Recent submissions

Comment · 23 days ago
Lots of talk of DOS, but both games that are described (Panzer General II and Imperialism II) were only released for Windows?

If the games had been for DOS, it would probably have made more sense to just run the original binaries in DOSBox-X or some other emulator. I think there is already some debug API that can be enabled. Or adding MCP or something similar to DOSBox(-X) would probably be a lot less work than to reimplement the games.

Comment · 1 month ago
Do those services have many more posts than what can be downloaded from archive.org and searched locally?
Comment · 1 month ago
Porting to DOS sounds like a great plan for retro games, to only have to do the port once and know there are stable emulators to run it in, as opposed to porting to some modern OS and then have to port the game again and again to keep up with API changes.
Comment · 1 month ago
If you use Kagi Assistant, you can pick one of your lenses (i.e. lists of domains to restrict searches to) in chats. Not sure if their API has that as well or some other way to restrict searches. Also not sure if the Assistant (or API) respects blocked domains when searching.
Comment · 2 months ago
But what would flat-earthers consider the longest possible paths to be? Not the ones shown in the article, presumably?
Comment · 2 months ago
I think it is the exact opposite. Keep remakes running in DOS instead, and they will run everywhere that DOSBox runs, which is pretty much everywhere, and also everywhere that you can boot up FreeDOS (including in QEMU), plus in other emulators, almost guaranteeing that the executable will keep working somewhere for a very, very long time. Versus a port to some modern system that will then require constant updates and ports forever to keep it running, and as soon as no one is around to maintain the project it will be a pain to get it to run anywhere.

It is always good to see open source reimplementations of old games, but sad to see almost none of them keep MS-DOS support. It's easily the most portable and future-safe of all virtual machines you can run games in.

Comment · 2 months ago
Almost 30 years ago when I wanted to backup my synth, its complete MIDI spec was in the printed user manual. Saving all sysex was just a matter of writing a short C program to send a few bytes to the ALSA MIDI device and then read the response back and save to disk.

No longer own that synth, but I still have my backups. No reason to believe the raw files would not still work. No dependency on any special software.

Comment · 2 months ago
PC was a clear winner for RPGs, adventure games, and wargames/strategy, even in the early days of PC/XT. Anything that could make use of more RAM and disk, while also not demanding too much of graphics or audio, was great on PC.
Comment · 2 months ago
Even as someone that grew up with GW-BASIC and had moved on to Turbo Pascal by the time qbasic came out, I must say you have a point. I think however that the more traditional BASIC "IDE" with line numbers etc, used in GW-BASIC, has its charm and is still fun to play with. It's quite unlike any modern IDE, but there is some logic to it and with some practice it isn't bad for what it needed to do.
Comment · 2 months ago
There is this fork that is easy to build:

https://codeberg.org/tkchia/GW-BASIC

There are some binary releases there from 2022, but I did not try those. The binary I built from source has worked very well.

Never tried to build the DOS source, but I really enjoyed playing with the toolchain they included with the MS-DOS 4 source code release. It's pretty much a complete, MIT-licensed (but binary only) Microsoft toolchain (msc, masm, make, link, etc) from ~1988. For some of my recent hobby projects I put that toolchain in my git repos, to have everything self-contained, with DOSBox as a virtual machine both for building and running, and no other dependencies. So I am happy Microsoft released the DOS code, even if I did not look much at the code itself.

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