[HN Gopher] Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS fee...
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Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for
modern platforms
Author : ingve
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-10-08 20:38 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| All these feels nostalgic but also somehow productive/not
| disturbing.
|
| Related for current web
|
| TuiCSS https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Strange to see the macOS and linux option in some details but the
| author never tested it. Should he asked ... and linux is free ...
| anyfoo wrote:
| Installing Linux and seeing if it even starts is already a lot
| of effort, and then you've only "seen if it starts" and are
| very far from anything considered "tested".
| Delk wrote:
| Eh. Sure it's takes a bit of effort but installing a Linux
| distro in a virtual machine and pulling and compiling some C
| code isn't exactly a massive project. It would have been a
| much bigger deal before the widespread use of virtual
| machines. Or, I guess, if you don't have experience with
| building things on Linux.
|
| I completely understand that if someone doesn't use a
| platform themselves, there might be little motivation to test
| things on it. No hard feelings if someone doesn't care to do
| that. But it's not _that_ much effort.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Still don't quite get the DOS nostalgia. Individual games were
| good, but the whole ecosystem was finicky and crash-prone by the
| early- to mid-90s, not to mention deeply ugly (ALL CAPS console,
| lousy inconsistent GUIs, unnaturally short filenames, etc.). My
| friends and I couldn't wait to run Unix, NeXTSTEP, hell even
| classic MacOS. We only ran DOS/Windows because that's all we had.
| Though don't get me wrong, we still had tons of fun and learned a
| lot.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's just a hobby and that's really it.
|
| The irrelevancy is the appeal. It's become something mostly
| disconnected from everything else.
|
| A world of computing that's not focused around networking or
| communications where are the relationship is between the user
| and the machine as opposed to the machine being a vessel for a
| relationship with others
|
| It is inherently a different kind of computing with a different
| kind of performance expected between the participants.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Nobody claimed it was good. Some of it was hilariously bad and
| is still good for funny stories of what we put up with. Does
| not change the nostalgia.
| bluedino wrote:
| Try migrating people away from green-screen apps
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| One of my first jobs involved writing a modern (for the time)
| GUI app to replace some ancient services that involved
| logging in a mainframe to use. They needed to updated for a
| host of technical reasons, but there was also hope that more
| user-friendly versions would decrease the onboarding time for
| new employees.
|
| The first version was a fairly literal replacement of the
| workflows. The users were pissed. They demanded the
| checkboxes be replaced with "Y" and "N" options to mimic what
| they were used to. It was interesting to see the reluctance
| to any change at all.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _The users were pissed. They demanded the checkboxes be
| replaced with "Y" and "N" options to mimic what they were
| used to._
|
| If you removed my keyboard workflow, I'd be pissed too.
| Muscle memory means you don't have to think about it; with
| the mouse, you _always_ have to think about what you 're
| doing, and can't think of other things (e.g. _why_ you 're
| doing it) while you're doing the rote bits.
|
| Is there a particular reason you couldn't've supported the
| Y/N workflow? (i.e. "Y" is like "set, tab" and "N" is like
| "clear, tab")
| ddingus wrote:
| Yes. People who interact with those things just blow
| through them at high speed without even thinking!
|
| That frees them to think about other things. Arguably,
| more important things.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| To be clear, we did support keyboard workflows, like Y/N
|
| They were pissed we replaced the Y/N text items with a
| checkbox. Any deviation, including things like lower case
| text, were pushed back.
| ddingus wrote:
| Maybe that has to do with things like documents
| workflows, other meta information related to the
| applications.
| bink wrote:
| The transition from ANSI graphics to the ugliness of Windows
| 3.1 or even Desqview was pretty rough. I spent a ton of time in
| terminal emulators and BBS programs that I found much more
| intuitive and "pretty". Their graphical counterparts were
| hideous by comparison. I think I still carry some of that bias
| with me.
|
| I did have to do a quick check to see if this library required
| me to configure expanded memory, however.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just like I don't get the VT100 nostalgia.
|
| Using XWindows just to manage xterms, with everything in text
| mode besides the window manager itself?
|
| Welcome to 1994 using DG/UX with X terminals.
| agumonkey wrote:
| some analog terminals had hardware smooth scrolling .. pretty
| superb even by today's standards
| Minor49er wrote:
| There were entire communities based around specific DOS games
| and applications. Notably: ZZT, MegaZeux, a slew of abandonware
| games, QBASIC, and so on.
|
| A lot of people discovered just how limited DOS was because
| they were fascinated by computers, but DOS (and likely Windows
| on top of it) was the only thing they had at the time. Yet they
| wanted to push the boundaries and ended up finding the ceiling.
| At least that's been my experience.
| brundolf wrote:
| People can have nostalgia about anything; I have nostalgia for
| lots of things that I know would be totally unappealing without
| it
| jmspring wrote:
| The OS itself was very basic. Learning to program things like
| TSRs, dealing with HIGHMEM, BASIC and BASIC assemblers vs C and
| other tools. It was a complicated environment by the
| restrictions, but those restrictions when explored taught one a
| lot about programming.
|
| Michael Abrash's graphics programming tutorials -
| https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/
|
| It was a great environment to learn in. I spent time there, on
| the Amiga, and other systems. I honestly love how easy and
| powerful systems are now, but miss swap meets and the like for
| meeting up, talking hardware, software, etc.
| simmons wrote:
| I was a brief DOS user for several months (in between C64 and
| discovering UNIX) around the early 90's, and my opinions of it
| from the time mostly align with yours. I think the early 90's
| was an especially rough period for DOS users, because people
| were trying to push it way beyond what it was originally meant
| to be.
|
| However, while I certainly don't have nostalgia for DOS in
| general, there were some positive things about the platform and
| ecosystem. Some subset of applications had TUI interfaces that
| were very nice (e.g. Borland C++), and while I'm a die-hard
| Linux terminal user, I find myself occasionally missing some of
| the tightness of those interfaces. (I think the UNIX terminal
| heritage, such as the "alt" key translating to ESC+key, no key-
| down/key-up events, etc., can limit our modern TUI interfaces.)
|
| I sometimes tinker with some 8086 emulator code for fun, which
| can lead me to diving into the internals of DOS. Looking at its
| API (and how the API evolved through the 80's), I can
| appreciate the simplicity that was necessary to run on machines
| with as little as 64KB of memory. So I may not have nostalgia
| for it -- there was certainly plenty of pain -- but it can
| still be very interesting to explore from an objective
| historical perspective. There may even be a few things we can
| learn from it.
| edward wrote:
| I fixed some spelling mistakes:
| https://github.com/mattiasgustavsson/dos-like/pull/1
| luhn wrote:
| The Github doesn't have much besides the source, this is probably
| the better link: https://mattiasgustavsson.itch.io/dos-like
| Includes some sample code and screenshots.
| zem wrote:
| anyone remember HelpPC? lovely TUI browser for a ton of hyertext
| reference material.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs?
|
| https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC83MTY0MTEyLnBuZw==/o...
|
| They have such a cozy feel, reminds me of simpler times.
|
| It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could
| make webpages like that.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Look at TuiCss: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss
| anyfoo wrote:
| Yes. However, even with the proper fonts (that also have to be
| aspect ratio corrected, the usual VGA text mode did not have
| square pixels), I struggle to recreate this to the point that
| it's really recognizable.
|
| CRTs with that text mode (and including scanlines, but not only
| that) just seem very hard to reproduce on modern displays.
|
| The fact that your photo _does_ evoke the same feeling while I
| 'm seeing it on a modern 5k display shows that it's possible,
| but the amount of tricks needed might be so much that it
| becomes whimsical somehow (or at least in contrast to just
| changing the font)...
| squarefoot wrote:
| > Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs?
|
| I do. Brings back memories of Turbo-C.
|
| > It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you
| could make webpages like that.
|
| A quick search brought this old project:
| https://github.com/6112/cursesjs
|
| Never tried that, however. Ncurses is what is used under Linux
| and other UNIX like systems to draw terminal based GUIs, and
| allows some pretty good graphics.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses
|
| http://elmon.sourceforge.net/
|
| https://christopherstoll.org/2015/12/29/ncurses-system-perfo...
| mindcrime wrote:
| If you like that old TurboVision look, you'll love
|
| https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
| squarefoot wrote:
| Thanks, I recall seeing it some time ago but totally forgot
| about it.
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I have fond memories of SETEDIT:
| http://setedit.sourceforge.net/
|
| It was kind of a complete floating windows GUI in a TUI:
| http://setedit.sourceforge.net/se1.gif
| zozbot234 wrote:
| PsychDOS is a very similar project:
| https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/INDEX.HTM
|
| I wonder if it would be possible to extend a terminal
| multiplexer to the point of providing such an intuitive
| interface to existing TUI software on modern *ix systems. I'm
| sure the effort would be quite non-trivial, but it would help
| a number of workflows. Adding support for the additional
| features that are found in these TUI environments (consider
| e.g. menubars) could then be done via custom terminal
| extensions.
| pengaru wrote:
| Eh, the Borland Grahics Interface (BGI) style TUIs were kind of
| awful. I hated the Borland Turbo C IDE in no small part because
| of that style TUI. It just wasted so much precious character
| space on TUI frames and other decorations.
|
| More of my fond TUI memories from that era were the bespoke
| ones in the demo/art/music/bbs scenes. Those in many cases were
| still character based but seemed to make better use of the
| screen space and at least more aesthetically pleasing character
| sets.
|
| Scream Tracker / Impulse Tracker comes to mind as one example:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/Screamtracker...
|
| Which you can still enjoy today in a cross-platform clone via
| SchismTracker:
|
| https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker
| torgoguys wrote:
| I love all things text mode.
|
| For anyone searching for the Borland style text interface, it
| was actually called TurboVision, not BGI (which was a generic
| graphics library). TurboVision (and many GUIs of the time)
| largely followed the Common User Interface (CUI) spec by IBM
| for its interactions in text mode.
|
| It is fair to say there was a lot of screen space devoted to
| borders and such, especially in 80x25 mode, but that helped
| make everything super clear and usable.
| pengaru wrote:
| Ah my bad re: BGI vs. TurboVision, my memory from those
| days is quite fuzzy!
| Lammy wrote:
| Even cooler when viewed in motion
| https://youtu.be/XRawUKO2Qy8?t=5848
| ddingus wrote:
| Hmm.....
|
| That same thing in say 96x50 would feel much better.
|
| Edit, just viewed your tracker link! Yes, exactly.
| allenu wrote:
| I remember back then my editor of choice in DOS was QEdit. I
| think it used up less space with its menus, although it's
| funny to think I enjoy using vim today whereas back then in
| my youth it may have been too much for me.
|
| I do miss the simple UI offered by some BBSes (as well as
| their message editors, like in Renegade BBS). A lot of that
| is just nostalgia, of course.
| ddingus wrote:
| Yes. My favorite was anything done in 80x50.
|
| Nice, mostly square characters. Mix in a mouse, and the product
| was easy to use, clean, fast, productive.
|
| That sort of aesthetic, in windows even, would be a lot of fun
| and quite useful, if a bit of a middle finger to modern
| sensibilities.
| zem wrote:
| norton commander in 80x50 was beautiful
| csdvrx wrote:
| > That sort of aesthetic, in windows even, would be a lot of
| fun and quite useful
|
| Who's stopping you?
|
| Try jexer:
|
| https://gitlab.com/klamonte/jexer
| agumonkey wrote:
| yes i do, the frugal aspect is extremely appealing to me.
|
| someone made a turbovision (borland turbo pascal ui framework)
| lib for java https://jexer.sourceforge.io/
| yoz-y wrote:
| Shoutout to the https://dosgameclub.com which naturally has all
| the website and forums done in this style.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| OH GOD NO. Man, I hated all that stuff at the time. If you're
| stuck in text mode, just be text. Don't try to mimic a GUI; it
| just looks weird and generally works poorly.
|
| A web site that imposed this sort of interface would be a site
| I visited ONCE.
| easton wrote:
| https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/ might be up your
| alley
| wenc wrote:
| I liked Turbo Vision but I thought Microsoft's text UI (the one
| used in products like QuickC, QBasic etc -- not sure what it's
| called) was actually cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing.
| tujv wrote:
| Related, Free Pascal has a text-mode IDE that's supported on most
| modern platforms.
|
| https://www.freepascal.org
| rpeden wrote:
| It looks pretty much identical to the Turbo Pascal IDE for
| anyone that's feeling nostalgic and wants to write some yellow
| on dark blue code.
|
| Even better - Free Pascal comes with Free Vision, which is
| mostly compatible with Turbo Vision. Turbo Vision was the
| toolkit Borland provided that would let you write your own
| text-mode GUI apps using the same widgets used to build the
| Turbo Pascal IDE.
| findthewords wrote:
| Windows 10 warns that burn.exe contains
| Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.B!ml. I'm sure it's fine but Windows doesn't
| let it run.
|
| The demos that work are stunning and inspiring.
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