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I do the opposite and put all games together, with DOS BAT-files to launch the games. I boot up my virtual dream DOS machine by just starting DOSBox-X and then I launch the games the way they are meant to be launched, from the DOS COMMAND.COM command-line. And as I mentioned in another comment, all of that is in one big DOS git repo.

Nice thing with DOSBox-X is there is a built-in command to set config parameters, so for games that require special settings or to slow down etc that can be set up from its launcher BAT file. All games share the same dosbox config file with default settings.

I never had any issues using WINE to install GOG games, but maybe running WINE on a Mac is not as easy now as it was back when I did that on a x86 Mac?

I always run the GOG installer in WINE and then copy the game into my git repo for DOS stuff, make sure the game works, git commit it, and then I know it will always just work and I will not have to think about that again (plus I can version manage all settings and save-games for all the games and also sync between my different machines without relying on any cloud service).

Termux and DOSBox are great for running or writing software on a phone. I almost never resort to installing or writing apps anymore as that is just more cumbersome and has APIs that keep breaking (not to mention the threats from Google about making non-Play app deployment more regulated).

Using a cache of outputs makes sense, but that is just an optimization. I don't mind if a site publishes generated texts, as long as they are clearly labelled as such and have no fake-writer human names attached.

If I want to read a LLM's "opinion" on some subject I just prompt it myself. Inserting humans as intermediaries that pretend they wrote something is dishonest at best. Future generations will hopefully see through that and stop sign generated texts with fake human names.

Seems to render perfectly with NoScript blocking all scripts, even with images showing.

Browsing that wiki in the past and two pages that resonated with me were on the topic of stable APIs (that is a topic in need of much more discussion overall). There are some good thoughts there.

https://permacomputing.net/software_rot/

https://permacomputing.net/bedrock_platform/

I only use BASIC with line numbers, mostly GW-BASIC and pcbasic. Without numbers it just feels like Lua or python or any other scripting language, but worse? The line numbers BASICs come with their own almost-REPL (IDE?) that I find quite nice (or at least fun) to work in. Maybe mostly nostalgia, but it is the only reason for me to use BASIC at all. I have some basic-mode installed to edit BASIC code in emacs, but I only rarely edit the code outside of its natural built-in line-editor.

I have not used SuperCollider in a long time, but there used to be a nice Clojure front-end (with some Emacs integration) and it looks like that still exists even if most recent commit was 8 months ago: https://github.com/overtone/overtone

Google did for a long time have a page documenting those features.

Picked a random date from around the time I know they had that. Clicked Adcanced Search, then a link near the top of the page to Advanced Search Tips.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041017053307/http://www.google...

https://lugaru.com/ They are still around. Most recent epsilon update was last month (but no real release since 2020?).

It was my first experience with emacs as well, but in MS-DOS, ca 1990. Did not know there was a CP/M version.

For making DOS games, there is also an old port of Löve2D. Löve2D normally uses SDL, but the DOS port has its own little (mode 13h VGA) graphics/audio/input library instead. Guess with a proper SDL port it might be possible to make a more complete port of Löve 2D (and of a newer version).

https://github.com/SuperIlu/lovedos

The original upstream version is archived and has not been maintained in 9+ years. The link is to a fork that has fixes as recent as 2025.

HP: https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...

149 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31389893

DOSBox-X has DOS as one of its supported host platforms (using HX-DOS that a sibling comment mentioned):

https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x#dosbox-x-supporte...

Martin Gardner wrote an article on platonic solids in Scientific American, December 1958, and mentioned this in passing: "All five Platonic solids have been used as dice. Next to the cube the octahedron seems to have been the most popular". I have no idea what games using 8-sided dice were somewhat popular (or existed at all) in 1958 or earlier? I wondered about that since I first read that article some decade ago.

I also read a book about games from ca 1880 and it described 12-sided dice (the usual one, numbered 1-12) as if that was a thing some people used for playing games, but none of the games described in that book used them and I also have no idea about other old games using 12-sided dice.

There are games that use a d100 with 0-99 range, and games that read a d10 as 0-9 for that matter. First that comes to mind is Ambush! from 1983 that did both those things (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1608/ambush).

Love that game, but it is a bit distracting that probabilities feel one-off. Rolling 5 or lower to hit is 60%, not 50%. And when rolling 2d10 the result is 0-18, not 2-20.

Sounds like something that could have a standalone usb-driver-container or special chromium fork for the 0.00001% of users that need it instead of bloating every browser with yet another niche API and the inevitable security holes it will bring.

CLI in a product name now means LLM agent TUI specifically and not just, as I would have expected, any kind of Command Line Interface? And usually there is barely a CLI included at all and you are expected to mostly launch the full TUI with its own embedded readline-loop rather that use the CLI?

I never had a problem with that. I want a specific application to behave the same no matter where I run it. I do not want my muscle memory for how to use an application to be confused by an application not looking or behaving the way I am used to when moving to a different platform.

Of course all the applications bundled with a specific OS should be designed to work the same and work well together. It still makes sense to have guidelines and standard widgets in a system. But I prefer very much any third-party multi-platform app to be identical everywhere I run it.

Not to defend Electron. There are many native frameworks that work the way I prefer, looking the same across platforms.

I have cut and glued some of Peter Dennis' Paperboys for use in miniature wargames:

https://peterspaperboys.com/

He has some free sets to download.

Also his instruction videos taught me a lot about how to cut and glue paper miniatures. Using so much glue basically that you end up with something that feels more like plastic than paper.

Was going to post a link to the minimal template for setting up Löve2D with Fennel, that I can really recommend, and found this recent article describing that...

https://itch.io/jam/love2d-jam-2026/topic/6082771/how-to-get...

... posted in the site of the 2026 Löve2D Game Jam, that sounds like something also worth mentioning: https://itch.io/jam/love2d-jam-2026

Too late to enter. Jam was last month. But there are 47 games to check out there, plus many from previous years.

Pretty sure there is still app packaging documented somewhere. There is also, at least for Android, an official Löve2D Launcher app that can open any love-file saved to the phone and execute it. I use that all the time.

The Launcher is available also for old Android versions, which means that old obsolete Android devices (I have some tablets and phones) can be used for whatever it can be fun to still write some GUI for on some spare touchscreen device.

I run the GOG installer, then copy the game files to where the virtual C: is for my DOSBox-X (in a git-repo). Then there is usually some small BAT script to write to launch the game (what is required can be figured out from the config GOG installed). I play all the games from within DOSBox-X, so I start that up in fullscreen and then run games as if running real DOS (from COMMAND.COM prompt).

It is of course possible to launch games from outside of DOSBox the way GOG does it, using host OS (non DOS) launch scripts and config for each game, but I prefer to have more like a virtual DOS fantasy console with all games installed. It also means DOSBox is fully self-contained, with no dependencies on the host OS. Once set up there is no maintenance. There is no code rot in DOS of course, so when something has been set up it will always work.

> The game is still very popular and easy to play. But the obsoletness of DOS

Nothing obsolete about DOS when it comes to playing 2D games. Thanks to DOSBox and other emulators (FreeDOS is also not bad though) it is a fantastic OS (or virtual machine). DOS as a platform for (2D) games has never been better than it is today, on modern hardware running DOSBox.

Isn't it the opposite, that they are mechanically the same, but differs on the surface (art style and type of stories)?

It is fascinating how some similar niche genres of games have managed to mostly ignore each other, from what I have seen.

Interactive fiction has https://ifdb.org/.

Gamebooks ("CYOA" to outsiders) have https://gamebooks.org/.

I think there is some community around branching browser text stories like (mostly) Twine games that have their own database somewhere?

And then there is always some overlap and discussions around what games to allow where, with each community gatekeeping to some degree what games are allowed in their database or not.

So, for example, I never heard about VNDB and never really crossed paths with VN players online, even if I have been around communities for IF and gamebooks since last century and the similarities are obvious.

Sure, and that is basically what sane people do now, but that only works until something needs a security patch that was not provided for the old version, and changing one dependency is likely to cascade so now I am open to supply chain attacks in many dependencies again (even if briefly).

To really run code without trust would need something more like a microkernel that is the only thing in my system I have to trust, and everything running on top of that is forced to behave and isolated from everything else. Ideally a kernel so small and popular and rarely modified that it can be well tested and trusted.

This assumes that we can get a locked down, secure, stable bedrock system and sandbox that basically never changes except for tiny security updates that can be carefully inspected by many independent parties.

Which sounds great, but the way things work now tend to be the exact opposite of that, so there will be no trustable platform to run the untrusted code in. If the sandbox, or the operating system the sandbox runs in, will get breaking changes and force everyone to always be on a recent release (or worse, track main branch) then that will still be a huge supply chain risk in itself.

Firefox Reader mode. As long as that works, as was the case on this site, I don't care how bad pages people make.

5+ years ago, perhaps? Almost all the places have closed down now here in Sweden. The bubble popped and now it's a joke and you see repurposed ex-padel buildings around every city. It's been years since I heard anyone talk about it other than to comment on how weird it was that it was so popular for a short time and then disappeared.