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by keepamovin 308 days ago
DOS is an interesting platform because it can run on old hardware, and then basically anything else by way of emulation (such as in browsers) or via DOSBox.

If networking can be plumbed up, it's probably a legitimate and fun application platform for some uses that's worthy of investing time building on either for fun or for something real.
2 comments
3036e4 308 days ago
With some emulators (at least DOSBox-X) you can enable modern graphics modes that show up in SVGA in the emulated DOS and can be supported by DOS software just like any other modes. Anyone making DOS software today that isn't going explicitly for a retro look can try to detect and support a few modes like 1920x1080 and only fall back to more common old modes when necessary.
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keepamovin 307 days ago
Yeah that's really cool how flexible the graphics are.
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lelanthran 308 days ago
> If networking can be plumbed up, it's probably a legitimate and fun application platform for some uses that's worthy of investing time building on either for fun or for something real.

It's probably well suited to being a game console platform, too.

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keepamovin 307 days ago
Heh, you might be onto something there :)

I've been playing around with raylib/raygui for cross-platform game/app development. It would be cool if it could target DOS. It probably could, but it sounds way beyond my current knowledge.

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lelanthran 307 days ago
Yeah, I think the hard part would be graphics libraries for anything 3D.

I've always had a bucket-list item along the lines of "constructing basic game playing graphics primitives from scratch using the SVGA address offset for output".

MS-DOS (and games for it) ran on 486s, at the end. Writing MS-DOS games for a computer running many hundreds/thousands of times faster would probably allow for many more different types of approaches that could not be done on slow machines.

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keepamovin 307 days ago
That sounds like a fun project! Would taking something like the DOOM source code, and extracting the "3d engine" from that be a workable approach? Or in your vision of it how would you make the primitives?
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pjmlp 307 days ago
I am quite sure they were running on Pentiums as well, given Michael Abrash books, and my own experience.
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