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 :)
Tag Archives: frontdoor
Progress measured in … lines of code :)
Progress is being made. The current tool of choice is Free Pascal. It is by no means a bad product. In fact, it’s a pretty damn great product. But just about every line of code needs to be tweaked, slightly modified, etc. Or so it seemed when porting the Event handling yesterday, which “only” took three hours. Part of this is obviously due to poor design on my part, but I can’t take credit for everything :)
Mike and I have been discussing issues with running the DOS version under Windows 10 Pro (64-bit), hosted by VirtualBox in a FreeDOS 1.2 virtual machine. There seems to be some sort of flow control issue disturbing the transfer of data. I’m hoping Mike finds (and solves) this problem. But, it may come to the fact that the problem is in VirtualBox after all.
While “waiting” for Mike, I’ve been porting some more code, and also began setting up FreeDOS under QEMU instead. It looks promising and feels somewhat surreal to be able to just move around virtual machines, converting them from VirtualBox under Windows 10 to QEMU under Ubuntu Linux 16 on a completely different physical machine, and it “just works”. I came across a fairly good page while configuring networking for QEMU and FreeDOS here: pclosmag.com/html/issues/201208/page11.html
I will jot down a full description of how I got it working, if I get it working. The next step is to get a “modem emulator over Internet” (i.e. a “virtual modem”) working in this context.
Visual feedback
Well, the first batch of the new licenses have been shipped via e-mail to a number of people and some feedback has been received. It feels pretty weird (in a good way) when you get stuff like this from users:
There’s something going on …
So I guess I took another three years to think about this, judging from the previous post(s) :-) But this time, I have actually managed to make some “progress”. That is, if you consider reviving a 30 year old DOS program progress.
I have been able to get FreeDOS up and running under VirtualBox. I have been able to locate my old copies of Borland Pascal, TASM, MASM, VirtualPascal, and Watcom. I was also very glad to see that there’s something called Open Watcom these days. That may prove to be very useful for this mission. The OS/2 stuff will have to wait for just a bit, I need to compile all the DOS stuff and see that the code actually still works.
The first version of FrontDoor was released in 1986 (and I managed to locate the original announcement). If I’m not mistaken, the first version of FrontDoor with mailer capabilities was out in 1987. That’s 30 years ago!