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Exult did this decades ago :).

On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play.

BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.


1 as a boolean? true

MPD, Krita, Vim/Emacs/Scite,NSxiv with scripts, any diff tool since the 90's, any file manager since Midnight Commander and so on...

Less stable? MPD supported damn state supported popular science radio streaming channels in Spain like nothing...

Also vidir, entr and jimtcl/awk scripts p0wn your setup any time... I can just remote-mount FS's anywhere and use any local tools as if they where there. I can just spawn builds on directory changes and spawn an editor with a REPL in miliseconds. GUI? Everything it's composable. I can use a mega-complete GUI for MPD that makes Foobar2k blush. I can output audio to an streaming socket (or to plain Icecast) from MPD and plug any audio FX' and whatnot with MPD plugins.

I can push the whole graphical environment down and I could keep playing my music and control the whole music daemon from my phone. Add songs, add radio stream, play/skip, volume up and down... from my damn bathroom.

And OFC I can still code under VTY's and even read PDF's/CBZ's/EPUB's and even watch videos play any game or emulator which uses SDL (a ton of source ports, emulators like mednafen, Doom/Quake ports, Scummvm, DOSBox, PCSXR, PPSPPP)...

That without touching a mouse or switching between GUI's. No RSI, no headaches, no remote GUI tools to mount any crap requiring thousands of click and hurting your wrists and forearms. Everything it's under a directory and managed as it if were part of my hard disk filesystem.

I can edit directory listings with my text editor with the vidir tool, they will show up as a text file. You delete a range of lines, these files are gone. I can search and rename files at crazy speeds and, well, I can spawn any tool with find and iomenu and have a quick search for a file. File managers? Forget it, you keep typing and the fuzzy-finding tool with match the file in milseconds and open the registered tool for that extensions. And this is done with tools that could probably run in the 80's and early 90's. Go figure, I'm computing as if it was in 2040 but with 'prehistoric' tools.

Ah, don't forget that most CLI and TUI tools are scriptable... so you can just forget of even using a computer, 90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix.


I am not sure why you've put so much effort, but thank you for confirming my views on Linux people.

Is not about Linux, I don't use that Unix branch. I don't click neither on menues nor buttons. It's about usability and automation, something utterly lacking under Windows. Once you can use any remote or local filesystem seamlessly with your own scripts spawning at events, you are 90% done.

On DOS runnning fast under W95, how no one created a SVGALIB wrapper trapping i386 code and redirecting the calls to an SDL window?


MinC for XP and up: (MinC is not Cygwin, you get cc, ncurses, ksh, git and some goodies).

https://minc.commandlinerevolution.nl/english/home.html

IronTCL for XP and up

https://minc.commandlinerevolution.nl/english/home.html

Updated SSL/TLS certs, again for XP and beyond:

https://legacyupdate.net/

Tiny Pascal-like language targetting DOS, CP/M and Unix:

https://t3x.org/t3x/0/index.html It's no Free Pascal but it can do good stuff with very little:

https://t3x.org/t3x/0/programs.html

JimTCL, a tiny TCL with bundled TLS, JSON, Sqlite3 and, optionally, some SDL2 support:

https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl https://jim.tcl-lang.org/home/doc/www/www/index.html

You can compile JimTCL with MinC under XP, and maybe T3X0 too. With JimTCL you can build a quick TCL expect clone, some netcat clone too with TLS can be done in minutes too, really good for debugging or to create a simple IRC/Email/Gopher/Gemini client in text mode.


I tried EMWM with Motif based tools (from Vim to Emacs, EMWM, XFile, Ximaging, Classic-Colors (and even tried to write a simple UI for Mplayer) under a 10-15 year old n270 based netbook.

https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html

It ran really fast. Also, if Dillo ran snappy under a 486 (today so-so except for a slight delay because of TLS, but bearable once the page it's rendered), Dillo today runs at light speeds. This on my n270 netbook under OpenBSD. With NetBSD, it would run slightly faster.


Simh can still run modern NetBSD under Vax. Go figure.

Anything with non keyboard input = prehistoric.

Amiga WB, Macs, Atari GEM, RiscOS... not that different.

How many of the operating systems that you listed remain as ways we use computers?

Even Macs were an entirely different codebase that didn’t even have memory protection or preemptive multitasking, which very much changed how you used it.


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