If anyone here is interested, a DOS game jam was announced recently for a streaming event called DOSember. https://itch.io/jam/dosember-game-jam Starts in a couple of weeks and lasts for three months.
DOS is an interesting platform because it can run on old hardware, and then basically anything else by way of emulation (such as in browsers) or via DOSBox.
If networking can be plumbed up, it's probably a legitimate and fun application platform for some uses that's worthy of investing time building on either for fun or for something real.
With some emulators (at least DOSBox-X) you can enable modern graphics modes that show up in SVGA in the emulated DOS and can be supported by DOS software just like any other modes. Anyone making DOS software today that isn't going explicitly for a retro look can try to detect and support a few modes like 1920x1080 and only fall back to more common old modes when necessary.
> If networking can be plumbed up, it's probably a legitimate and fun application platform for some uses that's worthy of investing time building on either for fun or for something real.
It's probably well suited to being a game console platform, too.
I've been playing around with raylib/raygui for cross-platform game/app development. It would be cool if it could target DOS. It probably could, but it sounds way beyond my current knowledge.
Yeah, I think the hard part would be graphics libraries for anything 3D.
I've always had a bucket-list item along the lines of "constructing basic game playing graphics primitives from scratch using the SVGA address offset for output".
MS-DOS (and games for it) ran on 486s, at the end. Writing MS-DOS games for a computer running many hundreds/thousands of times faster would probably allow for many more different types of approaches that could not be done on slow machines.
That sounds like a fun project! Would taking something like the DOOM source code, and extracting the "3d engine" from that be a workable approach? Or in your vision of it how would you make the primitives?
I grew up on 68k Macs so DOS was never something I thought much about aside from the occasional boot disk to run some firmware procedure later on when later Windows was well established.
Then later from a retrocomputing standpoint, I've come to see it is pretty fascinating:
1) The sheer volume of commercial software.. which is readily available on winworld, vetusware, and archive.org. A lot of it with sometimes awesome character-mode UIs (Borland's early IDEs are really spectacular, Lotus 1-2-3, and WordPerfect are still taken seriously by some users).
2) The memory model is quixotic and an interesting homage to the chaotic evolution of x86 that most later operating systems elide by requiring a 386. The 286 and 386 have drastically different protection schemes. EMS and XMS. The eventual DOS extenders and standards like VCPI, DPMI. It's honestly a mess but somehow interesting to see how people solved difficult problems.
If anything, a lot of the modern developer experience has suffered compared to the early Borland IDEs. One would easily say we regressed.
They were focused, immediate and effective.
If anything today you'd miss the code navigation features (go to definition, go back, go forward), and of course LSP is actually very useful and once you don't have it, it hurts (instant errors, ease of refactoring...)
Give me something like the Borland IDEs (FAST!) and some of the modern features (they can be slower, they're only as fast as the LSP server implementation anyway) and I'm there!
I did a proof of concept quickly, mostly while learning to write code editors, but I have not gotten it to a point of being useful [1]
The Free Pascal software distribution includes a FLOSS look-alike of Borland's character-mode IDE for Pascal. If you can track down RHIDE, that's a similar look-alike IDE that runs in MS-DOS (it does require 386+ since it uses a DOS extender) and compiles C/C++ using gcc. (One version of it is distributed as part of the FreeDOS "development" packages.) It would be nice to recreate a broadly similar look and featureset starting from a modern text-mode editor such as the newly released MS-EDIT, aiming for modern IDE infrastructure like LSP and DAP. Such a project may find quite some use for, e.g. remote system administration tasks using ssh.
It's MSC 5.10, MASM 5.10, LINK 3.65, NMAKE 1.00.05, and some other stuff.
Comes down to around 2 MB after cleaning up a bit. 1.4 MB if only keeping support for one memory model. Runs fine in DOSBox, so this is an easy way to make a project self-contained, building from within the target platform with no external dependencies.
For anything written from scratch, I would recommend fasm or nasm.
I prefer the latter, because the documentation is better and there's a way to specify target cpu (e.g. 8086) and get errors when instructions aren't compliant.
As someone old enough to have live through it, I always found TASM much better than MASM, in terms of tooling.
In both cases, still much better than traditional UNIX assemblers, desiged to massage C's output as another build stage, than to actually code by hand.
Not mentioned is the https://pcjs.org/ site which purports to let you emulate various machines in your browser, select from different disk images, and overall seems full-featured, though it is confusing and presents some difficulty when trying getting it to work on some configuration besides the pre-baked ones that you can come across.
Note that DOS development tools aren't strictly necessary to make DOS software,
as with help of HX DOS Extender [0], one may use any tooling that lets you produce Win32 PE exe files, of course, preferably with inline assembler to access hardware directly.
For development it is convenient that PC-BASIC exists, that is a pure Python implementation of GW-BASIC that has its own partial 1999s PC emulator built in.
Seems a bit obsessed with open source when abandonware like Borland C++ 3.1 and Pascal 7.0 are amazing.
Also, missing the very important, closer to primary sources, physical dead tree resources that are needed as reference to program things.
- Black Book of Graphics Programming (Special Edition) (now FOSS)
- Programmer's Guide To The EGA, VGA, And Super VGA Cards (3rd Edition)
- PC-Intern (where I learned how Central Point, Norton, and later FreeBSD made "GUI" with sub-character graphical pointers in text mode through custom fonts)
- Undocumented PC
- Undocumented DOS
- PC Interrupts (and) Uninterrupted Interrupts (Ralf Brown)
- Microsoft MS-DOS Programmer's Reference
- The Programmer's PC Sourcebook: Reference Tables for IBM PCs and Compatibles, PS/2 Systems, EISA-based Systems, MS-DOS Operating System Through Version 5
- (various hardware books by MindShare)
- Also useful would be real BIOS dumps and (dis)assembly, and MS-DOS source
- Emulators are no substitute for the real thing because the problem is that no emulator (commercial or otherwise) is faithful to the quirks, capabilities, and limitations of real hardware (in system, protected mode debuggers/profilers sure are nice though compared to triggering lockup, spontaneous reboot, or a beeping deadlock). If anyone remembers Bochs, its floppy behavior definitely doesn't act or look anything like a real FDC. (I submitted some patches for it many moons ago in college.)
(Yep, I own a "braindead" 286, 386DX, 486DX-100, Am5, and P5, P2, P Pro, and P4.)
Because if something can't work on real hardware and original OSes, then it's probably make believe. Prefer to make honest, real things wherever feasible.
