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Lots of talk of DOS, but both games that are described (Panzer General II and Imperialism II) were only released for Windows?

If the games had been for DOS, it would probably have made more sense to just run the original binaries in DOSBox-X or some other emulator. I think there is already some debug API that can be enabled. Or adding MCP or something similar to DOSBox(-X) would probably be a lot less work than to reimplement the games.

Do those services have many more posts than what can be downloaded from archive.org and searched locally?

Porting to DOS sounds like a great plan for retro games, to only have to do the port once and know there are stable emulators to run it in, as opposed to porting to some modern OS and then have to port the game again and again to keep up with API changes.

If you use Kagi Assistant, you can pick one of your lenses (i.e. lists of domains to restrict searches to) in chats. Not sure if their API has that as well or some other way to restrict searches. Also not sure if the Assistant (or API) respects blocked domains when searching.

But what would flat-earthers consider the longest possible paths to be? Not the ones shown in the article, presumably?

I think it is the exact opposite. Keep remakes running in DOS instead, and they will run everywhere that DOSBox runs, which is pretty much everywhere, and also everywhere that you can boot up FreeDOS (including in QEMU), plus in other emulators, almost guaranteeing that the executable will keep working somewhere for a very, very long time. Versus a port to some modern system that will then require constant updates and ports forever to keep it running, and as soon as no one is around to maintain the project it will be a pain to get it to run anywhere.

It is always good to see open source reimplementations of old games, but sad to see almost none of them keep MS-DOS support. It's easily the most portable and future-safe of all virtual machines you can run games in.

Almost 30 years ago when I wanted to backup my synth, its complete MIDI spec was in the printed user manual. Saving all sysex was just a matter of writing a short C program to send a few bytes to the ALSA MIDI device and then read the response back and save to disk.

No longer own that synth, but I still have my backups. No reason to believe the raw files would not still work. No dependency on any special software.

PC was a clear winner for RPGs, adventure games, and wargames/strategy, even in the early days of PC/XT. Anything that could make use of more RAM and disk, while also not demanding too much of graphics or audio, was great on PC.

Even as someone that grew up with GW-BASIC and had moved on to Turbo Pascal by the time qbasic came out, I must say you have a point. I think however that the more traditional BASIC "IDE" with line numbers etc, used in GW-BASIC, has its charm and is still fun to play with. It's quite unlike any modern IDE, but there is some logic to it and with some practice it isn't bad for what it needed to do.

There is this fork that is easy to build:

https://codeberg.org/tkchia/GW-BASIC

There are some binary releases there from 2022, but I did not try those. The binary I built from source has worked very well.

Never tried to build the DOS source, but I really enjoyed playing with the toolchain they included with the MS-DOS 4 source code release. It's pretty much a complete, MIT-licensed (but binary only) Microsoft toolchain (msc, masm, make, link, etc) from ~1988. For some of my recent hobby projects I put that toolchain in my git repos, to have everything self-contained, with DOSBox as a virtual machine both for building and running, and no other dependencies. So I am happy Microsoft released the DOS code, even if I did not look much at the code itself.

Sounds like pcbasic, that implements GW-BASIC in python, both with a SDL GUI and a TUI, and it contains a partial PC emulator to make it possible to peek and poke some addresses and such. Impressive project, well documented and seems stable and nothing obvious is missing.

https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/download.html

I wonder if the title was meant to say Sweden, as the text mentions Sweden and Belgium?

The map at the bottom correctly excludes Switzerland. It does however include Norway and Iceland.

I wonder how many libraries correctly handles the date 1712-02-30 in the Swedish calendar (according to Wikipedia the only official 30th of February in history)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Feb...

Tried using ncal like in the examples in that blog post, but it did not work correctly using either Julian or Gregorian. Of course the Swedish calendar from 1700-1712 was neither, but somewhere in-between, because of the (failed) attempt to gradually move from one to the other.

At first Windows 95 was not great for games, so at least through 1996-97 many games were still released for MS-DOS and often only for MS-DOS, or only had Windows ports later.

Looking back from now, I wish that era could have continued much longer, as running MS-DOS games in emulators is so much easier and more stable than to run old Windows games.

Krita, not GIMP, has been the FOSS flagship 2D bitmap editor for many years, the way Blender is for 3D. Can't remember when I last used GIMP for anything.

RIP. Here in Sweden the headlines mention primarily his role in Ivanhoe, a movie that has aired on Swedish TV almost every New Years for over 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe_(1982_film)

He posted this video message to the Swedish people for New Years 2023: https://www.svt.se/kultur/ivanhoe-skadespelarens-nyarshalsni...

Great movie.

I worked for several American companies in Sweden an all of them insisted on calling us engineers. Many I work with happen to be engineers, but I dropped out before getting my (computer) engineering degree. It's embarrassing. I would never call myself a software engineer or any other kind of engineer (or a doctor or lawyer or anything else I am not).

It bothers me that my large collection of legally bought, drm-free, works (ebooks and digital games, mostly) will basically transform into illegal warez for my heirs, as I understand the law. They can still legally watch my DVDs, read my printed books, but my collection of tabletop RPG PDFs, GOG games, etc, they may as well have downloaded from some shady torrent site? That does not feel right.

Especially not since many things I bought, like from Humble Bundles, have not been available drm-free since, and may never be, so all legal drm-free copies will expire as the generation that bought them passes away?

My understanding is the laws you describe are mostly limited to a few European countries, while most of the rest of the world are more restrictive?

Also, with with the limited right to make copies like that comes quite high fees on recordable media that is paid to the music and movie industries as compensation through organizations like CopySwede here in Sweden.

I like this boardgame kit that the Germans printed for their soldiers:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30082557

Useless fact I just learned from Wikipedia: Ångström/Angstrom (in Sweden of course we still use the original spelling) has its own UNICODE symbol, Angstrom sign: Å (U+212B) not to confuse with the Swedish letter Å (U+00C5). Looks slightly different in my browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom

The problem with C++ string slices is that after many years of C++ becoming increasingly memory-safe with std::string and smart pointers, now we reverted to something barely more safe than a C string.

I guess Rust can keep slices safe using some borrow checker magic or something, but C++ can't.

That's pretty much what git over https does by default (is it even possible to do read-write to a git repo over https instead of ssh?).

https://git-scm.com/docs/http-protocol

Except the one on the right is in Swedish.

And Ion Fury, from 2018, made with the Build engine: https://www.gog.com/en/game/ion_fury

There is 16-bit DOS support in Free Pascal these days (yes, added long after 32-bit DOS support). That makes it easier to get a pointer to video memory. Makes other things less easy.

Also some (more) free (open source) 16-bit C-compilers now, like the ia16 gcc port and Microsoft's C compiler included in the MS-DOS repo on GitHub.

Not that 32-bit extenders do not come with some advantages, but I enjoy the simplicity of 16-bit.

Same as for GitHub Copilot?

"For more on how Anthropic handles this data, see Anthropic’s commercial terms and data retention policy. Enabling the Claude Fable 5 policy constitutes acknowledgement of this requirement. Leaving it off keeps Claude Fable 5 unavailable to your organization."

https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-09-claude-fable-5-is-g...

There is also fennel, earlier language originally by same developer, that is similar, but compiles to, and is fully implemented in, Lua. No standard library of its own so missing many nice things like the parser library from janet, but it is good for writing scripts for things that embed Lua.

https://fennel-lang.org/

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).