From the mind that brought you “let’s try to write games using just pure C” I have a new idea for making my life difficult.
Let’s write DOS software using period correct tools…
This is just me organising a thought, I’ve not started yet. Further research will be needed – or in other words, if I still think this is a cool idea in a week or so and haven’t forgotten about it, I might try some things out.
So the general idea is to make DOS games or whatever using period correct tools, inside DOS itself. My only concession to the modern world will be running everything inside an emulator. I’ll probably use 86Box so I can emulate the entire machine and not just a DOS environment.
Something like a 486 DX2/66 with 4 meg of RAM and a regular VGA card seems like a decent base machine. If it was good enough for Doom, it’ll be good enough for whatever I try to make.
I then plan on having a development machine that’s more powerful – a Pentium or something with 8 meg of RAM. Having two machines means that if I crash the target machine with my wonky code, I won’t have to boot the editor back up again.
The Internet is full of DOS graphics programming documentation, digging through it sounds like a fun research task. As does finding all the classic programming books and trying out some classic programming techniques.
It could also be quite interesting finding some of the demoscene techniques and trying to make those work. I spent far too long watching demos on my DOS PCs and wondering how they made all the effects work.
I was thinking I can probably find a copy of Turbo C and Turbo Assembler to use rather than some hacked together bunch of tools. I have a worrying feeling I’ll have to dust off my rusty K&R C knowledge or even learn whatever C-like “standard” the compiler I end up choosing uses. And the always confusing bit of figuring out how to write assembly that cooperates with C.
Not that I know how to write x86 assembly though.
Oh and for those paying attention, this won’t replace my Agon Light programming. It’ll just give me an alternative thing to do, so I don’t get burnt out and bored doing just one project all the time.
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