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== fabulous.systems ==
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CREATING NEW INSTALLATION MEDIA FOR MS-DOS 4.0

2024-06-22 22:00:00
#retrocomputing #msdos #operatingsystems

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On April 25, 2024, Microsoft released the source code of MS-/PC-DOS 4.00 to the
public, and the community managed to provide MS-DOS 4.01 as well.

While the original release was available as a set of six 5,25" floppy disks (and
optionally three 3,5" disks for version 4.01), this open-source release does not
have official installation media.

Recreating the original media would theoretically be possible, but I want to
focus on the 720k images for this project. Having to swap around six floppies
multiple times isn’t practical. Furthermore, we can build images for 1.44 MB
floppy disks for increased compatibility: The SELECT utility used for the
installation process doesn’t like it if you install it on floppies with a
different format than the source disks are written in.

The open-source release is missing a few program files and the entire DOSSHELL
environment, so that’s something we also have to deal with.

Read more...


IF I EVER GET A DOG, I'LL NAME IT ROVER: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO MICROSOFT BOB

2024-06-16 20:00:00
#retrocomputing #windows #operatingsystems

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March 1995. Although PCs had been around for many years at this point, less than
40% of households in the US owned one. Back then, people mostly associated PCs
with being a machine used at work, not a thing you’d even need at home. They
were complicated and… unfriendly.

Just a few months before the launch of the all-new Windows 95, Microsoft Bob was
an attempt to create a user-friendly interface that runs on top of Windows to
increase the popularity of PCs at home and show how valuable a PC might be for
purposes other than business.

Read more...


LET'S BUILD A FABULOUS.COMMUNITY

2024-06-07 20:00:00


Today, I’m excited to finally announce a new side project I’ve been working on
for quite a while.

To be more precise, this will be our new side project that we’ll be working on
in the future.

Read more...


ABOUT IMPROVING MS-DOS SCREENSHOTS WITH CALCULATED DISTORTION

2024-05-30 17:00:00
#retrocomputing #msdos

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INTRODUCTION

Have you ever noticed that a pixel-perfect screenshot from a virtual machine
running MS-DOS in the default VGA text mode looks slightly off? The characters
are too wide, and the whole image seems stretched.

At the very least, it doesn’t evoke the same nostalgic feeling as the old CRT
days, does it?

But did you know that what you’re seeing is a perfect representation of the
actual image, while your monitor from 1995 was deceiving you? Let’s have a
closer look.

Read more...


3D PINBALL FOR WINDOWS: THE SPACE CADET'S MISSION CONTINUES

2024-05-27 21:00:00
#retrocomputing #retrogaming #preservation

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Do you know what computer games and the Voyager space probes have in common?
Clever engineering can extend their missions way beyond their intended lifetime.

3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet, the iconic game bundled with the Microsoft
Plus! packs and included in Windows NT4 up to Windows XP, is preserved for
decades to come thanks to a reverse engineering project by Andrey Muzychenko.

Andrey’s work involved decompiling the executable that shipped with Windows XP
and creating a modern reimplementation using SDL2 . This means you can now enjoy
both the bundled version and the ‘Full Tilt! Pinball’ version on Windows, Linux
and macOS.

Read more...


A MINOR UPDATE: THE SOURCE CODE FOR MS-DOS 4.01 IS HERE

2024-05-25 17:30:00
#retrocomputing #msdos #operatingsystems

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A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft released the source code of MS-/PC-DOS 4.00 to
the public.

Due to various bugs, DOS 4.00 was a relatively short-lived release, and it was
replaced by DOS 4.01 just a couple of months later.

Howard M. Harte (hharte), who already fixed various flaws in the official source
code release of MS-DOS 4.00 , managed to figure out the differences between DOS
4.00 and 4.01 — we now have access to the improved version as well!

Read more...


THE BROKEN SOURCE CODE FOR MS-DOS 4.00 HAS BEEN RESTORED

2024-05-01 18:00:00
#retrocomputing #msdos #operatingsystems

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On April 25, 2024, Microsoft released the source code of MS-/PC-DOS 4.00 to the
public.

While this release is exciting and essential to computing history, Microsoft’s
release process was not entirely flawless: An accidental conversion from
codepage 437 to UTF-8 destroyed parts of the source code and caused build
failures.

In less than a week, on April 30, 2024, the community provided all necessary
patches to restore the source code to its original state, matching the 1988
release of MS-DOS 4.00.

Read more...


THE MAKING OF THE MS-DOS COMMAND REFERENCE BOT

2024-01-21 12:00:00
#retrocomputing #msdos #mastodon #fediverse

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A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

I launched my Daily MS-DOS command bot a few months ago.

The initial idea was straightforward: Pick a random command or program that
ships with MS-DOS 6.22 and post a brief description.

With a bit of help from some websites that archived the MS-DOS reference manual,
I finished the initial revision of the JSON-based data file including all the
comments with a short description in a matter of hours. I wrote a simple Bash
script to pick a random command, fetch the description from the JSON file, and
publish a post through the Mastodon API.

Easy. But shortly after that, a question arose: “What about screenshots?”

At first, I thought about going through every command in my data file, spinning
up a VM, executing the command, taking a screenshot, and linking to it in the
data file itself. While this approach is possible, it is tedious. There’s no
real challenge in repeatedly typing in commands and trying to keep track of the
screenshots I already took. Moreover, any change in the command list would
require spinning up a VM, executing the command, taking a screenshot, and
modifying the data file to include the modified screenshot.

But what if I could do all of this dynamically by taking screenshots at the
moment my MS-DOS VM is executing the command I requested?

Read more...


CONNECTING MS-DOS 6.22 TO THE INTERNET --- AND THE FEDIVERSE

2023-08-05 22:00:00
#retrocomputing #msdos #mastodon #fediverse

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Microsoft released the last standalone version of MS-DOS as MS-DOS 6.22 in 1994.

Even though this operating system is decades old and a true relic of the past,
people still develop new software for it. Thanks to a couple of modern tools, we
can connect MS-DOS to the internet. Since just having a connection to the
outside world itself is pretty boring, we connect MS-DOS 6.22 to something
fairly modern and amazing: the fediverse.

Let’s have a look.

Read more...


SMASHING THE LIMITS: INSTALLING WINDOWS XP IN DOSBOX-X

2023-07-26 00:00:00
#retrocomputing #windows #preservation #emulation #operatingsystems

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In my previous article , I described how I managed to install Windows 2000 in
DOSBox-X.

Even though this experiment was successful, I was not really happy with the
results. While I got Windows 2000 working, I didn’t want to stop there. The
final goal for the project was to get Windows XP running instead. However, after
multiple attempts I gave up, thinking that Windows XP was impossible to use.

Well - I was wrong. But let’s start at the beginning.

Read more...
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