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Microsoft Releases Crown Jewels — From 1982!
If you look back 30 or so years ago, it wasn’t clear what was going to happen with personal computers. One thing most people would have bet on, though, was that CP/M — the operating system from Digital Research — would keep growing and power whatever new machines were available. Except it didn’t. MS-DOS took over the word and led — eventually — to the huge number of Windows computers we know today. Microsoft has released the source code to MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 on GitHub.
Microsoft — then another fledgling computer company — had written some BASIC interpreters and wanted in on the operating system space. They paid the princely sum of $75,000 to Seattle Computer Products for something called QDOS written by [Tim Paterson]. Rebranded as MS-DOS, the first version appeared in late 1981 and version 1.25 was out about a year later.
While you might not think having MS-DOS source code is a big deal, there’s still a lot of life left in DOS and it is also interesting from an educational and historical perspective. If you don’t want to read x86 assembly language, there’s also the BASIC source for the samples (paradoxically, in the bin subdirectory) along with compiled COM files for old friends like EDLIN and DEBUG.
[...] If this gets you wanting to write some new DOS programs, you can actually use GCC now. Or if you want to play the DONKEY.BAS file, QB64 would probably work.
Also at The Register.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 01 2018, @09:07PM (4 children)
You've given me reason to pause and think. I don't think there was any "supported" emulator. Lemme check with the Duck . . .
I'm not finding any real clear answers to emulation, but this page is interesting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#Dependence_on_MS-DOS [wikipedia.org]
The paragraph seem to indicate that Win95 could not/would not run without DOS, but also that Windows performed it's own disk operations. Funny . . . in a puzzling way.
And, I'm left wondering how accurate the parent article is. They suggest that DOS games were run inside of Windows 3.x, but they would sometimes lock up Windows. But - as I recall, you simply didn't run DOS games in Windows 3.x - instead, you played windows specific games in Windows, then dropped back to DOS to play older DOS games.
Too many years have passed. I'd have to poke my fingers into a working system to sort out how some of this stuff worked. ;^)
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 01 2018, @09:38PM (2 children)
"With the release of Windows 95 (and continuing in the Windows 9x product line through to Windows ME), an integrated version of MS-DOS was used for bootstrapping, troubleshooting, and backwards-compatibility with old DOS software, particularly games, and no longer released as a standalone product.[51] In Windows 95, the DOS, called MS-DOS 7, can be booted separately, without the Windows GUI; this capability was retained through Windows 98 Second Edition. Windows ME removed the capability to boot its underlying MS-DOS 8.0 alone from a hard disk, but retained the ability to make a DOS boot floppy disk (called an "Emergency Boot Disk") and can be hacked to restore full access to the underlying DOS. " -- Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#End_of_MS-DOS [wikipedia.org]
I generally used boot floppies to play my games on Windows 98. Good old Ultima VII and X-COM: UFO Defense. Ultima VII was a particular pain with the need for Extended Memory, but it still worked fine without the need for an emulator.
Was quite happy to see DOSBox come along, though. FreeDOS was good and all, but it was a drop-in replacement for DOS. Not an easy way for me to play a game in Windows.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Tuesday October 02 2018, @03:10AM (1 child)
That's doin' it the hard way. Me, I edited MSDOS.SYS to make Win9x start in DOS, then started Windows by typing WIN at the prompt, and when I quit Windows, I was back at DOS, handy for whatever games required it. No boot floppy required.
Since I happen to have a copy handy... the relevant line is BootGUI= 0 is don't, 1 is do.
;FORMAT
[Paths]
WinDir=C:\WIN98
WinBootDir=C:\WIN98
HostWinBootDrv=C
[Options]
BootMulti=1
BootGUI=0
LOGO=0
DoubleBuffer=1
AutoScan=1
WinVer=4.10.1998
plus some filler for ancient programs that expected MSDOS.SYS to larger than 1024 bytes.
WinME did in fact run atop DOS, and could be hacked into doing a DOS-only boot (I'd done so on mine, using a small utility that floated around at the time), but it wasn't really useful as neither HIMEM.SYS nor EMM386.SYS would load. It worked for games with their own DOS extender (eg. DOS4GW) or very small apps that could scrape by on 500k (because WinME's DOS only gave you about 525k total) but otherwise wasn't worth the bother.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:39AM
Force WinME to boot to its hidden underlying DOS:
http://www.oocities.org/dos8me/ [oocities.org]
This is the same one I applied to my setup. Use at your own risk.
Here's a different method and utility to achieve the same thing; I haven't tried this one.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010205080400/http://www.dewassoc.com/support/winme/real_dos.htm [archive.org]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 02 2018, @02:56AM
I didn't retire my trusty Win3.11 box til late 2001, so I'm probably a bit closer to this than average... as I recall, so long as the game or other program didn't want to dink around with its own memory manager, it would run just fine in a DOS window inside the Windows shell. But if it used, frex, DOS4GW (a la DOOM) then it would clank about and crash, or refuse to run at all, and for those you had to drop to DOS.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.