SDL Now Supports DOS
91 points
2 hours ago
| 8 comments
| github.com
| HN
ronsor
1 hour ago
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All that's left now is SDL for UEFI, and then all our games can run in a pre-OS environment.
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chaps
1 hour ago
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That honestly sounds amazing. Imagine booting into something like a grub menu that's just a list of classic games.
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Xirdus
51 minutes ago
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I basically had this setup back in the day. I don't really know how I ended up with it, I was 7 at the time and none of it was intentional - but my bootloader had two entries: I could boot into Windows 98, or I could boot into Worms.
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dale_glass
27 minutes ago
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Probably your parents setting it up?

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.

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Induane
18 minutes ago
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I bet it wasn't actually the bootloader but something with autoexec.bat - you could setup choices in it and windows was just one launch option.
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Dwedit
31 minutes ago
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It's a similar idea, but that's a DOS menu. At the point when the menu appears, MS-DOS 7.1 has already been loaded.
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queuebert
59 minutes ago
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I would guess a modern BIOS chip is as powerful as an NES, right?
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snazz
42 minutes ago
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You can do substantially more in UEFI than NES-level games. (See https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.9_A/12_Protocols_Console_Suppo...)
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fluoridation
53 minutes ago
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What do you mean by "BIOS chip"? Like, the flash memory that stores the motherboard's firmware? I don't think that contains any processing elements.
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sedatk
46 minutes ago
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BIOS can only manage VESA which is much much slower than the capabilities of a modern GPU, so they might have meant graphical performance in regards to that.
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alnwlsn
54 minutes ago
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This is an especially funny screenshot as DosBOX itself is built on SDL.
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theragra
7 minutes ago
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Hm, then we need dosbox running in dos!
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vunderba
33 minutes ago
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Awesome. I wonder how this would work with a 386+ targeted MS-DOS executable from FreeBASIC, which supports binding to SDL.

[1] - https://github.com/freebasic/fbc

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jlokier
24 minutes ago
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Perfect! I was just doing some Turbo C development inside DOSBox-X inside Debian GNU/Linux inside VMware Fusion inside macOS this morning.
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bpavuk
5 minutes ago
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you may also enjoy watching Inception then :)
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Dwedit
44 minutes ago
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Technically this already worked with HXDOS, which emulated DirectDraw well enough that SDL could use it.
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dwedge
48 minutes ago
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I got really confused and thought this was sdf, I only read the comments and none of them made sense
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raverbashing
1 hour ago
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Well I guess Allegra was a bit old already /s
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sedatk
26 seconds ago
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I loved Allegra! Saved me a lot of time when I was writing code for our musicdisk. That was 29 years ago though. :)
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jan_Sate
1 hour ago
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Uhm... excuse me? Why? Is there anyone even using DOS for anything serious these days?
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mrweasel
14 minutes ago
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Perhaps not serious, but I think people gravitate towards older systems these days because they are easier to conceptualize. It's not unrealistic for a single person to have a complete grasp of e.g. the C64 and it's programming environment. DOS is similarly constraint, but also easier for you to form a more or less complete mental model around.

Some people love computers and making them do weird stuff, older computers make certain tasks feel more manageable.

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sedatk
51 minutes ago
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Most computers in Turkey come with FreeDOS preinstalled because there's a law that states all computers must be sold with an operating system. FreeDOS turns out to be the cheapest and easiest.

That's why you don't let people who have never touched a computer write tech laws. You get results like this.

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Dwedit
46 minutes ago
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The really weird case is where the computer isn't actually compatible with DOS, so they put in a locked-down Linux distro that emulates FreeDOS.
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ronsor
38 minutes ago
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Wasn't it Dell or HP that did this? IIRC it was FreeDOS-on-QEMU-on-X11-on-Linux.
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unleaded
27 minutes ago
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Those types of laws aren't all that bad.. they got us this: https://segaretro.org/Dottori_Kun
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wk_end
42 minutes ago
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Is there a reason they don't go with Ubuntu or something like that instead?
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prmoustache
36 minutes ago
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I guess they don't want to get support's call. DOS looks like firmware for non techies.
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wk_end
1 hour ago
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Who said anything about "serious"?

(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)

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gbin
58 minutes ago
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The real question is "why not?" :)
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spijdar
49 minutes ago
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I think this PR is awesome, and I can totally see myself playing around with this at some point. Being able to create DOS executables of SDL projects is just ... cool!

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.

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queuebert
58 minutes ago
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There used to be stock exchanges running happily on DOS. Maybe there still are.
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chaps
56 minutes ago
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Worked at an exchange in 2007/2008 and... we had systems still running from the 80s. Mostly tape audit stuff.
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mikepurvis
52 minutes ago
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Hacker News
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alnwlsn
55 minutes ago
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because you can
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