Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2020-11-02, 02:09

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I finished it too close to bed to mention it on the same day, but yesterday's retro activity was completing a very delayed blog post reviewing unit test frameworks that are easy to use and can build into real-mode DOS executables using Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9. Here's a screenshot of what my …

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Re: What do you want in a DOS installer wizard?

Posted on 2020-08-31, 14:24

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

a web page should be doable. https://bloodycactus.com/files.html Thanks. Barring any tweaks you propose, this is what the title line for the entry will look like: Installer v1.03 by Bloody Cactus Development Labs ( HTTPS , FTP , Local Mirror ) EDIT: Done. oh man I feel like I took over your thread …

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Re: What do you want in a DOS installer wizard?

Posted on 2020-08-31, 13:54

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

BloodyCactus wrote on 2020-08-31, 11:20: hey I have my upload a permanent url ftp://bloodycactus.com/pub/si103.zip Thanks. 😀 (It's not ideal when browsers are phasing out built-in FTP support, but a local mirror will solve that.) If I don't get side-tracked, I'll add it to the list later today.

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Re: What do you want in a DOS installer wizard?

Posted on 2020-08-31, 10:50

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

makes sense. I have an option in mine to reserve Xkb on disk one, if you choose to use disk sizes to save space for things like a readme.txt, the install app itself etc, and this reserved space doesn't bleed into subsequent images. *nod* Not a high priority yet, given that splitting across multiple …

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Re: What do you want in a DOS installer wizard?

Posted on 2020-08-30, 19:17

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

i put in a 'its freeware' in the install.txt and reuploaded it. i dont know how long that link will last, i have not bothered to archive all my stuff on the net. Thanks. I'll mirror a copy on my blog when I add it to the list. 15kb.. thats odd because its not an even cluster size so your basically …

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Re: What do you want in a DOS installer wizard?

Posted on 2020-08-30, 16:37

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

well yeah i wrote it in 97, its just a utility, freeware. nobody cared about that stuff back then. i dont care about distribution, like the masses of anything that got uploaded to bbs's back in the day. Would you mind either saying that in a permalinkable download page I can link to from my blog …

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Re: Dos 6 conventional memory tricks

Posted on 2020-08-30, 16:34

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I thought BUFFERSHIGH could put the buffers in upper memory. I haven't looked at my config.sys or autoexecs in decades now, but recall that we would do this in msdos 5.0. I think it actually works only on Windows 9x (DOS 7.x), and FreeDOS (possibly since certain versions). Huh. You're right …

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Re: What do you want in a DOS installer wizard?

Posted on 2020-08-30, 12:52

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

i have a neat dos installer that has some of those requirements http://mega-tokyo.com/si103.zip its an installer rather than setup, as doing tricks like modifying config.sys/autoexec.bat can get tricky when it comes to multimenu stuff... and this was originally written in 97... UI-wise, it's …

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Re: Dos 6 conventional memory tricks

Posted on 2020-08-29, 20:21

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

...like the BUFFERS and FCBs. I thought BUFFERSHIGH could put the buffers in upper memory. I haven't looked at my config.sys or autoexecs in decades now, but recall that we would do this in msdos 5.0. Possibly. I am quite tired right now and without it being easy to boot it up and check, it's …

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What do you want in a DOS installer wizard?

Posted on 2020-08-29, 18:20

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

One of the hobby projects I've started to poke at again (mind you, very slowly) is an effort to build an installer builder for DOS. (InnoSetup, NSIS, WiX, and MS Setup 2.0 serve everything from Windows 3.1 onward, but I couldn't find anything for DOS that was both legally free and as polished as the …

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Re: Dos 6 conventional memory tricks

Posted on 2020-08-29, 17:23

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I've been using qemm since it originally came out. Never had a problem with compatibility. I found that my AST Adventure! 210 didn't like QEMM97 (It rendered it unbootable) so I just went for borrowing stuff from FreeDOS distros that's more space-efficient and can load itself high more completely …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2020-04-16, 01:34

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Sorry I went silent here. Life has been very distracting. That said, I thought you guys'd appreciate what I got up to today: I nerd-sniped myself and implemented a one-click aspect ratio correction userscript for 320x200 screenshots on MobyGames based on this Gamasutra post . It doesn't do 640x400 …

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Re: Intel to remove all BIOS updates on November 22nd, 2019 from their website

Posted on 2019-11-19, 17:37

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Since nobody has mentioned it, this Reddit thread may also be useful to keep an eye on for coordinating things: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments … of_drivers_and/

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Re: Spam, spam, spam

Posted on 2019-11-19, 17:05

by

by ssokolow

in Milliways

in Milliways

(All this spamming and double (triple) user trolling would go away if active members had to register a phone number to be able to comment. It works just fine on other forums.) I assume you mean SMS verification. What about those of us who don't have smartphones? I'm on Discord, but I've warned my …

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Re: Powering and testing IDE / SATA HDDs...

Posted on 2019-05-14, 23:13

by

by ssokolow

in Milliways

in Milliways

SirNickity wrote: OH. I totally missed that. I saw all the Windows screen shots and put it on the to-do list to try on my pre-XP boxen. Thanks, that's fantastic! Yeah. It'll probably be in your distro's package repo too. https://repology.org/project/dvdisaster/versions

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Re: Best way of debugging Win16 programs on 64-bit Windows?

Posted on 2019-05-13, 10:41

by

by ssokolow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Interesting, thanks for mentioning it. Also saw your blog - Btw, there also was a WinMem32 API in Windows 3.1 which could be used for writing flat-memory apps (thus dropping 286 support). I haven't found much information of it, but you can check its presence in Byte Magazine May/92 , p.24, if you …

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Re: Powering and testing IDE / SATA HDDs...

Posted on 2019-05-13, 09:52

by

by ssokolow

in Milliways

in Milliways

I still have to figure out how to test optical drives. I'm sure there's a good Linux utility for doing measured reads from disc. I need something that can help me determine whether the laser(s) is/are still good. It's not really intended for that purpose, but dvdisaster 's Scan option might be …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2019-05-11, 21:38

by

by ssokolow

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Managed to fit in a bit of work on my far-too-backlogged effort to build a DOS installer toolkit analogous to InnoSetup or NSIS. Specifically, I refactored the internals and, while I was at it, found ways to tune the routines I'd already written to shave down the final binary size by 74 bytes. ( …

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Re: Best way of debugging Win16 programs on 64-bit Windows?

Posted on 2019-05-11, 06:41

by

by ssokolow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

I had a long reply but I forgot that Firefox neglects to preserve un-submitted form contents if you have an extension which unloads idle tabs. The gist of it was that you should check the options for NE-format executables that I dug up a few months ago . I haven't tried debugging Win16 executables …

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Re: [Pics are welcome] What are the rarest or the most obscure games in your possession?

Posted on 2019-05-11, 06:24

by

by ssokolow

in Milliways

in Milliways

IMG_20190511_014619_cropped.jpg Shovelware and sequel to a relatively little-known edutainment title. I'm the guy who added the MobyGames entries for both of them. https://www.mobygames.com/game/tetris-gold-professional https://www.mobygames.com/game/spelling-blizzard IMG_20190511_015928_cropped. …

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