This game was to resurrect MS-DOS! Fixed typos. - mickey96

Edit: And it was too hard to program in Windows. I only hope you're
willing to help. SHAW3D is in danger of being cancelled by me because
of lack of support.

LennyLen said:
"What does "The executable should be for MSDOS or any other DOS operating systems. The executable should be up to 768KB. We could try UPX or DJP." have to do with anything? The code you gave in your source won't compile under DJGPP either."

What I meant there was:

1. The game was originally intended to run under DOS.
2. The .EXE size should be small. Like you could use
UPX or something.

-Great! I'll port it once the DOS version of the game is released and it is stable.

This thread is closed. From now on, there will be a new thread at the depot.

You still don't get it don't you?

This game was to RESURRECT MS-DOS. Really, really! DosBox can be used as a alterative, if you don't know.

Oh and in case you didn't know, back in 2007 and (previous years) I only knew how to program in DOS.

This project is nearing death.

I know. I just want to revive DOS and perhaps try to motivate people to work on them no matter what if there are supported or not.

BTW: Miliclan team is gone. So you can join the project without it. And another thing I think you should go here: http://www.classicdosgames.com/misc/modern.html

I will port the code to Windows, but only if it's not too hard.
Updated the changelog.

It is true I loved DOS. That's why I target it at. BTW: Why would you criticise a old favorite OS? And oh yeah, I'm not joking about resurrection the history of DOS games.

Here are the reasons I have for targeting DOS:
- It's my favorite OS
- Its API is easier to program in Windows than in DOS
- Stabler, less warnings, less bugs.
- During the old days people work on DOS extenders such as DOS4GW, PMODE/W...
- I've never seen a program to be most stablest on the MS-Windows application.
- Less prone to viruses but false alarms may appear
- There are some other DOS-distributers that better support like FreeDOS, DR-DOS
than Microsoft
- Tricks can be used. Like extenders go into protected mode which is 32-bit.

Actually I probably would futz around a bit with DOS myself now and then, except for the biggest sticking point I can see: I HAVE NO WAY TO PLAY SOUND IN DOS!!! The previous computer did have some alleged DOS sound drivers on the 'net, but when run they would urge me to "select Legary (sic) mode in BIOS setup" and there was no such mode in CMOS setup or any mention of it in the BIOS strings. I suppose if I wanted to tear my hair out trying to figure out how ALSA did it, I could be a bald programmer with one specific sound driver.

That 1280 x 1024 32 bit VESA mode sure was nice to look at, but with a non-hardware accelerated 15 FPS, it wasn't particularly equal to the task of modern games either.

Even if Duke Nukem Forever came out as a freeware DOS release, I wouldn't be likely to install DOS. DOS is dead, it's gone, stop trying to revive it.

...

Not it's not.

So you need people to do everything for you?

From your posts the impression I have of you is of someone who is lazy and ignorant. You've got a game idea that you think is brilliant, but you want other people to do a majority of the work for you.

I wouldn't work on this project if you paid me. You'll probably find that most of the others here feel the same way.

He probably found some old Andre LaMothe books in a used bookstore or some such, and it was using DOS. Maybe found some ancient Win 3.1 16 bit program to show a window displaying "Hello World" with only 5 pages of setup code too. It'd be easy to think DOS is much easier under those circumstances.

I really think you picked the right name for this, it's definitely "Shawn's Nightmare"

Now seriously, have you even taught of following peoples advices? I mean, you are the one seeking help, not them

Ahh, DOS. Combining the no security, no high-level API, straight-to-the-metal attitude that people needed to achieve decent performance on z80 and 6502-based computers with the most diverse hardware platform available.

Please don't insult me.
I get what you're saying, I just care to disagree.

I do know. I just don't see why anyone would resurrect an OS from more than two decades ago; an OS that was pretty primitive even considering the standards of its time.

In that case, learn some proper programming before opening your mouth this wide.

Good. It needs to die. And a few more projects with it. Maybe you'll learn some modesty.

It is barely an OS, just a very very thin layer above the hardware and the BIOS. The only reason I can think of for liking it would be that anything else is too complicated for you to work with. Seeing that virtually every single programmer on earth who has advanced beyond simple snake clones can easily cope with more modern OSes, this probably means you're not ready for anything remotely like what you are planning.

It doesn't really HAVE an API - all it has is a bunch of interrupts, DMAs, I/O addresses and memory-mapped I/O. You call that easier?

Which is completely pointless, since DOS consists of so little code. Considering the massive amount of code that OSes like Linux, BSD, or Windows consist of, their bug-to-code ratio is probably the same or better.

As if that were comfortable. Those were very very ugly hacks to run 32 bit applications on an OS that was originally conceived for a mixed 8bit/16bit platform. You may have noticed that today's hardware has reached 64 bits; I have yet to see a 64 bit extender for DOS.

Apart from the horrible grammar you have there: How stable a program runs depends on the program, not the platform. I've seen some horribly unstable programs in DOS, just like on any other OS. The difference, however, is that with Windows, you can at least kill the offending process and carry on, whereas in DOS, you'll have to reboot.

Don't make me laugh.
The only reason you don't have virus problems in DOS is because nobody uses it, especially when connected to the internet.

Right. Tricks. Why use tricks to achieve a hackish, bug-ridden way of doing something that remotely resembles the features modern OSes offer out-of-the-box?

Just a few things: Have you tried any of the following in DOS?
- Write a program that connects to the internet?
- Run two programs at the same time, switching between them?
- Use a USB-based audio device?
- Use a USB-based printer?
- Use, well, ANYTHING USB-based?
- Set up a dual-screen system?
- Share files over a network of computers running (your choice) Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows XP or Vista? Or even other computers running DOS?
- Connect to a WLAN?
- Output hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on a card that is newer than the Voodoo2?
- Prevent users from accessing certain files?
- Run any commercial application written in the last 10 years?
And so on, and so on.

The fact that nobody uses DOS anymore can mean one of two things:
- You are right, and everyone else is retarded for not seeing the greatness of DOS
- You are wrong, and everyone else has a good reason to think other OSes are better than DOS.

Anyway, enough bashing. Here's what I think you should do.
1. Realize that your ideas may be brilliant, but they won't mean anything unless YOU turn them into games. Having brilliant ideas isn't hard, we all have come up with dozens of earth-shattering, mind-blowing games in our heads. Turning them into actual working games is what it's about. Programming is hard work, and it's difficult. People go to universities to learn it, many of them have years of programming experience before even starting their curriculum, and after they graduate, and only a few of them turn out to become great programmers. Also, programming work is about 60% thinking, 35% grinding, and 5% glory (plus another 200% debugging).
2. If writing C++ applications for windows is too hard for you, then you may consider using a different technology. C++ is a widespread language that gives you a lot of control, but it may not be the best choice for a beginner. Python is supposed to be easy to learn; Java, combined with a good IDE, has a somewhat steep learning curve, but I still consider it easier than C++, plus the output is cross-platform; some people like actionscript (for browser games and such); in case you're OK with using Microsoft tools, their Visual Studio versions are pretty good (C# is a really good programming language, powerful yet easier to learn than C++, and the .NET class library has almost everything you could wish for), and there are lots of other programming languages and programming environments for you to experiment with. Experiment with some of them, until you find one that you feel comfortable with.
3. Make some simple games. A good goal is to write a simple yet complete game in 40 hours (one work week). Don't try to write your dream game in the first go; the dream game is something you write after you have been programming smaller games for years, after you have made all the mistakes and learned from them, and after you have accumulated the experience to keep yourself organized and motivated through a large project.
4. Ditch DOS. It will only be in your way. The sooner you start using modern tools, the sooner you will learn to program in a reasonably up-to-date way.
5. To start a team project, you need at the very least:
- A working proof-of-concept to build on: that is, the core part of the game, in a form that compiles, runs, and shows the basic game mechanics. At least one playable level would be good. The code should be well-organized and thoroughly commented, and it should come with build instructions.
- A portfolio of your previous work, so that potential team members can see that you know your stuff, and that you can finish projects
- A detailed design doc, that shows what you have in mind
- A modest attitude and decent grammar. You want people to help you; threatening that your precious project might die won't help you a bit.

Because you are not being modest.
You seem to assume that your game is the most precious, most revolutionary, most mind-blowing thing ever written, and that everyone on the planet must be interested in helping and supporting it. You need to face the reality: Your project, until now, is nothing more than a few buggy intro screens that requires an operating system that died ten years ago. Nobody will care about it unless you can present something that looks at least decent, and nobody will even download it and look at it unless you make it very very easy for them. People will certainly not help you if you require them to subscribe to something just to see what it is they're supposed to help you with.

There's your problem. General rule of thumb: Never trust an OS made by Microsoft before SP2 is out. For XP, we're at SP3 already, and I would strongly suggest you install it as fast as you can. The security issue you might be having isn't windows, it's windows without the updates.

Good. I won't read them, though. I suggest you come back when you have something that works well enough, say, one playable level using programmer's art.

There's nothing wrong about supporting dos. A dos release is nice. But the others are right. Nearly nobody is using it today. And releases for other systems( windows, linux, mac ) are needed if you want people to support you. It's easy to do so with gcc and allegro. One compiler on all platforms. The windows version will be the same as the dos version. You can use autotools as build system. Its present for all platforms. And even other compilers should work with the code, as long as you are using <= C98.

If you really wan't to support today's DOS distros. Create multi platform code. People won't install DOS, for playing your game. But maybe they will see, that it's possible to do so. And give FreeDOS or something similar a chance some day.