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That reminded me: Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation s
by vzaliva 2y ago
That reminded me:
Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.)
My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my compilation was taking so long without producing any results. That motivated me to improve my "boss key" app - I ended up adding line numbers that incremented on the screen, making it look like the fake compilation was actually progressing.
- incanus77 2y agoI recall playing an 80s-ish submarine (WW2?) game with a "spreadsheet mode".
- netsharc 2y agoLots of old games have this, I played many MicroProse flight simulators and they all had it.
- stevekemp 2y agoThese days even Tinder (website version) has a boss-key. But yeah I remember a lot of games had boss-keys that would let you pretend to be working.
- relwin 2y agoThat's probably Gato (1984): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gato_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gato_(video_game)
- nwellnhof 2y agoBetter known as "boss key": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key
- csprimer-in 2y ago[dead]
- kazinator 2y agoSo, yeah, yes he was.
- hakaneskici 2y agoCreative use case for a TSR :) The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :) When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.
- wruza 2y agoSome mouse drivers used an upper ascii range (less used) and rendered 4 “arrow” cursor parts into it over 4 chars over which the cursor ought to be. And then replaced those 4 chars on screen temporarily. As a result you had a fully pixel-perfect cursor in text mode.
- hakaneskici 2y agoThat's clever!
- kdmtctl 2y agoNorton Utils had it. Mind blowing for its time.
- fragmede 2y agowhy was it pointless? it worked in the text guis of the time
- hakaneskici 2y agoYou're right, TUIs had mouse support. This is a TSR, and exits to shell after running, so there's a mouse cursor visible without any app running. Like, there's nothing to "click" :)
- fasteo 2y agoAnother use of TSR ! I implemented a password protected access to A: