7 ms·
Q2DOS – Quake 2 backported to MS-DOS
- Dwedit 2y agoDoes the original work on HXDOS?
- unixhero 2y agoWow hxdos[0] looks like msdos extender nirvana 0, https://www.japheth.de/HX.html https://www.japheth.de/HX.html
- stevefan1999 2y agoGiven that Quake 2 already runs on Windows 95 back in the days, and how Windows 95 is already somewhat of an "exokernel" to DOS, I wonder how hard it is to port to DOS, actually? Well, given that you can have almost full control to the hardware and framebuffer, and memory allocation and how you can directly issue BIOS calls...I guess the performance should be prettier right?
- dietrichepp 2y agoI don’t think you could fairly say Windows 95 is an exokernel to DOS. Windows 95 is a whole OS, which happened to go through DOS during the boot process, and keep bits of DOS around for certain pieces of functionality (device drivers?) Maybe Quake II on DOS will run with less system memory than the Windows version.
- userbinator 2y agoWindows 95, like Windows 3.x enhanced mode and Windows/386 before that, is actually a hypervisor that runs DOS in VMs; and one of those VMs, the "system VM", runs a DOS extender that handles the Win32 and GUI part.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kbolino 2y agoNotably, the DOS environment under Windows is running in a hardware mode called "virtual 8086 mode" which allows it to be isolated from the other DOS environments and, even more importantly, from full BIOS access. These limitations kept the whole system safer and more stable than DOS in "real mode" but made some DOS programs unusable under Windows.
- rasz 2y agoAlmost fully isolated. As far as I know Intel screwed 386 design forgetting about trapping POPF on interrupt flag change. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160411-00/?p=93281 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160411-00/?p=93... https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/admin/swvirt-details.html https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/adm...
- chem83 2y agoSome context related to what you're saying: - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24063 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24... - https://www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.html https://www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.html
- TazeTSchnitzel 2y agoWindows 95 is so good at pretending to not be there that it convinced a generation of nerds that it was a thin layer on top of DOS, but the reality is the other way round.
- zero_shift 2y agoI'd heard this claim before too. For the unenlightened - what was the structure of Win95 and its DOS? As opposed to 3.1?
- Sharlin 2y agoRaymond Chen: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24063 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...
- 2mlWQbCK 2y agoWindows 95 had a horrible reputation for games in the early days, for good reasons or not (maybe mostly because how bad Windows 3.x was for games?). Quake was possibly the first mainstream game that managed to convince many that it was possible to get good games performance without sticking to MS-DOS? 1997 was still a great year for DOS games really. Even 1998 was not bad. For someone playing games on a PC in that era there was really no hurry to switch to Windows 95/98 (but by 1997 I had moved on to Linux instead anyway). https://www.mobygames.com/platform/dos/year:1997/ https://www.mobygames.com/platform/dos/year:1997/ https://www.mobygames.com/platform/dos/year:1998/ https://www.mobygames.com/platform/dos/year:1998/
- scruffyherder 2y agoDLL's were the most involved part of the port.
- tombert 2y agoIt's sort of fascinating how much mileage people can squeeze out of MS-DOS. A part of me always wonders about the "What If" world where GUIs never caught on, and how different the world might be today.
- userbinator 2y agoIt's a tiny OS that provides little more than a filesystem and program loader on top of the BIOS, and otherwise stays out of the way. Any large complex MS-DOS application itself contains functionality that would be in the OS otherwise.
- tombert 2y agoI kind of figured that, just based on the fact that there seems to be a ton of DOS-compatible clones out there, even when DOS was relevant, like Concurrent DOS. If the OS were too complex there probably wouldn’t be a lot of clones.
- ladyanita22 2y agoYeah. Basically, for most intents and purposes, any high-end MSDOS application is basically running bare-metal, as if no OS was installed in the system at all. As close to the embedded world as possible. I don't understand why is there so little documentation about MSDOS as a real-time operating system. I'd bet it would work beautifully for any piece of software that was developed with such use-case in mind.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoYou’d have to write your own scheduler.
- mr_toad 2y agoWith no memory protection a wayward process could easily overwrite the schedulers data structures, and probably hang the system.
- pankajdoharey 2y agoWhat realmode in DOS offered was a boon for beginner programmers, i wonder has anyone done something similar in linux framebuffer without using X server. Perhaps a game in /dev/fb0 ?
- endgame 2y agoI think the search term you want is "svgalib" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVGALib https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVGALib It looks like at least some versions of Allegro and SDL supported it as a backend.
- matttproud 2y agoOne of the original Quake I implementations — as in authored by Carmack and Taylor themselves — used SVGAlib as a backend. I remember this because of having to configure my mouse to co-exist with GPM in some file in /etc for svgalib. Nice breadcrumb: https://web.archive.org/web/19991008210746/http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/howto/Quake-HOWTO-2.html#ss2.6 https://web.archive.org/web/19991008210746/http://webpages.m...
- pankajdoharey 2y agoAllegro thats a name i have not heard since 2002 i think. Kids these days would know SDL, DirectX , LOVR or Raylib.
- pajko 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectFB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectFB
- pankajdoharey 2y agoHow do these Nintendo handhelds work? i thought they use some kind of framebuffer for such great performance for the substandard quality hardware they use. Every generation of Nintendo chip is way behind Apple and Android systems yet they achieve remarkable performance.
- lightedman 2y agoThis wants something like a fast P3 or P4 to get any usable speed, sadly. Good luck getting this operating on a Cyrix.
- ReptileMan 2y agoIndiana jones theme playing
- turol 2y agoTrue. I've tried it on a Pentium 166/MMX with a Voodoo 2 and it runs about 15 fps.
- lightedman 2y agoI think that this might be due to the specific version of VESA stuff it ships with causing the problems.
- turol 2y agoThe Voodoo 2 completely takes over display output. VESA stuff shouldn't have any effect in this case.
- lightedman 2y agoThe Voodoo2 can not completely take over display output - that's why it needed a 2D card for passthrough until the Voodoo Banshee.
- scruffyherder 2y agowhen testing native builds I was using a Xeon E5v2. why bother with anything slow as a p3?
- andai 2y agoMy public library has this website blacklisted due to "proxy avoidance". (I can't find anything about proxies on the site, so that's odd.) I was able to load it on my phone though, and it looks bloody cool.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- AaronMT 2y agoAside, this website is so nostalgic. Perfectly captures the 90s.
- bluedino 2y agoThe old Carmack .plan We are not going to do another dos game. No amount of flaming hate mail is going to change my mind on this (PLEASE don't!). The advantages of good TCP/IP support, dynamic linking, powerfull virtual memory, device drivers, etc, are just too much to overcome. Yes, all of those can be provided under dos in various ways, but it just isn't worth it. https://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html https://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]