It turns out that FrontDoor 24.01 (DOS) was released on this day, the 20th of December 2024.
And thanks to all of you who helped me get there, and thanks to all of those that still consider this to be something cool to tinker with. I do too! :-)
Oh, the link you say? Here you go:
defsol.com/news/frontdoor-re-boot
Well, the re-boot in progress seems to be moving in the right direction. FM, FD, FDSETUP, and FDNC now compile properly as they should.
Furthermore, they can talk to other FroDo:s, which is good. So the “commercial version” (which will be ditched, it’ll all be the same) can run in unlicensed mode. That’s one of the goals with this re-boot.
I also discovered that DOSbox-X plays very nicely with FrontDoor, even in a virtual Windows 10 32-bit environment under VirtualBox.
For some reason, I decided to check one of my laptops that I was using at the time of the crash. It was my go-to environment for the “Free Pascal conversion” project.
It turns out that I had actually not lost everything I thought I had lost. So I have tinkered some with an alternative setup here to see if I can get things to compile and build again.
I need to get a version out that doesn’t require a license. As previously stated, there will only be “mL” releases from now on. The “license” will be “free for non-commercial use”.
So far, FM has been re-compiled at version 2024.1 and handles an “invalid license” (or missing license) as it should.
I’ll keep you posted.
Meet the people behind the BBS scene and people who made FidoNet what it once was, a long time before “the Internet” :)
(Playlist with eight parts)
(Full length movie)
You can find me at keybase.io/joho68
We’ve set-up a keybase.io team too, just drop us a note via keybase that you want to join (“frontdoor.wall”).
We might as well start at the back :) Here’s a rough HOW-TO for running FrontDoor with Windows XP; https://wiki.defsol.com/howto/windowsxp
At some point I suppose it had to be done, so I’ve now put things in motion to create the Wiki. I’m sure it’ll have to be re-arranged a million times, but it’s a start. The porting and writing of codes has priority, so don’t expect any wiki miracles anytime soon :)
nodehist.fidonet.org.ua/?name=Joaquim+Homrighausen
(Nice service by the way)
I knew one of the first mental showdowns when porting FrontDoor would always be the windows part. The visual windows that is, those silly “beautifully” framed squares displayed on the screen while just about any part of FrontDoor is running.
And now, I’m at a crossroads. There are a few ways of doing this, of course. There always are. The problem is that I’m not so keen on spending my time on something that nobody really wants or needs, when I would be much better off spending my time implementing new (to FrontDoor) protocols, methods, concepts.
I have ideas on how to do this much better than it’s currently implemented. It has to do with pipes and streams and similar concepts. But again … where is time best spent?
It’s bound to happen. When looking for your own crap, you find someone else’s crap :)
Serial device I/O is probably not at the top of the list for any product these days. But when you’ve reached a version level of 5.x, you’d expect the product to be at least “mature”. Enter VirtualBox which seems to have problems when transporting data between the Host and the Guest. I’m not sure this is entirely related to “Serial I/O” or “UART” as VirtualBox likes to call it. But since that’s where I ran into it, that’s what I’ll label it as until they tell me different :)
There are, obviously, ways to get serial I/O working in VirtualBox. But this particular scenario, where I wanted to run NetSerial on the Windows 10 Pro (64-bit) host, and access the virtual COM ports in a Guest OS, does not seem to be the optimal way of doing things in VirtualBox. (Moving NetSerial into the Windows XP Guest solves the issue, but that sort of defeats the purpose, since I want to be able to use the emulated COM ports from any Guest OS, and not just Windows-based OSs).
The VirtualBox bug filing is here:
www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17093