Some people love computers and making them do weird stuff, older computers make certain tasks feel more manageable.
The former is mesmerizing, intriguing, inviting and inspiring. The later? you can't wait to put the lid back on...
That's why you don't let people who have never touched a computer write tech laws. You get results like this.
(FWIW: I suspect there are more than a few old industrial control systems and such out there that are still running DOS, just because of an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude)
But I do wonder about the practicality. This would, I presume (never done DOS development, never touched a memory extender) only run on 386+ CPUs, and maybe more importantly, probably require a newer CPU than that to run anything non-trivial at acceptable performance. So I wonder how many "real DOS machines" this can practically target.
Still, it is massively cool.
Translation: "Stop liking things I don't like!"
https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...
The problem is that people don't use onboard audio anymore (because its incredibly and audibly noisy). They use USB or Bluetooth.
Bluetooth absolutely isn't standardized and is a mess, and USB miiiiiiight be okay if you limit to a subset of EHCI and USB Audio Class 1.0 devices.
At this point, its easier to just use Linux and run your game as pid 1.
At least on the Amiga 500 you would not go through the trouble to start Workbench, only to load the game, unless you were a lucky owner of an external hard drive.
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x#dosbox-x-supporte...
oh wait...
Anything up to the complexity of mid-90s AAA titles can run practically anywhere with a keyboard and mouse.
Games like Tomb Raider, Command & Conquer, Quake, etc. This is pretty compelling if you want a "it just works" platform.
Having SDL now makes that even easier.
I'm very surprised to see SDL3 re-gain DOS support, since they've aggressively dropped support for almost every port/OS they had in the SDL 1.2 days.
From the wikipedia entry [1] for OHRRPGCE
> It runs at an 8-bit color depth, by default creates games that run at a 320 × 200 resolution.
It's funny but I bet anyone else in here who also grew up with the QBASIC interpreter as a kid instantly thinks SCREEN 13 when they read something like this.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Hamster_Republic_Role...
What SDL would you compile for? Win32 with exclusive fullscreen? With a VESA resolution like 640x480?
Usually upstream projects would reject such PRs under the reason they just increase maintenance cost with little to no benefit to the userbase.
Different projects have different policies, and I don't know what SDLs is.
But they already have a lot of ports, so I trust they know what they're getting themselves into.
I don't have any real clue how many openbsd luna 88k users there are in the wild, it was an obscure machine released, I think, only in japan, so most users, if they exist, are probably japanese, that is, out of my normal view scope. So as far as I can tell there is one user, the porter. But every release a couple weeks after the standard release date he comes out of the woods and drops the luna88k files and packages. I suspect it takes that long to compile on an actual luna88k. But that is all it takes and luna88k is an official hardware platform of openbsd.
I don't have nor do I really want a luna88k but that guy is sort of my hero for keeping it going like this.
You might be thinking of Allegro?
Joystick calibration: what a blast from the past! Blast from the past I encountered recently...
Joysticks had to be "calibrated" and it was something you had to do for each game that supported joysticks. These would give back analog values and they'd depend on the phases of the moon or the room temperature or both. I'm not making this up: this was a serious pain point both for players and coders.
FWIW in that DOS game of mine from 1991 or so for which I still had the .ASM source code files (about 30 000 lines of assembly code, 15 000 of which were auto-generated code to do very fast sprites drawing in the VGA 320x200 "tweaked" mode) and which I managed, at long last, to get to compile again a few days ago thanks to UASM (and quite some LLM help), I found lines like these:
ul_corner_ch:
db 63,"PUT YOUR JOYSTICK IN THE UPPER LEFT CORNER AND PRESS A BUTTON "
lr_corner_ch:
db 63,"PUT YOUR JOYSTICK IN THE LOWER RIGHT CORNER AND PRESS A BUTTON "
p1_choose:
dw 1 ;1 keyboard 2 joystick
p2_choose:
dw 0 ;0 none 1 keyboard 2 joystick
So you can understand that "auto-calibration" as in TFA is quite a selling point!
https://github.com/SuperIlu/lovedos
The original upstream version is archived and has not been maintained in 9+ years. The link is to a fork that has fixes as recent as 2025.
I want to commend Dj Delorie for doing a great job. As a poor child at that time having access to a proper compiler which could ran on my old PC which only ran DOS, was awesome and amazing.