DOS computer

[noshutdown]

LigH said:

That was quite the smartest move of Bill Gates at all: To have it bundled with IBM PCs. May have been a risk, its public acceptance was hard to predict; PCs becoming a best seller was the big luck of Microsoft.

when ibm first asked gates about os, he actually recommended CP/M to ibm because he didn't foresee the importance of holding the os market at that moment. however the talk between kidall and ibm didn't come to agreements, and ibm couldn't wait any longer so they went back to gates demanding an os, thats how gates grabbed the oppotunity.

[terminus12]

I normally play vanilla doom on my old DOS computer and I think its the best doom experience once you get it all set up. The smoothness of vanilla doom is unmatched. Also it's really not that big of a pain to set up I don't think.

[Jon]

Maes said:

Why? Cyrix and AMD usually outperformed Intel at frequency (or price ;-) parity. And a 486 was always at least twice as fast as a 386 at frequency parity.

Coincidentally, this vid compares just two such systems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fcPxAO1FeU

I recall Cyrix chips were the Lada of the CPU world in the Pentium/Pentium 2 era. Were they really worth looking at in the pre-Pentium era?

[Maes]

Jon said:

I recall Cyrix chips were the Lada of the CPU world in the Pentium/Pentium 2 era. Were they really worth looking at in the pre-Pentium era?

Lada? Nah. They were more like the Seat/Skoda to Intel's Audi/Volkswagen ;-) Their selling point was they they offered "the same and often better performance as Intel" but at a smaller price. Now, the truth is that for fixed point applications and most DOS games, that was often true. Cyrix were also far more generous with the onboard cache (64 KB of unified L1 cache? Wow! That's a luxury even today!), however Intel's chips were more balanced, superior in floating-point performance, and stabler, and of course they lead development with features such as MMX.

Now, some games notoriously had issues installing on anything but an Intel CPU, especially under DOS: the CPU detection code would not detect the Cyrix/AMD CPUs as Pentium compatibles (or did but refused installing anyway just to make them look bad...)

The workaround was of course to install the game on a "genuine Intel" system, and then copy the installed files to the "dirty" Cyrix/AMD system (or bypass the installer entirely, if the game allowed it).

[LogicDeLuxe]

I mostly bought AMD CPUs, except for Pentium 90 and Pentium 200mmx, because those early Pentium CPUs had a much lower power consumption than AMD's equivalents. I remember reading that the Cyrix 5x86 was especially bad at that as it produced significantly more heat than the competitors.

I don't remember any problems installing DOS games on my AMD 486 DX back then. The only Pentium optimized game (at least the only one advertized as such) I tried was "Magic Carpet", though. It was playable with average framerate in 320x200. And it did run well in 640x480 on a Pentium 200mmx. It did run too fast on an AMD K6 or faster CPU. Not very well coded, I guess. Much like the very early PC games relying on XT speed.

[LigH]

Some "VGA demos" were so extremely optimized, including self-modifying code, that they failed due to instruction cache and pipelines when running on a Pentium, supported 486 at most. Some "DOS Emulators" also had issues with them. I believe the "Second Reality" by Future Crew was one of these picky demos. (Gosh, I love its soundtrack; but there is no good remake of its LQ samples, the official remake is worse in many details.)

And then there are C=64 emulators, some simple, some elaborate; CCS64 and Vice are among the few which ran the "Second Reality" remake by Smash Designs. They simulated even the BIOS screens during a PC boot and matched the sound card selection in the demo to support the SID! :D

Just recently I found a graphic demo which is so extremely optimized for real hardware CGA in original IBM PCs that it "won't run on any CGA emulation": 8088 MPH — as old as skool can be ... retro for the heck of it.

[gamegalaxy]

I used to play it on an IBM 386 - later on Packard Bell 90mhz computer - And then I moved on to DOOM 95 because I could render with higher resolution - and used doom 95 ALL the way until 2015 until I switched to zandronum

[riki2321]

Sorry for the bump.

Go back to your boring programs

Well, this sounds nerdy. I own a dos, What's so cool about it?

[RestlessRodent]

riki2321 said:

Sorry for the bump.
Well, this sounds nerdy. I own a dos, What's so cool about it?

If you are referring to MS-DOS, you do not own it you are licensed it.

[cybdmn]

GhostlyDeath said:

If you are referring to MS-DOS, you do not own it you are licensed it.

Depends on where you live. In germany yyou own your copy of every software you bought.

The Bundesgerichtshof made that clear finally in 2000, in an case where Microsoft tried so stop reselling OEM licences.

Link (massive amount of german stuff)

[Maes]

gamegalaxy said:

and used doom 95 ALL the way until 2015 until I switched to zandronum

Now that's hardcore.

[RestlessRodent]

cybdmn said:

Depends on where you live. In germany yyou own your copy of every software you bought.

The Bundesgerichtshof made that clear finally in 2000, in an case where Microsoft tried so stop reselling OEM licences.

Link (massive amount of german stuff)

So does this mean that if I were in Germany, I could say... take any software, modify it a bit and then resell/redistribute it as my own software and strip all the existing copyrights out of it because I own my copy of it and get away with it because it is legal under German law?

[GreyGhost]

cybdmn said:

The Bundesgerichtshof made that clear finally in 2000, in an case where Microsoft tried so stop reselling OEM licences.

Microsoft have since got around that with Online Authentication & Activation. So while you own the disk, they reserve the right to cancel your licence key, which they do now and then when cheap "emerging markets" releases of their software start turning up where they shouldn't. I was once caught out that way with an otherwise legal copy of XP Pro I'd purchased on eBay from a local seller.

[cybdmn]

GhostlyDeath said:

So does this mean that if I were in Germany, I could say... take any software, modify it a bit and then resell/redistribute it as my own software and strip all the existing copyrights out of it because I own my copy of it and get away with it because it is legal under German law?

No, of course not. That means you own your copy of the software. You are allowed to use it as long as you want, and you are allowed to sell your copy to someone else.

GreyGhost said:

Microsoft have since got around that with Online Authentication & Activation. So while you own the disk, they reserve the right to cancel your licence key, which they do now and then when cheap "emerging markets" releases of their software start turning up where they shouldn't. I was once caught out that way with an otherwise legal copy of XP Pro I'd purchased on eBay from a local seller.

I know. I had such a case, after changing some hardware in my computer, microsoft denied the activation for my XP. While speaking with the phone support of microsoft, they told me, i have to talk with the seller. I answered her, that i won't do that, and cracking my windows instead of begging for a new license.

In germany you are allowed to take every action, to get your bought software running, so cracking is legal, as long as you do that just for the software you bought.

[chungy]

cybdmn said:

In germany you are allowed to take every action, to get your bought software running, so cracking is legal, as long as you do that just for the software you bought.

There is precedence for this in the United States as well, although if MS ever brought action upon you, you better have proof that you actually bought a copy of Windows.

[Voros]

I for one never had a MS-DOS computer(I was born in 2000!). Played my first Doom on dosbox.

[LigH]

Getting even nerdier...

The GDR (eastern Germany under russian administration between 1949 and 1989) used an own variant of CP/M as OS for their education computers (BiC = Bildungs-Computer) in advantaged schools and called it SCP; I doubt they made that one from scratch. It supported 5.25" floppies with up to 624 KB (DS HD format) and graphics close to CGA or low-res EGA. We used it to run Turbo Pascal 3 with WordStar cursor movement (Ctrl+ESDX).

Well, it didn't take long until CP/A spread in the class, with up to 780 KB formats and a more powerful CLI named "power" (similar to 4DOS).

That's even more remarkable as it was quite hard to obtain any floppies, that usually required access to an "Intershop" where you could buy goods from the capitalistic market for token money based on Mark of the FRG as convertible currency (Mark of the GDR was a token currency itself).

More common were homecomputers of the KC 8x series with cassette loader. The most common game there was an ASCII+block art text adventure called "Tatum" or similar where you had to explore a building with lots of fatal traps. When you died ... load again from cassette ... and get a fresh coffee in the meantime ...

[Maes]

LigH said:

When you died ... load again from cassette ... and get a fresh coffee in the meantime ...

Apparently, Komrade Koderz refused to use the capitalist construct of a loop assigned to a "restart" key, since everything was already loaded in-memory?

"The restart key and reusable memory structures are an instrument of oppression against the People!"

[Quasar]

Maes said:

Apparently, Komrade Koderz refused to use the capitalist construct of a loop assigned to a "restart" key, since everything was already loaded in-memory?

"The restart key and reusable memory structures are an instrument of oppression against the People!"

East German propaganda poster:

    _______________
   |               |
   |   while(1)    |
   |   {           |
   |      ...      |
   |   }           |
   |               |
   |   NEIN!!!!    |
   |               |
   -----------------