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.
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 :)
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.
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:
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!