This is by no means a promise or commitment, nor is it something that matters to anyone. So feel free to scroll along or go elswhere 😉
This is a screenshot of FM, the FrontDoor message editor, running as a native 64-bit Linux application under Ubuntu 24.04.LTS.
There are many hurdles to clear, and many issues to solve, before it turns into something useful. But it’s a pretty good start.
Omg! That’s just fantastic! Can’t wait to see what comes of it, since I can’t get FD to work in DOSBox without lots of packet errors/retries and ultimately fails when trying to connect and send files.
I was just looking in my old diskette container and I found my FrontDoor 2.2ml diskette. I had forgotten we actually got a diskette for it. And yes, just a few weeks ago I got it up and running again. It immediately tried to call out to deliver/pickup mail from 1995. It’s very well behaved under OS/2 although it revealed a bug in OS/2’s VX00 (SIO2K) driver. Unlike most software FrontDoor doesn’t just rely on the fossil signature to determine if one is installed, it does the full call to get the version. VX00 from SIO2K sends back one hell of a corrupted structure. SIO 1.60f doesn’t have this issue. The SIO2K version works fine; issue seems to be limited to just that function. I wrote a TSR wrapper that hooks into the interrupt and responds instead of VX00 to give FrontDoot that v5 it’s looking for. Thanks for all the work you put into FrotnDoot. It still feels slick 30+ years later.
Thank you for your kind words Edmond! There’s a “reboot”-version of sorts here: https://defsol.com/f_fd
At some point, another platform may be supported 😉