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Zed

MenuetOS

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Yesterday I was looking information on alternate operating systems (not Windows, OSX, Linux), and I came across this small (literally) OS system called Menuet.

Now, I'm posting this here because according to the Wikipedia page the OS ships with the shareware versions of Quake & Doom. Doing a little research on the official page, they mention Doom, Quake, and 3D Maze (I assume those are the included games) in the FAQ, but I found a thread in the forums (http://menuet.fr.yuku.com/topic/637/what-happened-to-doom#.V5aIlD-Vt1Z) which says it is apparently no longer the case, unless I'm misreading something.

Has anyone here had the chance of playing around with Menuet? I wanted to try it out, but it seems it's a little bit different from "regular" operating systems, and I'm afraid I don't even know where to start.

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I have not tried Menuet OS, but I've tested Kolibri OS (on an USB stick) which is a slightly more advanced fork thereof.

I remember running Doom Shareware on it, but IIRC there was no sound, probably a driver problem ?

It's not that difficult to use, looked like good old Windows 3.x

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Well, it looks like a lightweight RTOS, kinda like QNX (UNIX-like) and RTOS32 (like Windows without a GUI). These can be fun or a PITA to develop for, depending on what you're trying to do.

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soner du said:

I remember running Doom Shareware on it, but IIRC there was no sound, probably a driver problem ?


Yeah good luck getting drivers for random consumer hardware on these OS. TempleOS gets around this problem by only supporting PC speaker and 640x480 16-color VGA mode (software only, no GPU). I guess you probably don't want to play Doom on that though (then again, some people have made text-mode doom and quake...)

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When I test exotic OS'es ; my main concern is "Can I set up and play Doom in less than 15 minutes, with adequate sound ?"

I'm extremely happy with DPup OS (a Debian-compatible fork of Puppy Linux) on my USB key. I've got all the Doom I need (Chocolate and PrBoom+) and lots of interesting software, all that under 0.5GB, and the included drivers will run everything, including my good old scanner which refuses to collaborate with Windows 7+.

As for ultra-small OS'es (under 100MB), I like TinyCore linux but only when I'm feeling experimental. I don't think I've ever run Doom on it.

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hex11 said:

TempleOS gets around this problem by only supporting PC speaker and 640x480 16-color VGA mode (software only, no GPU). I guess you probably don't want to play Doom on that though (then again, some people have made text-mode doom and quake...)


Actually, the visuals of a dithered 16-color mode would be interesting, if you halved the horizontal resolution and outputted 2 16-color pixels at a time in order to simulate 256 colors. Vertical resolution could also be halved, and either line-double, or, if you're daring, implement a 320 x 240 pseudo-1024 color mode (with big, square, quad 16-color "pixels").

Then again a lot would depend on how efficient it would be to write individual pixels to the screen (planar vs chunky, though I think that 16-color VGA is bit-planar, so not really efficient). Some 16-color systems (like a recent TI calculator) actually have a chunky 8 bpp but only use 4, allowing the existing renderer to be used just by remapping the colormaps to the 16 available colors. Easy to do, but quite poor looking. A remapping to 256 or more dithered "colors" would be far more interesting IMO.

soner du said:

As for ultra-small OS'es (under 100MB)


Heh. And to think that Windows 95 and OS/2 as well as many full-blown commercial UNICes of the early 90s were all well below that limit, and those were fully featured multitasking OSes with functional TCP/IP stacks, lots of built-in drivers etc.

"Ultra small" at least back then would mean something that could pull something equally impressive (the very least, a GUI and some multitasking) by booting off a floppy (I guess AmigaOS/Workbench would qualify).

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I finally had the time to test it on VirtualBox.

The 32 bit version runs very slow for some reason, and anyway it seems to have been superseded by the 64 bit version, so...

64 bit boots incredibly fast and there are no visible issues. That is, until I try to start Doom or Quake. Every other game seems to work fine except for those. I have the feeling I have to do something else to get them running, but this is a strange little OS, so it may take a while.

Stay tuned.

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