Notices by felsqualle (felsqualle@manitu.social)

I'm clearing out my domain portfolio, so don't miss your chance!

For sale:

https://max-design.at: Great domain if you run a design business! Also, this is the domain originally used by the developers of 1602 A.D./Anno 1602!

https://syndik.at: German word for "syndicate"!

Getting these domains sold would greatly help financing my projects, so making any offers (don't be shy!) or boosting would be FABULOUS!

Note to myself: Do not look into scanner bed while scanning boxart and the lid is open.

Since you really liked the story I posted yesterday, it is time to re-share the most ambitious blog post I've written so far.

Join me on a trip to memory lane where I try a virtual recreation of the very first PC I've ever used.

https://fabulous.systems/posts/2022/12/virtual-archaeology-recreating-my-first-computer/

#retrogaming #retrocomputing

Blood, sweat, and tears.

Yes, I’m thinking about setting up a mail server from scratch, what did you think?!

Strongest thunderstorm I’ve seen in probably a couple of years right now. Luckily, we are halfway through according to radar data.

Thunder and lightning aren’t so frightening, but the winds… well. 😁

This was minutes before it hit. Yes, I always like to get the moment where you feel the wall of cold air hitting you when you enter the supercell.

What we need: A new Creative Commons license that explicitly forbids ingestion in AI models.

Creating New Installation Media for MS-DOS 4.0

On April 25, 2024, Microsoft released the source code of MS-/PC-DOS 4.00 to the public, and the community managed to provide MS-DOS 4.01 as well.

While the original release was available as a set of six 5,25" floppy disks (and optionally three 3,5" disks for version 4.01), this open-source release does not have official installation media.

Time to fix it!

https://fabulous.systems/posts/2024/06/new-installation-media-for-ms-dos-4/

#msdos #retrocomputing

@GreenSkyOverMe warte, die schicken das Geld VORHER? Und ich hab die immer geblockt :(

If I Ever Get a Dog, I'll Name It Rover: A Brief Introduction to Microsoft Bob

Microsoft Bob has a reputation for being one of the worst products #microsoft ever released.

I wondered how bad it truly is - and there is only one way to find out.

https://fabulous.systems/posts/2024/06/if-i-ever-get-a-dog-ill-name-it-rover-ms-bob-retrospective/

#retrocomputing #windows #msdos

Oh, it also has a tutorial how to handle cats.

Bonus points for that.

Today is the day I learned that Microsoft Bob includes a tutorial on how to buy a house.

@thanius Since it is an NTSC DVD, my expectation was to see the video file itself matching the proper NTSC frame rate. Examining the VOB with Hybrid reveals that the video itself is stored at 29.97 FPS.

@thanius That's what I'm going to check next - maybe MakeMKV doesn't do a "raw" copy...

@thanius That's interesting, a raw copy of the VOBs behaves exactly the same.

So it is most likely a "soft-telecine" and Handbrake parses the appropriate flags?

Alright, I am super-duper confused. I have an NTSC DVD ripped. I see the 3:2 pull-down pattern. And Handbrake just reports 23.9x FPS after the initial dump with MakeMKV.

This is weird. I’d expect to have 29.97 FPS there, unless Handbrake already reads the proper flags from the MKV.

Well, let’s wait for the first detelecine pass to finish.

I was looking for a way to apply aspect ratio correction to screenshots from MS-DOS windows taken by 86Box.

The screenshorts are saved "raw", so they don't include aspect ratio correction.

ImageMagick handles this very well:

convert original-file.png -resize 720x540\! scaled.png

@shanselman thank you, that’s great to hear!

@shanselman What both you and @starfrost did here is simply amazing, a great piece of history. I was always wondering how different the IBM PC-DOS and MS-DOS builds were - well, now I can see that the differences are really minor thanks to the "IBMCOPYRIGHT" defines. Let's see how long it takes to compile on period-correct emulated hardware.

Well... I wanted to look into compiling MS-DOS 4.0 after Microsoft released the sources today.

Looks like it won't compile from scratch because the conversion to git killed some characters and inlined byte-sequences :(

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/SELECT/USA.INF

I started to sort my pile of shame. It is now a three-layered semi-sorted cupbord of hoarding!