Hi, On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Michael B. Brutman <mbbrut...@brutman.com> wrote: > Rugxulo, > > I could have looked up Z machine - was just pressed for time this > morning. I try not to sound willfully ignorant. ;-0
I only barely know about it myself. And BTW, Gog.com still sells "Zork Anthology" (link redacted to avoid feeling like a spammer, though admittedly it's pretty cheap and DRM free). > (Which reminds me - I wanted to do a telnet server that used the Zork > "virtual machine as a proof of concept. Now I know where to go start > when I find the time. Zork on the internet via Telnet! Eliza would be > another good one.) Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is still hosted on three telnet servers, which is good since they dropped the DOS port a few years ago. :-( But honestly it's kinda complex, a simpler roguelike (e.g. RogueClone) would be better. http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto http://rogueclone.sourceforge.net/ Note that I'm not actually telling you to host any of these, just giving you bits of trivia. But Rogue Clone is cool, and while not updated officially in a while (2004??), at least unofficially in 2008 their CVS was updated. It supports OpenWatcom (16-bit DOS) and DJGPP (32-bit DOS) targets and even MSVC Win32 also. > Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 is not freeware, but I don't think it is hard to > find. I have sold a few copies that I personally rescued from the trash > in the past year or two for a nominal amount. It runs well on a 386 or > 486 and is easy to use. Look for a copy on eBay, the Vintage Computer > Marketplace, etc. It can be used without the manuals by somebody > with a little experience. Good to know, but I'm not rushing out to get it for Christmas. ;-) > Open Watcom is open source and readily available but it is quite > overwhelming for a newbie. It took me a while to get over my fear of > it, and I had plenty of experience with TC++, gcc, IBM's xlC, etc. But > I'm happy I made the switch. The only blatant advantage there is cross-compilation (while foregoing the obvious 8086 host and target combo since it needs 386+ host). BTW, it's used by MIT/GNU Scheme for their Windows builds (surprisingly). > Jim Leonard is a Turbo Pascal bigot. I think he's stuck in the mid 80s. > :-) To be fair I think he uses it as a loader for his assembler code. Yeah, TP7 is old (though 1992, IIRC, heh, not "that" obsolete) and non-optimizing, but people love it. It works well (and fast, written in asm!). Good 16-bit compilers are harder to find these days. > Any reasonable compiler and development setup is probably best run > on a 386 or better machine, unless you are using something like > Turbo Pascal 3.0. TP 3.0 actually ran well on the oldest hardware, > and fit too. Admittedly, older machines aren't great for development due to long compile cycles. I'm no compiler expert (and never written one ... yet), but there are many factors involved that make this problematic. Well, and also modern developer apathy, why are people so RAM and optimization greedy??? (Makes me appreciate Forth and native asm all the more.) It's ridiculous how complicated and unportable most compilers are. > Most of the C compilers have just too big of a footprint. As much as I > like my PCjr and 5150/5160s, I still do most of my development work on a > Windows XP machine and I test in DOSBox or a virtual machine. I did > most of the mTCP development work on a 386-40, but my current setup > is far more productive. Admittedly, I'm not dragging out my 486 to develop on, esp. not with modern GCC (ugh). Even 2.95.3 was too slow there. My how things have changed (for the worse), GCC now wants like 300-450 MB for optimizations of a single file. Yuck. But I don't think most compilers are that bad. > (And all of this reminds me that I need to do a series of web pages or a > Wiki on getting started programming in DOS. It is a dying art ...) Be sure to link to various specs: http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/specs/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cloud Services Checklist: Pricing and Packaging Optimization This white paper is intended to serve as a reference, checklist and point of discussion for anyone considering optimizing the pricing and packaging model of a cloud services business. Read Now! http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51491232/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
