIRC. No "edit", no nothing. Only edlin. I hate edlin, it's awful. But I'd have traded talking someone through using it on the phone for it any day.
  • I remember DOS 3.3. It ran on my dad's NEC V20 with 20Megs of harddrive space and the top-notch EGA videocard of that time. Whohoo.

    Back then I got in this mode of learning each and every command that came with DOS. And then I found fdisk. That was interresting!
  • I've been playing the X-Com Collector's Edition version of UFO (redone in DirectX) the last couple of days through Wine without any problems, short of not having any music. It runs at a good pace with the movement and firing speeds set to 2, although the ship-to-ship battles still run much too fast.

    I tried the demo of the DOS version in Dosemu a while back, and I think it worked okay as well, except for some jerkiness in the mouse sampling.

  • Finally! I might be able to play my old games, Leisure suit larry, King's Quest etc. I just love those old Sierra AGI games..

    You can! Its called Sarien, and I'm the primary author. Its comming along slowly (myself and claudio who do most of th work are very busy), but we are getting there. (we just had announcements for Mac and Acorn ports!!)..

    If you want to play old AGI games on nix boxen from sun ultra's to linux xfree etc, Check out Sarien.

    www.mega-tokyo.com/sarien [mega-tokyo.com]

    Write your Own Operating System [FAQ]!

  • Well Microsoft have made billions doing a similar thing (a rehash of a 10 year old GUI concept, running on top of a 20 year old OS, with various ideas borrowed and made proprietary from a 30 year old OS), so it can't be that bad an idea.
  • I love the ZX 48
    At least once a year I'll bring my old one out...connect the tape deck, and spend hours trying to load the old games from tapes that are falling to bits.

    My dad tried to throw it out at Christmas...I almost killed him
  • Didn't Bill Gates write that?

    Heard tell he did but I don't know that for a fact... &nbsp Maybe we need a penguin.bas where the penguin throws a nice pointy icicle at Bill Gates... &nbsp You get different points for what part of him you hit... &nbsp hee hee (okay trolls - don't get started...) &nbsp ;-)

    By the way, just downloaded and tried to compile dosemu 1.0.0 on my SuSE 6.1 (they say they use SuSE to test it). &nbsp No go. &nbsp :-(.&nbsp It aborted trying to do something with pkt_init.



  • Oh man, that ruined a few years of my early life... I remember one of my first non-pointless programming projects was an extensive modification of Nibbles. I figured out how its speed-checking routine worked (it used For...Next loops for delay in the main subroutines to avoid the floating point ops and to get better precision, but timed a similar loop to determine a multiplier for the iterations of the For (excuse me, FOR) loops later on. This was before I took any algebra or even pre-algebra ... a good guess is probably age 7 or 8... and I'm sure that understanding the little formula that it used and some other things was the root of my interest in mathematics from that point on). I discovered its key-getting-and-parsing section, and once I had read over it at least 50 times, I understood it and added my own keys. I tweaked some other routines too so that you could turn off walls (i.e., go right through them), start at any level (that was easy), return the snake to the middle of the screen, change how much it increased after hitting each number, and lots of other stuff that I dreaded leaving.

    Of course, now that I use Linux, I very quickly found gnibbles (Debian maintainers please put /usr/games in the default path!!!) (the Debian package is gnome-gnibbles, fyi). It's even cooler! Pass-through walls (I never thought of that!), bonuses that make you shorter, totally new levels, up to four snakes (once me and one of my friends played four-player GNibbles, each one doing two snakes... that was fun!), and unmatched speed!!! And more overjoyed was I to find a Gorillas clone for the TI-89 over at ticalc.org! Unfourtunately, it doesn't do the little sun-smiles-when-you-throw-a-banana-at-it thing (screen's too small) that I just loved (hacked it once to do that at random...). Anyone know of a Linux port?

    You missed money.bas. I didn't hack that one very much (too boring), but I did see that it had a small machine code section for something like fast screen scrolling. It even had menus. High-tech BASIC coding!

    Before leaving BASIC and moving on to more advanced languages, I undertook a very large project, specifically to fix up and enhance my friend's program called "Vocab Quizzer" (for English). I cleaned it up a lot, sped it up a lot, made the code a lot neater, fixed bugs, and (this took up most of the time) added lots of awesome graphics. I found probably the fastest and least memory-intensive way (in BASIC, that is) to draw and maintain a starfield bitmap in the background of everything in the program. I added in a grade-keeping section that was password-protected, and even devised a checksum algorithm to allow grades of home or lab-based quizzes to be verified by the teacher. Way-cool for a 6th grader like me. Okay, so it was pretty pathetic. But that wasn't important. It's what it led to that was important. Scheme, C. And of course I always liked CLIs, so Linux came naturally. Did I mention I discovered Slackware at about that time? Now I'm using Debian, and very very happy with it. Look how far we've come!

    And to bring it all full-circle, I can run DOS from Linux. Vocab Quizzer -> QBASIC -> DOSEMU -> Linux -> P3-450.

  • So young and already nostalgic. :-|

    Those who are nostalgic after the olden days of the first Uni*es should have a look at Digital's FTP site [digital.com] where a PDP-11 simulator can be found, together with disk images for Unix versions 5, 6 and 7.

    Ah, the glorious times when Small was Beautiful: the V5 kernel was 25802 bytes — nowadays you can hardly find a web page for this size.

  • See the IBM iron run VM, see VM run linux see linx run dosemu on any86 see windows 3.1 run on IBM iron fall on the floor and laugh your guts out.----- see VICE running on the Linux session, and play Commodore 64 games on that IBM iron! (Off topic a bit, but on the subject of emulators the latest version of VICE works really really really well! Archon, Raid on Bungeling Bay, Sargon II, Impossible Mission....)
  • VMware is VERY cool, but like DOSemu, they seem not to have figured out how to make sound work for an emulated DOS environment, even in this 2.0 release. Apparently you can get sound to work at least moderately well with a Win32 client OS, and sometimes with a Unix-ish client OS, but not with a DOS client OS...

    Bochs makes sound work correctly, and is astoundingly cool, but Bochs is really really really slow.

    Meaning there's STILL no complete and accurate way to play Ultima 7 under Linux, sigh.


    --
  • I beleive I had Joe Montana Football working with sound at some point. I didn't get much else working with sound however.
    --
  • Why don't you use a real emulator, like MESS or Bochs that actually runs the x86 slow enough?

    (MESS is made for playing old games, yeah!
    (it's MAME for computer/console systems...))
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • You did not have hard drives back then, they were to expensive!

    Ah yes, playing StarFlight lo those many years ago on a dual-floppy 8088 machine.

    What a pain their save-game system was though. You had to make a playing copy of the disks, and another copy each time you wanted to save some point in the game. The worst was if you didn't exit properly you lost the game. Not just the work you did since starting, but the whole game! One time someone flipped the power while I was out of the room almost made we want to kill the whole family!

    Those were the days eh? :)

    I also remember getting my first hard drive. A 20Meg behemoth (had to lose a floppy to fit it though :( ). I remember thinking, "20Meg! I'll never be able to fill that thing!" My how times have changed.

  • Ah yes, edlin, the most evil of the text editor's I've ever seen. --- Hey, everybody's pickin' on edlin. That was the only editor that you could count on finding on any DOS machine you sat down in front of. And it was fully redirectable so you could remotely edit a text file via dial-up connection, a must when you're running a BBS that's located halfway across town. Ain't nuffin' wrong with edlin, boys. She always got the job done.
  • Yep, DOS is still cool on a 33MHz 486, found in first world garbage cans.

    But Debian is much cooler, and really free.

  • Homeworld was developed by Canadian developer Relic, and Sierra was merely the distributor. Although they still pop out a few gems now and again (Swat 3, Gabriel Knight) Sierra's glory days are long gone. They now only try to make mainstream titles, rather than the innovation they created before.

  • Time to get the Spectrum emulator out once more! And browse through my 200+MB collection of oldies...
  • The official Slashdot policy is to reject thousands of submissions of a story and only post it once it is has been good and scooped by other news organizations. Frequently they are a couple days or so behind on the news even though people have submitted the stories right after they broke...

    Maybe they just wait to see if they get a ton of submissions so they don't have to worry about picking the good stories, they just go with the growd (they'd call it "doing the best for the community")

    Esperandi
    Yeah, I'm pissed off today, leave me alone. My Sim burned alive because the moron couldn't cook.
  • Tried forwarding the port already with ipmasqadm
    and the autofw module?
    Also check this great ipmasq site for the right ports and stuff (unreplacable!): http://www.tsmservices.com/masq/

  • I used PCTools 1.0 (or was it even 0.9 something?) to create hard links in the file systems. Several directory names linked to the same physical dir, subdirs linking back to a higher dir (creating some kind of weird cyclical-infinitely-linked list kind of thing), and all sorts of fun... It confused the h*ll out of chkdsk, though.

    And trust me, the 12-bit FAT format is weird when you do your editing directly on disk. Later I got hold of Norton Utilities, which could parse the FAT and partition table for me, after that it wasn't so much fun anymore :/

    I even recreated almost every single file from a 20 MB harddisk, where, by some freak accident, the whole bootsector, partition table and FAT table had been overwritten by a text file. Don't ask me how that could happen, something must have been really screwed up. Luckily I had run "SpeedDisk" on it shortly before, so I could recreate the whole FAT table from the information in the directory entries. It took a lot of time, but I got everything back.

  • anyone know where that game can be found? I played that on my ancient 486 and remember it being le merde. I found RoE2 [spaceports.com] at this site [spaceports.com], but can't seem to find the original..
  • Hear, Hear, Brother !

    I was pretty darn close to starting a reimplementation for X myself a few years ago. I actually mailed Microprose to ask them for the source (no shit!), for some reason I never even got a reply :*( (well, trying was fun too)

    The two first versions of the game were great, the third one sort of ruined it IMO. If only I had a year or two I didn't know what to do with, I'd be firing up gcc&Mesa and get that baby done with.

    Actually doing a reimplementation would probably be the easiest, and by far the most fun. Think about XCom in 1600x1200, MesaGL, original plot, MP3 background music, drooool....

    I'd love to ask "Any takers?" but I just _can't_ go into this myself now.
  • Sound on SCII is fine under 1.0 - I wouldn't have got any sleep last night if it wasn't for some problems with the colours which I suspect is the fault my graphics card (CL Banshee), not DOSEMU.
  • Oh man, that ruined a few years of my early life... I remember one of my first non-pointless programming projects was an extensive modification of Nibbles.

    One of my early projects was modifying Nibbles so the computer could play one or both snakes. WoW or something ;-)

  • And edlin was scriptable.

    I had all these neat-o DOS 4 (and 4DOS) scripts that would do a search and replace for the text "STUDENT EDITION OF LOTUS 1-2-3" and pipe the output to the printer, which was a noisy panasonic 8 pin dot matrix. This being my post VAX and pre-UNIX days, I thought this was a clever hack.

    When DOS 5 came out, and they got rid of edlin, I was a little annoyed. Sure, it sucked as a user interface, but it was about the only scriptable tool that came with DOS! (Which was only slightly scriptable to begin with; still - it was neat what you could do with a .com file, an interrupt, and if errorlevel)
  • I had as my first computer, a Commodore PC 10-III it ran at 4.77mhz, and using either special keystrokes or an included utility, you could "Turbo" or "Double" the clock speed (1.5x and 2.0x respectivly) (It was an 8088-1 for the curious) - It was amazing, it had onboard serial, parallel, H/C/P-GA graphics, bus mouse, floppy and hdd controlers, and had an amazing bios that would automatically list all added ports, and disable any onboards that were conflicting... (the first PnP?) 2 360k 5.25" drives, and I added an 80meg SCSI that I got used from a big company (was in their server until they upgraded)... Man, I maxed it out all the way... I still have it, and occasionally crack it out to use as a colour terminal for BBSing. I got to share in the delight of downloading from Software Creations on a 1200 baud...

    Those were the days.

  • I made a backup of my Ultima 4 disk and then sector edited it... If you play enough you get to recognize the landscape even when it's hex codes instead of graphics.

    Luckily the 16x16 chunks they saved it in mapped nicely to the 256B sectors on Apple 2 5.25s so my hex editor (Copy //+) showed the data in roughly the same format as it was in the game.

    I then went through the sector putting all byte values in and when I played the game, writing down what each value was. Some values were for things like horses and ships. But what was really cool was that you could 'B'oard the horse/ship and ride/sail it away and there was still one there. So I went through the map editing horses and ships near all the towns, so no matter where I wanted to go I'd have the proper transport easily available.

    This was in '88 or so, on my Apple //gs (not my first Apple // by 6 years or so) with Ultima 4 and 5...

    And I did something similar recently, with some shareware adventure game. Now of course, with a multitasking OS, it's easier to just snoop on the process's memory and make edits that way.
  • Oops, OK. It was 32768 words, not bytes, on the PDP-11. Still, that's nearly half the memory . . .

    Someday, I need to actually get the timeline on the larger memory 11's staight in my head . . .

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