Re: Premade DOS Hard Drive Image

Posted on 2024-04-08, 01:29

by

by doshea

in DOS

in DOS

You are asking for trouble. I was going to post the same thing :D I feel like the "YOU WILL REGRET THIS!" guy from SimCity 2000. The scheme wierd_w proposes where you do the partitioning and format on the target system has worked for me (or at least I'm pretty sure it has). Alternatively, you can …

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Re: The IBM Game Port, more than just games

Posted on 2024-04-07, 11:02

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by doshea

in Milliways

in Milliways

Pierre32 wrote on 2024-04-07, 08:32: I picked this up late last year, but haven't gotten to playing with it yet. It's a gameport oscilloscope interface, sold in kit form back in the day. Wow, nice! I notice JayCar and Dick Smith products that look very similar, were they both just putting their …

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Re: The IBM Game Port, more than just games

Posted on 2024-04-07, 06:42

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by doshea

in Milliways

in Milliways

Yeah, that stuff was definitely popular in the DOS days, but if you had Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, or Windows 3.1, you could install the joystick driver, and then also read the joystick port from Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal for Windows, etc. I can provide more details on Visual Basic if …

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Re: Hex editing a game exe - How do you figure out which parts represent what?

Posted on 2024-04-06, 00:49

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by doshea

in Milliways

in Milliways

You're probably at the point where you need to disassemble or decompile it, using e.g. Ghidra. It would probably be pretty challenging - you won't get to see the original variable names or anything so it can be pretty hard to figure out what you're looking at, even if you are experienced at …

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Re: The IBM Game Port, more than just games

Posted on 2024-04-04, 07:44

by

by doshea

in Milliways

in Milliways

Yeah, that stuff was definitely popular in the DOS days, but if you had Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, or Windows 3.1, you could install the joystick driver, and then also read the joystick port from Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal for Windows, etc. I can provide more details on Visual Basic if …

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Re: Has anyone archived no-CD for old games?

Posted on 2024-04-04, 07:37

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by doshea

in Milliways

in Milliways

DosFreak wrote on 2024-03-28, 10:38: Legally I've been looking into putting xdelta diff's onto github Thanks, this sounds much nicer than running some random patcher, if I can even find one!

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Re: Will program written in Microsoft Visual Basic 1.0 work in Real-Mode on Windows 3.0?

Posted on 2024-04-03, 08:22

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by doshea

in Milliways

in Milliways

I've seen Jo22 mention Gupta SQLWindows a few time but I'd never seen it mentioned elsewhere until I was just having a look at this "Windows Shopping" brochure from Microsoft from 1988 which includes it and Actor. Actor sounds pretty interesting! It says it's interactive, object-oriented, supposedly …

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Re: Batch for running software in DOS

Posted on 2024-03-31, 05:03

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

The easiest way to test a specific memory configuration is to create an environment variable in AUTOEXEC.BAT that persists in memory and then test it. I'm sure you know this, but for anyone reading who might not: the CONFIG environment variable is set to the menu item name in CONFIG.SYS when you …

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Re: DOS/SMB/Mounting images

Posted on 2024-03-30, 02:50

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Network designers have found that latency has a significant impact on the performance of the SMB 1.0 protocol, that it performs more poorly than other protocols like FTP. Monitoring reveals a high degree of "chattiness" and a disregard of network latency between hosts.[13] For example, a VPN …

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Re: Batch for running software in DOS

Posted on 2024-03-30, 01:43

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

You could use GOTO as workaround and thus something like the folloing. The GOTO workaround also works in very early DOS Versions, like 3.3. I'm not a fan of this, since as I said it's more typing to run this - instead of just "WC2" you need to type "GO WC2" or something - but yes, it does have the …

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Re: Batch for running software in DOS

Posted on 2024-03-30, 01:30

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Set /P SomeVariable=any input Does DOS actually support this, or just Win32 CMD.EXE? I tried running "HELP SET" under MS-DOS 6.22, but on this particular VM I have 4DOS installed so learned that the /P parameter to SET means "pause" in 4DOS, like the /P parameter to DIR :D Okay, let's try that …

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Re: DOS/SMB/Mounting images

Posted on 2024-03-29, 11:23

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I'd like to point out that OP didn't specify any protocol/fs, so things like NFS or Novell Netware are still on the table. Though I have little experience with both, at least within DOS, but maybe one of you guys has an idea how appropriate they'd be here? I don't really know. All I know is that in …

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Re: DOS/SMB/Mounting images

Posted on 2024-03-29, 11:18

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Again, the problem is with opportunistic locking, or rather, its lack there of, with SMB1.0 This mostly manifests in issues with ensuring data integrity on writes, but also causes problems with caching on reads, with large files. I think you must be addressing my suggestion since nothing else has …

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Re: Batch for running software in DOS

Posted on 2024-03-29, 11:08

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

then having game specific variables get populated and used, based on what the user picks. How does the picking part work? Using the CHOICE command, which was only introduced in MS-DOS 6? Accepting a command-line parameter, which means you have to type more? Or something nicer? Sorry if I missed …

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Re: DOS/SMB/Mounting images

Posted on 2024-03-29, 07:56

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

A simpler option you could consider - although it might not be suitable in all cases - would be mounting .iso file(s) on whatever machine is hosting the server, and then sharing the contents as regular folders. Depending on what your server's operating system is and whether it's running on a …

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Re: Batch for running software in DOS

Posted on 2024-03-29, 07:48

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

By the way, the suggestion to increase the permitted size of the environment variables so that the PATH variable can be longer becomes quite ugly if you then want to edit the PATH variable in the AUTOEXEC.BAT with EDIT from MS-DOS 6.x to add about 60 game folders. Although EDIT allows you to read …

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Re: Best way to figure out CF geometry

Posted on 2024-03-23, 10:14

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

OP said they were hoping to use their modern system. I assume that since IDEINFO is from 1991 or so, it might be a challenge. I know that you can generally boot DOS from a USB device (maybe some firmware is making this difficult now though?) but I assume the BIOS just installs an interrupt 13h …

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Re: Best way to figure out CF geometry

Posted on 2024-03-23, 08:19

by

by doshea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm not sure what a passthrough is, I'm afraid. What I am using for CF reader is [ this device ] USB-to-storage adapters don't always let the host send any command it wants to the target device, because that's more work, so they just support the basic read/write/etc. stuff. Commands required for …

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Re: Unable to run Qix and similar games on an IBM 5150

Posted on 2024-03-21, 11:04

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by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

The remote debugging feature didn't help much because the program is unable to load necessary files for startup Does the debugger on the host want to load the executable into its own memory and view that rather than read from memory on the target? It seems like that wouldn't work very well if there …

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Re: Unable to run Qix and similar games on an IBM 5150

Posted on 2024-03-17, 01:10

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by doshea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

When doing single step using for a certain amount of instructions, the screen of the debugger starts rolling vertically at some point and the debugger stops executing with the keyboard not responding. The debugger is Microsoft Codeview 2.2. I looked up the documentation for Microsoft C/C++ 7 and it …

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