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#dos

10 posts9 participants0 posts today

As promised: PartUtil a limited partition editor that makes dual booting DOS and Win 9x without a boot manager easier.

Hide, unhide and make partitions active. Save and restore MBRs to files. And a few extra tricks that help with initial setup. Runs on any PC compatible and any version of DOS. Source code included.

(I've been using an earlier version of this for years on a PCjr. This is a complete rewrite that is finally worth sharing.)

brutman.com/PartUtil/PartUtil.

Replied in thread

@cyningstan ... But one thing I am not sure about, CGA allows each pixel to appear in 1 out of 4 colors, Hercules is only black or white (green, amber, ..), but on Hercules each CGA pixel is mapped to 3 Hercules pixels by average. Does one do some dithering to represent the 4 colors?

#dos#msdos#CGA
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@cyningstan

Great laptop:
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/0

An IBM-compatible Turbo XT! My first PC, of 1989 was such a thing, but a huge box with a tiny 12-inch green CRT monitor. 640kB RAM, 10MHz in turbo mode, and a Hercules-compatible graphics card, 640x350 pixels, for games one used a software CGA emulator, mapped the 320x200x4 colors of CGA onto the 640x300x3 gray levels of Hercules ...

And with locally installed DoS ...

Programmed #Pascal on it.

Ars Technica · Going deep with the Book 8088, the brand-new laptop that runs like it’s 1981By Andrew Cunningham

A few weeks ago I wondered what it takes to turn a small LISP-1 into a LISP-2. Turns out it takes just a few hours to get most things right, then some days to iron out a few subtleties, and then a couple of weeks to polish it into a piece of art.
MICRO COMMON LISP is a tiny, purely symbolic, microscopic subset of #CommonLISP. It runs in less than 64K bytes of memory, even on #DOS (tiny model) or CP/M. Here it is:
t3x.org/mcl/
#CPM #LISP

t3x.orgT3X.ORG mcl/index

Coming soon ... a utility to make swapping active partitions easier.

On my PCjr I like to switch between DOS 3.3 and DOS 5, while keeping the drive letters in the extended partition the same. To do that you have to mark the new partition active, but also hide the old partition. FDISK doesn't allow that.

Other tools exist but they are often not small machine friendly. I wrote a similar utility years ago but I lost the source code, so here it is recreated and enhanced.

Yay! Or maybe AIEEE! Seems like I'm giving a talk at #EuroBSDCon again this year!

Anyone who has been following me here for a while will know I'm a hopeless #retrocomputing nerd, and I will make no attempt at hiding it during my talk:

Dirty Tricks: Using nginx and Lua to thwart bots and skript kiddies

I'll (try to) show how you can protect your #BBS from drive-by portscans and your production systems from #DDoS attacks using all the wrong tools.

Dietary warning: may contain traces of floppies.

https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2025/talk/review/RHDFBQWZEVC833T3WDLDEXYFQVRWJKMN #FreeBSD #BSD #Unix #DOS #RunBSD

pleroma.anduin.netAnduin.net

There are loads of videos about MS-DOS, DOS games and DOS PCs on PeerTube, here's a playlist:

:ms_dos: fedi.video/w/p/uEorJj9vYsrdmih

- Watching on a phone: Swipe up first two videos at bottom to browse rest of playlist

- Watching on a computer: Choose video by scrolling through playlist on right of screen

- Watching embedded: Click ⏭️ or ⏮️ to see next or previous videos in playlist

cc @msdos

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@rl_dane

GNOME 2.x has something that the other Gnome's have never had. Full configurability almost like KDE has

That was the period where I would gladly use both Gnome and KDE on my desktops.

When the Gnome programmers started to think for me, is when I Departed.

I am however glad that the Gnome project exists and thrives, because there are hundreds of thousands of people who like the way that the Gnome programmers work. Without Gnome we would have lost those people to Macintosh

Get back to subject please take your time to go to Amber monitors, to the time when you had to run Sidekick, the time when you had to run DOS 3.3

I'm almost certain, no I am certain that you can't argue, that what sidekick did there for a crude and rudimentary user interface was advanced.

I love the way SideKick used the interrupt timer, interrupt the whole system inserted stuff do whatever it wants to do, then tell DOS how to save the files, and then when you got out of SideKick, it was almost magical, that you could use a single tasking operating system and pause it do one of the tasks and then resume it without the operating system ever getting screwed up

#GNOME#KDE#UI