Category: MS-DOS
PLATO is the great, great, great granddaddy of the online computer network. Developing forums, email, multiplayer networked games, screen sharing, and instant messaging, it is responsible for many of the things we take for granted today. AJ and Joerg take a deep dive with IRATA.ONLINE’s Thomas Cherryhomes into why PLATO is as awesome as it is, and how it still…
You feel dizzy and your head is spinning around, you open your eyes only to find yourself in a filthy room. You stand up and you realize that you are hostage inside an asylum. There is something worse than your headache, the thing that you don’t remember anything about your past. You suffer amnesia and you have to read the…
In this edition of Retro Revisited, we’ll be looking back at Syndicate Wars, the much-anticipated sequel to one of the best real-time action-strategy games of the early 90’s, Syndicate. The original game proved to be incredibly popular, and remains one of my favourite games of all time – to say that I was excited when I learned that a sequel was in development would be something of an understatement! The game…
DOSBox-X 0.82.2 has been released. DOSBox-x is a branch of DOSBox v0.74. DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, joystick, modem, etc., necessary for running many old MS-DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux and FreeBSD. DOSBox-X Changelog DOS filename handling fixed…
We all know that deep, really deep inside your fancy Windows 10 there is still a function call do_msdos() but what we may not know is how it actually all started. To help to close that gap, Rem’s Classic Computer website has a new article telling the history of MS-DOS (and IBM PC-DOS, for that matter). There are plenty of information about…
I confess I don’t remember PC-MOS/386, but every time a vintage software has its source code released, I get excited. It is a way to learn new (old) techniques and at the same time, make sure the source code is preserved forever. PC-MOS was a multi-user MS-DOS system released in 1987 by The Software Link. The expected setup was to…
Arstechnica UK has published a 2-part article telling the complete story of the IBM PC. The first part was published back in June and the second and final part on July 31st. The massive 8000-word article goes deep in the history of the computer that, despite not being the most exciting and capable of its time, caused the demise of…
Gamasutra website has released from its Vault a presentation from this years’ Game Development Conference (GDC) with nothing less than Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley’s postmortem of Civilization. Very common in the game industry (and many others as well), the postmortem is an evaluation of a certain game development process, analyzing what went right and what went wrong, how it should’ve…
I love the articles written by Jimmy Maher, the “Digital Antiquarian”! Being also the author of the excellent “The Future was Here – The Commodore Amiga“, Maher has been writing about computer (hardware and software) history for a long time, and you can find them all on his blog. This time around he published one talking about the IBM PC architecture, tackling…
Arstechnica has published the article WordStar: A writer’s word processor which talks about the iconic word processor released in 1979 for CP/M and later on for DOS and Windows. The author tries to show why the text based editor is still the tool of choice for many writers, like George R. R. Martin, that wrote A Song of Ice and Fire using the DOS-based…
