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[Rogerwilco]

It might be beneficial to split this thread on savegame editing and nostalgia talk.
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Hey, Data....

Reason was, no one responded to wanting to learn, so it kinda drifted into chewing the fat....

I you are interested, just pot it here and I'll continue...lemmie know

Rogerwilco and out

[Rogerwilco]

Hey, slowcoder

(As far as ZZT, I never played it, though "ZZT" is a very familiar sequence of letters from back in the day. From a little googling, it looks like it was some sort of Rogue/WOW type game? Looks pretty neat! Think I might have to give it a real teardown.

Other than my Animator software, I never released anything of my own to the public, until recently. I decided to place my stuff out there because I became nostalgic about QB about a month ago, and wanted to contribute my old stuff to the QB community.

Oh, yes. Now I do remember Sidekick. I think I tried it once, but had problems with performance, or it didn't work, or something or other. That was back in the late 80's-early 90's? I was a teen at that time, so software like that wasn't of real importance yet.

Edit: Holy Bug Eyes Batman! SideKick for DOS is still being sold. The surprise here is that it still costs between $59 and $99??? Holy Mazoli! I'd figure that someone who could afford that price could also afford a newer computer that can run newer software to do the same stuff!)

ZZT was a really popular game using just ascii. It's still fun in a retro way, and if you haven't played it, give it a whirl. It's out there.


As I recall, sidekick was always buggy, and with those oldie systems, taking up even a small amount of memory could be a problem.

I can't believe it's still being sold. And for that price? I doubt if it would work, not to mention there's a plethora of freeware packages out there that to that and a whole lot more....

Hey, do you remember MLBBS's?

The latest and greatest in the late 90's.....

ANSI Graphics..... Still cool. I wrote a bucketfull of ANSI utilities back in the day....

Wonder how I got anything else done?

[SlowCoder]

Originally Posted by Rogerwilco

I can't believe it's still being sold. And for that price? I doubt if it would work, not to mention there's a plethora of freeware packages out there that to that and a whole lot more....

http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/borsk.htm

Originally Posted by Rogerwilco

Hey, do you remember MLBBS's? The latest and greatest in the late 90's.....

By the late 90's I was well into the Internet, and had pretty much left BBSing behind. There weren't many of the local old-school BBSs left by that time, anyway. It's really too bad because they were a great hobby from what I understand. But older tech makes way for newer.

Originally Posted by Rogerwilco

ANSI Graphics..... Still cool. I wrote a bucketfull of ANSI utilities back in the day....

Yeah, but they've been replaced by GIF and JPG, and most people have left it far behind. Unfortunately just like many of the games here. It's really too bad, because so much of the old-school technology could give a lesson to the newer stuff, and show the youngies what it took to get from the dark ages to now in technology. These days kids come in knowing all about how to browse the Internet and to use Word effectively. But they never get a good feel for how a computer works in the background, unlike the older days. Sad really.

Any of your ANSI utils in use today? TheDraw was my staple, and I was ok with it, but nothing real special. I opened TheDraw for the first time in many years just a couple of months ago, and couldn't remember much. I did manage to get the Ship/Castle animation to work, though! Hehe ...

[Rogerwilco]

Yeah, but they've been replaced by GIF and JPG, and most people have left it far behind. Unfortunately just like many of the games here. It's really too bad, because so much of the old-school technology could give a lesson to the newer stuff, and show the youngies what it took to get from the dark ages to now in technology. These days kids come in knowing all about how to browse the Internet and to use Word effectively. But they never get a good feel for how a computer works in the background, unlike the older days. Sad really.

Any of your ANSI utils in use today? TheDraw was my staple, and I was ok with it, but nothing real special. I opened TheDraw for the first time in many years just a couple of months ago, and couldn't remember much. I did manage to get the Ship/Castle animation to work, though! Hehe ...
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Arrrg! I messed up...MLBBS's were the latest and greatest in the late *80's*

oh yea, I'm gratefull to be there when this whole computer thing was "growing up"

you had to know what you were doing back then......

the entire DOS was three files: Command.com, Msdos.sys and.... another one...the last two were hidden, so you only saw Command.com when you DIR'ed it.



Used to peruse PC Magazine for these little code snippets...either in Basic, or Binary(Assembly?)

you wrote it out as something like:

...if I recall....to convert it...lessee....it was, I *think* a consol command....remember those?

like

COPY CON THIS.TXT
This is a test <enter>

then CTRL-Z to put an EOF mark
<enter>

and you had yourself a text file

Anyway, when you ran the code it turned into a .COM file....

Those dozens of little utilities you couldn't live without.....

Hey, remember...EDLIN?????

Wow.....those days when microsoft had the crappiest utilities going....Hmmm...nothing has changed much, has it.....


ANSI stuff.....lessee... I probably have the sorce code somewhere...the only one that comes to mind right now was ANSIFY....took any standard ascii text file and ANSIFIED it, turned each letter into a random color.....did other stuff too, like cOnVeRtInG cAsE

you could set the intensity, Blinks or no blinks, etc.

Tells you how slow the old systems were: it had a progress bar so you could see it processing...heh.....

I did some stuff you could incorporate into your Basic program, graphics wise, but i can't remember off hand.....

Oh yea, I remeber The Draw's Spaceship and castle...and what passed for animation back then.....

It had an export function that made BLOAD images...

Remember when screensavers were really used to save the screen? Those old green monitors would burn an image if the text/whatever was left on too long....

Retro stuff.....what happens when you get old....

[SlowCoder]

* Imagines what the other forum guys are thinking when they read this stuff. Probably making some offhanded expletive remark, rolling their eyes and clicking the Back button to find something more interesting to read *

I didn't use edlin much at all. But I did use the "copy con" command quite often during the early DOS 2/3.x days, mostly to rewrite config.sys and autoexec.bat. When DOS 5 came out I moved on to the new EDIT software. WAY EASIER!

Working in the education environment, I see kids these days doing so much with computers. They are able to accomplish so much, very amazingly. But if you ask them HOW the computer does stuff, they have no idea. Basically they're the equivalent of script kiddies, using the applications as a means to an end, but not understanding what's under the hood. And since most use MS OSs, life's so simple that they can't even tell what an interrupt or bus is. There are very few who manage to pass muster as far as I'm concerned. (Wholly geez! Did I just say "muster"? Age is creeping up on me!)

These days I use Linux for a number of reasons. One of those is that I enjoy being able to tinker with the OS, and nothing is hidden from me. For instance, I can trace what happens when I plug a piece of hardware all the way from the kernel to the driver, to the apps themselves. Really fun stuff for me.

I don't remember anything just becoming a COM, but I do remember using DEBUG to make the computer do things that were otherwise not available, such as restarting via batch file.

[dosraider]

Originally Posted by Rogerwilco

the entire DOS was three files: Command.com, Msdos.sys and.... another one...

IO.SYS

Originally Posted by SlowCoder

* Imagines what the other forum guys are thinking when they read this stuff........

Boooooooooooooooooooooooring, that's what I think.
And: WhyTF they don't do this in a chat session.

[SlowCoder]

Originally Posted by dosraider

Boooooooooooooooooooooooring, that's what I think.
And: WhyTF they don't do this in a chat session.

... And yet you're still standing here. :bleh:

[Rogerwilco]

Hey, slowcoder . . ..

I think dosraider needs some Midol....


COM was an executable file, remember? if you had three files, all named the same, like:
test.com
test.exe
test.bat

DOS would "look" for the com first, then the exe then the bat..... I think it's still that way...

And.......for dosraiders enjoyment.....heh

Hard to believe, but one Quickbasic was considered a "High end" programming language......

Biggest knock was the large file size - like a stand alone 35-45k was large - and it was slow in those old systemd compared to assembly . . ..

Remember Z80?

Hint: 8088's powered the XT's

Hardware interrupts.....256 - or is it 255 - tiny programs embedded in the microprocessor that was the core of everything a computer does.....

I was lucky enough to work in the Silicon Valley in the late 70's through the 80's.....

Some for my accounts were Intel, National Semi, AMD...... Got to see how thay made the chips, kept up on all the latest breakthroughs...

I remember when National came out with a 5 inch wafer! No kidding...that was a BIG deal back then....

Oh yea...in the early 80's, my biggest account was Shugart. They made floppy disk drives....... The founder went on to start Seagate....

Anyone out there remember Amdahl systems? They were the only competitor to the large IBM mainframes.....

[dosraider]

Originally Posted by Rogerwilco

COM was an executable file, remember? if you had three files, all named the same, like:
test.com
test.exe
test.bat

DOS would "look" for the com first, then the exe then the bat..... I think it's still that way...

Nope.
The first Dos would read and execute is test.bat, always the batch first.

And you're still boooooooooooooooooooooooring.

[Rogerwilco]

Nope.
The first Dos would read and execute is test.bat, always the batch first.

And you're still boooooooooooooooooooooooring.

You know you're right, BAT does come first...senior moment

and if this is so darn Booorning, why are you reading and responding???

Huh???????