📅 2025-05-08
· ✍️ Bas v.d. Wiel
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🏷
design
One of the most complicated aspects of DOS gaming used to be the support for a
whole forest of different audio hardware. Initially the PC came with nothing
beyond a simple speaker that was intended to produce simple square wave bleeps
as a means of auditory feedback, like system alerts. As computers found their
way into markets IBM had not envisioned, like gaming and music, lots of add-ons
appeared that would readily slot into the supplied ISA-slots of the PC. DOSContainer
intends to support the most relevant such hardware, primarily for gaming. If you
think something important is missing, drop me a note!
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📅 2025-05-07
· ✍️ Bas v.d. Wiel
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🏷
announcement
So what is DOSContainer? It’s a software project aimed at those who build and
maintain collections of games and applications for the DOS platform. DOS, an
abbreviation for Disk Operating System, is a class of operating systems that
were popular in the 1980’s and 1990’s for use on IBM-PC and compatible hardware
that would go on to grow into the Windows platform we have today. DOS was quite
a basic operating system that was command-line driven. The fact that there were
dozens of versions from different vendors paired with wildly different hardware
platforms didn’t make things easier on the systems’ owners. DOSContainer aims to
take the complexity out of the maintenance of large libraries of DOS software.
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📅 2025-05-06
· ✍️ Bas v.d. Wiel
DOSContainer is still progressing, even though I skimped on the updates. Let’s rectify
that. There’s a lot that happened over the past months, but unfortunately there still isn’t
a stable release to be made. The main effort went into reimagining the configuration file
format and structure behind it, and I’m hoping this’ll be the last such major overhaul
because it’s no fun writing code that only does boring stuff like config file parsing. I
really want to get into the nitty gritty bits of ancient DOS and making sure that gets
reproduced as faithfully as possible. Let’s go over the changes though.
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DOSContainer