SDL Now Supports DOS(github.com) |
SDL Now Supports DOS(github.com) |
https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...
The problem is that people don't use onboard audio anymore (because its incredibly and audibly noisy). They use USB or Bluetooth.
Bluetooth absolutely isn't standardized and is a mess, and USB miiiiiiight be okay if you limit to a subset of EHCI and USB Audio Class 1.0 devices.
At this point, its easier to just use Linux and run your game as pid 1.
At least on the Amiga 500 you would not go through the trouble to start Workbench, only to load the game, unless you were a lucky owner of an external hard drive.
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x#dosbox-x-supporte...
oh wait...
I'm very surprised to see SDL3 re-gain DOS support, since they've aggressively dropped support for almost every port/OS they had in the SDL 1.2 days.
From the wikipedia entry [1] for OHRRPGCE
> It runs at an 8-bit color depth, by default creates games that run at a 320 × 200 resolution.
It's funny but I bet anyone else in here who also grew up with the QBASIC interpreter as a kid instantly thinks SCREEN 13 when they read something like this.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Hamster_Republic_Role...
What SDL would you compile for? Win32 with exclusive fullscreen? With a VESA resolution like 640x480?
Joystick calibration: what a blast from the past! Blast from the past I encountered recently...
Joysticks had to be "calibrated" and it was something you had to do for each game that supported joysticks. These would give back analog values and they'd depend on the phases of the moon or the room temperature or both. I'm not making this up: this was a serious pain point both for players and coders.
FWIW in that DOS game of mine from 1991 or so for which I still had the .ASM source code files (about 30 000 lines of assembly code, 15 000 of which were auto-generated code to do very fast sprites drawing in the VGA 320x200 "tweaked" mode) and which I managed, at long last, to get to compile again a few days ago thanks to UASM (and quite some LLM help), I found lines like these:
ul_corner_ch:
db 63,"PUT YOUR JOYSTICK IN THE UPPER LEFT CORNER AND PRESS A BUTTON "
lr_corner_ch:
db 63,"PUT YOUR JOYSTICK IN THE LOWER RIGHT CORNER AND PRESS A BUTTON "
p1_choose:
dw 1 ;1 keyboard 2 joystick
p2_choose:
dw 0 ;0 none 1 keyboard 2 joystick
So you can understand that "auto-calibration" as in TFA is quite a selling point!
Usually upstream projects would reject such PRs under the reason they just increase maintenance cost with little to no benefit to the userbase.
https://github.com/SuperIlu/lovedos
The original upstream version is archived and has not been maintained in 9+ years. The link is to a fork that has fixes as recent as 2025.
Different projects have different policies, and I don't know what SDLs is.
But they already have a lot of ports, so I trust they know what they're getting themselves into.
I don't have any real clue how many openbsd luna 88k users there are in the wild, it was an obscure machine released, I think, only in japan, so most users, if they exist, are probably japanese, that is, out of my normal view scope. So as far as I can tell there is one user, the porter. But every release a couple weeks after the standard release date he comes out of the woods and drops the luna88k files and packages. I suspect it takes that long to compile on an actual luna88k. But that is all it takes and luna88k is an official hardware platform of openbsd.
I don't have nor do I really want a luna88k but that guy is sort of my hero for keeping it going like this.
I want to commend Dj Delorie for doing a great job. As a poor child at that time having access to a proper compiler which could ran on my old PC which only ran DOS, was awesome and amazing.
Anything up to the complexity of mid-90s AAA titles can run practically anywhere with a keyboard and mouse.
Games like Tomb Raider, Command & Conquer, Quake, etc. This is pretty compelling if you want a "it just works" platform.
Having SDL now makes that even easier.
You might be thinking of Allegro?
Some people love computers and making them do weird stuff, older computers make certain tasks feel more manageable.
The former is mesmerizing, intriguing, inviting and inspiring. The later? you can't wait to put the lid back on...
That's why you don't let people who have never touched a computer write tech laws. You get results like this.
(FWIW: I suspect there are more than a few old industrial control systems and such out there that are still running DOS, just because of an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude)
But I do wonder about the practicality. This would, I presume (never done DOS development, never touched a memory extender) only run on 386+ CPUs, and maybe more importantly, probably require a newer CPU than that to run anything non-trivial at acceptable performance. So I wonder how many "real DOS machines" this can practically target.
Still, it is massively cool.
Translation: "Stop liking things I don't like!"
At least on my circle for doing the same with PC games, we built the floppies ourselves, then again, it could be a side effect that you could hardly buy any legal games in Portugal during those days, even regular shops would sell pirated games as originals.
Define "real DOS machine".
But I would give you my definition: something with ISA slot so you can hear that awful 2.0 stereo SB Pro-compatible with a hiss what could be almost parseltongue. Video card of choice.
So basically anything between 386sx to P3 Tualatin and some rare and weird cases even P4 and AMD Athlon.
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards?page=1&itemsPerPage=24&...
Compiling an SDL port of Quake quake gives you 90% performance at 320x200 and 97% at 640x480 compared to the original. That's about 45fps which isn't bad I think.
SDL3 should now work with any i386+ with a VGA and 4MB of RAM which is roughly the requirements of Doom.
ISA is part of IBM-compatibility.
Your comment said "welcome to Amiga games", as if it were unique to Amiga. The context of the thread is PC, where they had their own booter/bare-metal games.
So you don't have to go to "Amiga games world", you're already in the proper world.
Not everyone was rich enough to know how the world looked elsewhere, connecting to all kinds of BBSs.
UEFI GOP additionally supports accelerated bitblt, but again YAGNI for 2D game performance at reasonable framerates on a modern PC.
About 10 years ago, it became "common knowledge" about mainboards that onboard sound has become good enough for almost anybody. It has never been true for me, maybe because my recent mainboards have been lower middle class (AMD B350 / B650) largely chosen for good CPU power converters.
Because my two (PC) laptops since 2020 have both had really damn good headphone outputs, I can believe that some good / expensive mainboards have it, too. It's not exotic technology anymore. Meanwhile, my desktop PC has a 20+ years old M-Audio prosumer card that also sounds great. (Now rigged with a PCIe -> PCI converter card off AliExpress)
Good news, though, there are a lot of inexpensive good external DACs out there. Over the past decade, an entire industry grew up to fix this problem.
But given autotune trends and how genz-ers grew up with shitty early smartphone loudspeakers and not much better BT ones they aren't used to proper music and their tastes are rot forever.
But, unfortunately, people keep buying that trash. We're kinda forced to support their mistakes.
If you design the system from the outset to work with an actual PLC/SCADA or similar (the typical solution for hooking up to big industrial machinery of that sort) that's a bit less likely to come up as an issue, and the hardware will actually be designed for that kind of environment.
I realize this is basically doing docker for DOS games and incredibly stupid, I'm just curious about the thought experiment
As far as I know, Worms is a normal DOS game, so the only way for that to happen should be a DOS install configured to just auto-start Worms on boot. Which makes sense as a way to keep a kid away from anything that could cause trouble.
I very vaguely recall that there used to be a very few PC games that worked as boot floppies and possibly didn't use DOS at all, but it was a rarity and Worms definitely wasn't one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell
Brown Bag PowerMenu was another.
https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/15739/software-spotl...
If you're ignorant of the situation, maybe don't come out with such a self-centered (and arguably, arrogant) statement; and especially don't double down on it when corrected.
You have the freedom to chose to reply or ignore me.
Unfortunately, like many in that group, it seems you'd rather double down on your ignorance.