Necromancer's Dos Navigator - Norton Commander Clone written in FV/TV lazarus / 65-FV-Textmode IDE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CandyMan30 · 2023-05-21 20:46 Necromancer's Dos Navigator - Norton Commander Clone. It is written in FV/TV for various systems (Dos/Win/Linux/KolibriOS/MenuetOS etc. - also 32/64-bit) http://www.ndn.muxe.com/download ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CandyMan30 · 2023-05-22 08:27 Hello all! Maybe some of you are interested in translating NDN (Necromancer's Dos Navigator) resources into your native language? I can provide resource compiler and available resources. Among other things, Slovak, Austria or German are missing. Unfortunately, this is not a job for money. I'm not forcing anyone. If you take it and want it, your name will be visible in the program. Best regards, CandyMan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- alpine · 2023-05-22 08:44 Does it work with utf-8? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CandyMan30 · 2023-05-22 08:56 No, all but one version are Ansi. There is one Unicode instead (named U64). Linux x64 version works with UTF-8. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ngx234 · 2023-05-22 10:06 good, thanks ---------------------------------------------------------------------- firstrose · 2023-06-13 10:11 Quote from: CandyMan30 on May 22, 2023, 10:56:55 amNo, all but one version are Ansi. There is one Unicode instead (named U64). Linux x64 version works with UTF-8. ndn_3_00_0009_u64.zip and ndn_3_00_0008_u64.zip failed to start with 0xc0000045 but ndn_3_00_0009_w64.zip can start. my pc: win 10 ver10.0.19045.3031 Anything I can do to get more error detail? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CandyMan30 · 2023-07-17 20:33 Quotendn_3_00_0009_u64.zip and ndn_3_00_0008_u64.zip failed to start with 0xc0000045 but ndn_3_00_0009_w64.zip can start. It has probably been corrected. Thanks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- miso · 2026-04-13 08:17 Hi, It is possible to find somewhere full source code for current version of NDN. Regards Mirek ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cdbc · 2026-04-13 08:28 From the Web: "Turns out Necromancer's Dos Navigator is not open- source, but another fork of the original Dos Navigator, Dos Navigator Open Source Project, is." Good luck /bc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Thaddy · 2026-04-13 08:41 I feel more like making sure there is an alternative that is freeware. NDN is frowned with copyright and license violations. Helping for free on a commercial product with such heritage is not something I have time for. Besides, it is quite easy to write in FV, only long-wary, there's no mystery code to mimic Norton. We did that already many moons ago. There are many such Norton clones as freeware, only nowadays hard to find and most, like mine, 16 bit real Dos. And half the "features" come already with FV demo's like the Ascii chart and the calender and the navigation and the calculator and more..... And that would not have licensing issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dbannon · 2026-04-13 09:03 Quote from: Thaddy on April 13, 2026, 10:41:45 amI feel more like making sure there is an alternative that is freeware. Maybe Thaddy, you used the wrong term "Freeware" ?  Should not be confused with open source. Freeware projects were/are usually shipped, for no charge, as binaries and the source code not made available.  Generally. Davo ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Thaddy · 2026-04-14 16:26 Where's the code Davo? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- unxed · 2026-10-03 00:50 After quite a few failed experiments, I finally managed to port DN to Free Pascal. The problem with the original DN (that NDN is trying to continue) was that it contained modified Turbo Vision components from Turbo Pascal that had never been released under open-source licenses. I tried porting it to Free Vision, but that turned out to be a nightmare. Among other things, it requires moving from a single-byte encoding to UTF-16 used by FV, which alone means modifying more than 1,000 places across about a hundred files. Moreover, my audit showed that Free Vision itself contains quite a lot of code that overlaps with Borland's code. Some or all of it may possibly not be copyrightable as trivial code, but I haven't investigated that question deeply. In the end, the solution was to rebase DN on a top of Free Pascal port of the Turbo Vision implementation by magiblot: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision It uses UTF-8, so adapting a program designed around a single-byte encoding is much easier. And, importantly, it is definitely clean from a licensing standpoint. For extra safety, I wrote a dedicated script that checks for overlaps with Borland code, just in case an LLM happens to generate something similar. Another challenge was adapting the sources, which were originally designed to build with Borland Pascal (the 1.51 branch) or Virtual Pascal (the OSP branch), for FP. That also turned out to be manageable in the end. If anyone is interested in experimenting with it, here is the code. It already runs on both DOS and Linux (I'm developing on Linux; I'll add support for other OSes later): https://github.com/unxed/dn/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kagamma · 2026-10-03 02:37 IQuote from: unxed on October 03, 2026, 02:50:41 amMoreover, my audit showed that Free Vision itself contains quite a lot of code that overlaps with Borland's code. Some or all of it may possibly not be copyrightable as trivial code, but I haven't investigated that question deeply. I am interested in this claim, because from what I know Free Vision is based on Leon de Boer's C++ graphics vision. Quote from wiki: QuoteThis was found in the shape of Free Vision, which (afaik) was a backport of the PD C++ code back to Pascal by Leon de Boer for use in graphics mode. As far as I can remember, Pierre and Peter backported the code back to textmode (coordinate system change that affected a lot of code!), ported missing parts, improved compatibility, and hooked it into the Textmode IDE. Note that the sf.net TVISION page falsely states that FPC uses Pascal sources donated by Borland, however it seems that nobody reacts to mails there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- unxed · 2026-10-03 04:09 Added Windows build. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- unxed · 2026-10-03 04:14 Quote from: kagamma on October 03, 2026, 04:37:57 amIQuote from: unxed on October 03, 2026, 02:50:41 amMoreover, my audit showed that Free Vision itself contains quite a lot of code that overlaps with Borland's code. Some or all of it may possibly not be copyrightable as trivial code, but I haven't investigated that question deeply. I am interested in this claim, because from what I know Free Vision is based on Leon de Boer's C++ graphics vision. Quote from wiki: QuoteThis was found in the shape of Free Vision, which (afaik) was a backport of the PD C++ code back to Pascal by Leon de Boer for use in graphics mode. As far as I can remember, Pierre and Peter backported the code back to textmode (coordinate system change that affected a lot of code!), ported missing parts, improved compatibility, and hooked it into the Textmode IDE. Note that the sf.net TVISION page falsely states that FPC uses Pascal sources donated by Borland, however it seems that nobody reacts to mails there. You can try running audit tool yourself: https://github.com/unxed/dn/tree/main/audit#how-to-check-another- pascal-code-base-for-example-free-vision