4 ms·

OK, I'll bite: Which part of this thread is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting"? The fact that DOSBox is at least 17 years old? The fact that

OK, I'll bite: Which part of this thread is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting"? The fact that DOSBox is at least 17 years old? The fact that the "just run Linux, it'll work there if you figure out the right command line syntax that I'm not going to tell you" pattern is that old? (Richard Bonner, 4th comment from the end) XP unified the Win9x and Windows NT codebases, and both had to compromise a bit. The VxD driver model officially went away; more bits were added to the WDM model to enable better multimedia support than W2K and previous had. This whole thread is an instance of the XKCD Workflow: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ Making graphical DOS apps windowed never worked in NT (the very first post admits that this caused the graphics to freeze) but this user decided to push on stretching the bug to capture screenshots for reports (something that was never an option in DOS either) and was surprised when this edge case that very clearly was never supported stopped working between major versions.

Shared404 4y ago
> OK, I'll bite: Which part of this thread is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting"? I hesitate to qualify myself as a good hacker, but for me personally I enjoy reading about the history of computing - especially in the contexts of what people found important at any given time.
nailer 4y ago
I find it a good capture of the the ‘M$’ vibes of the early 2000s. Someone is angry that emails are no longer formatted to 78 monospace characters.
- dspillett 4y ago
  > 78 monospace characters I recall 72 being more common. This left room for a few nested quotes (indented each level by >[space]) before needing to reflow the text to fit in 78, the 78 coming from back in the days of text terminals 80 characters wide (leaving two for a border or for formatting marks or for other decoration/indicators). Maybe that was a more localised thing (I'm remembering it from guidelines for mailing lists and/or Usenet groups) and a flat 78 character guideline was more usual around the wider internet?
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  For what it's worth, Windows-1252 pretending to be ISO 8859-1 still makes my life difficult every now and then. Windows' smart quotes not being encoded using the proper unicode characters can cause tons of issues when editors try to use smart quotes (encoding quotes as 0x93 instead of \u201C). It's especially silly considering Microsoft had already switched to UCS-2 in the OS long before XP came out and UCS-2 also has the standard quotes in its set. Complaining that programs aren't inserting unnecessary line feeds anymore is just silly, though. DOS needed those characters because of technical limitations and if people aren't working around your computer's arbitrary limitations anymore, that's really your problem more than anyone else's. Their website (http://www.chebucto.ca/~ak621/DOS/ http://www.chebucto.ca/~ak621/DOS/) is still up and is actively being maintained. I wonder if the author still uses DOS every day...
userbinator 4y ago
Making graphical DOS apps windowed never worked in NT One could argue that it was supposed to, because otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to write the code to do it (and knowing what that code has to do, it wasn't a trivial thing either.) XP unified the Win9x and Windows NT codebases If anything, that should've enhanced the functionality since 9x's DOS windows are significantly more performant, and the "graphical DOS box" has been around in one form or another since Windows/386: https://gekk.info/articles/dosapps.html https://gekk.info/articles/dosapps.html Here's a demonstration of that, running Windows 2.03 (in CGA mode) inside Windows 3.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwkAVlUBu30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwkAVlUBu30
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> Which part of this thread What there was such a problem back in the days. THere are people there who are full fledged adults yet don't know how that was hecause they are born after W2K GA. What Bonner's site URLs still work and the content is at the same addresses. What some people responding with 'just use Linux' even if nobody asked them was an issue even then.
hulitu 4y ago
> OK, I'll bite: Which part of this thread is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting"? The fact that it does not autoupdate itself every 2 weeks with breaking changes ? The fact that the "UI" hasn't changed ? >The fact that DOSBox is at least 17 years old? This is a sign of quality. Firefox is 2 weeks old and already wants to update /s
gpvos 4y ago
Thanks for writing one of the few replies that actually explains the problem somewhat. Shame about the first three paragraphs though.

Shared404 4y ago

> OK, I'll bite: Which part of this thread is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting"? I hesitate to qualify myself as a good hacker, but for me personally I enjoy reading about the history of computing - especially in the contexts of what people found important at any given time.

nailer 4y ago

I find it a good capture of the the ‘M$’ vibes of the early 2000s. Someone is angry that emails are no longer formatted to 78 monospace characters.

dspillett 4y ago
> 78 monospace characters I recall 72 being more common. This left room for a few nested quotes (indented each level by >[space]) before needing to reflow the text to fit in 78, the 78 coming from back in the days of text terminals 80 characters wide (leaving two for a border or for formatting marks or for other decoration/indicators). Maybe that was a more localised thing (I'm remembering it from guidelines for mailing lists and/or Usenet groups) and a flat 78 character guideline was more usual around the wider internet?
jeroenhd 4y ago
For what it's worth, Windows-1252 pretending to be ISO 8859-1 still makes my life difficult every now and then. Windows' smart quotes not being encoded using the proper unicode characters can cause tons of issues when editors try to use smart quotes (encoding quotes as 0x93 instead of \u201C). It's especially silly considering Microsoft had already switched to UCS-2 in the OS long before XP came out and UCS-2 also has the standard quotes in its set. Complaining that programs aren't inserting unnecessary line feeds anymore is just silly, though. DOS needed those characters because of technical limitations and if people aren't working around your computer's arbitrary limitations anymore, that's really your problem more than anyone else's. Their website (http://www.chebucto.ca/~ak621/DOS/ http://www.chebucto.ca/~ak621/DOS/) is still up and is actively being maintained. I wonder if the author still uses DOS every day...

userbinator 4y ago

Making graphical DOS apps windowed never worked in NT One could argue that it was supposed to, because otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to write the code to do it (and knowing what that code has to do, it wasn't a trivial thing either.) XP unified the Win9x and Windows NT codebases If anything, that should've enhanced the functionality since 9x's DOS windows are significantly more performant, and the "graphical DOS box" has been around in one form or another since Windows/386: https://gekk.info/articles/dosapps.html https://gekk.info/articles/dosapps.html Here's a demonstration of that, running Windows 2.03 (in CGA mode) inside Windows 3.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwkAVlUBu30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwkAVlUBu30

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> Which part of this thread What there was such a problem back in the days. THere are people there who are full fledged adults yet don't know how that was hecause they are born after W2K GA. What Bonner's site URLs still work and the content is at the same addresses. What some people responding with 'just use Linux' even if nobody asked them was an issue even then.

hulitu 4y ago

> OK, I'll bite: Which part of this thread is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting"? The fact that it does not autoupdate itself every 2 weeks with breaking changes ? The fact that the "UI" hasn't changed ? >The fact that DOSBox is at least 17 years old? This is a sign of quality. Firefox is 2 weeks old and already wants to update /s

gpvos 4y ago

Thanks for writing one of the few replies that actually explains the problem somewhat. Shame about the first three paragraphs though.