Some people use DOS as a hobby and other people use Windows as a hobby. If Dos is a hobby does not negate the truth that you are willing to abandon the modern, and that is what strikes me, because even if dos is just a hobby, something very important is lost in the process, the willingness to stay behind and I don't see "It's my hobby" as a good excuse for that. But that's just my opinion.

But don't take that seriously, you're allowed to do Dos of course. People just share their opinions and it's my opinion.

I use Windows. You are not sharing your opinion, you are trying to prove that you are wiser and that axlucas should use Windows.

Nice

I am the most opinionated man in the world, but don't mistake that for hostility to the oldfashional. Dos is a beautiful thing, I like dos and I miss dos, but that doesn't change facts.

I recommend Computer History Museum, it might interest you. It has little to do with Dos, but it has a lot of information on old computers.

https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos

They have gathered huge stockpiles of old computers from all over the world and stacked them in the museum. They have computers that not only ran Dos a quarter of a century ago, but most of the other computers that grew out of that era. They have them behind glass bars so that people can study them and wonder about the past.

It was always about curiosity, that is why asm is part of my life. People who are interested in the deeper details are people who want to know, want to understand, the honest. On the surface it looks oldfashional, but in the end it leads to what one wants; more understanding. Layers are tools, tools are good, but there is a deeper interest that goes beneath tools, that is the place of a blacksmith.

Assembly is pure and so there is some mysticism involved with why some people use asm and most don't. The purity of assembly makes me ask many many questions about the person using asm. One thing is rebellion or rejection of the world. Assembly is like religion and a prophet. Assembly programmer can in some ways be thought of like rebellious people with a pure mind.

That doesn't apply to people, but the character trait is there. If anyone would fit being a holy prophet, it would be an asm coder. The purity, the curiosity for truth and the general rejection of the "upper" programming world may as well translate into other areas, not just programming.

People who love asm are probably people who love truth and are probably very honest people. But another question arises, what made an asm programmer love truth in the first place when most people don't?

If you want to find some truth, you probably have to surround yourself with ways that allows you to live that way. One shouldn't underestimate the choice of an asm programmer, it may be that he just doesn't fit in anywhere else.

When it comes to the question about using Dos, this is pure opinion, but if you're capable of moving back a quarter of a century to the dark old days of dos, in a world where you are so separated from the rest of the world it's almost scary, I think this is a social danger sign for that person. It's against every social principle that I can think of, thats total isolation and is a warning sign to me. To me, not necessarily to others. That's one step away from a coffin if you ask me, it doesn't get more isolated than that.

Time often freezes if there is a reason to freeze it and sometimes people also need to be special to discover a special meaning. Moving on is a betrayal to that principle to some people. I don't know if this has got to do with adaptation or not but moving on seems impossible.

I also think that, one reason for using assemmbly may also be because you actually do want to move on, but you want to learn everything, bit by bit, and so you're not actually oldfashional when you use assembly, but you're just moving slower (or you take everything more seriously than other) other people skip assembly in its entirety and they don't learn it at all, and approximately all C people that I know are bitter for not learning asm, they don't tell but they show that attitude.

PeExecutable, honestly, what I didn't like about your first post is that you called me an ignorant for not thinking the way you do. I see now that you meant good, but I still think you should stop putting it that way. As I say, I know what I'm talking about and I'm no ignorant, see:


This is a fallacy. If you program for money, then maybe you're right about this, only you should change the word "programmer" with "businessman". If you program for pleasure, then you're plainly wrong. In my case, programming is my hobby and I want to enjoy it as much as possible.

Also, Randall said then why ASM and not C++? And when you answered...

This was a great answer. Now when if you wonder why I think the way I think about DOS and new OSs, about programming low level instead of using libraries and layers of abstraction, then my answer is exactly the same as yours.

A perfect computer for a hobbyist programmer is certainly not the same as the perfect computer for an average user. That doesn't mean the hobbyist programmer is wrong. But besides hobbies, there is indeed something useful I want to do with all this. I'm interested in free hardware projects and I sadly don't still know enough about electronics. I think having "free computer" projects alive would be very good and useful in the future and right now could be fun for hobbyists like I am to work on. So I wanted to find out if there was something like that running, so I could join in. No offense, I see your point. Just please do see mine. To me, it's really boring to program a gas station's billing system. It's a lot more fun to program an operating system, a driver or a compiler. I can't comfortably do that on a new PC.

Oh, and guys, I do have some old computers here too, including a Commodore 64 with some cassettes My first computer was actually a 386. I got the Commodore from my uncle. It's mostly a curiousity. I like having these stuff Hey, I'm looking at the links you passed me guys. Really fascinating![/quote]

axlucas, most people can't take my criticism, it's just the way I am. I am always happy when I say these things, so you should not mistake this for hostility, it's actually my happiness to talk about computers.

Can I ask a favor from you? Can you test my program and see if it works, I've only tested it on two computers:

http://en.file-upload.net/download-10847318/Program.zip.html

Can you test it and let me know if it works on your computer? It's difficult to tell whether or not it works on other computers

Trinitek: I've been reading on the TellyMate. It's really great! Not only it allows for the CP437, but also, you can edit the font, effectively allowing graphics programming that is reasonably comfortable. It is a console system, but one could create a linear character buffer to keep track of what currently is on the screen and have a "virtual screen input"

PeExecutable: That's fine. It's first impressions, but then you exchange a few messages and begin to understand why people say what they say. I downloaded your program, but it's a Windows executable and I don't have Windows on my PC. I used to have Wine installed, but since I switched to 64bit Linux, I still haven't figured out how to get Wine working. When I manage to install Wine, I'll try your program and let you know.

Works for me.
I was thinking about that a great deal last night. It could easily be done with a separate microcontroller interfaced with it, and that would allow a pseudo graphics mode with a set of custom block characters without the Z80 doing the heavy lifting for such a thing. Too bad it doesn't support grayscale or color. Let's see... with a custom character set that splits one character into 4 virtual pixels, that would increase the screen's addressable resolution from 38x25 to 76x50. Not fantastic, but usable, but we could go for even more than that. I don't think I'll be using it in the board I'm designing right now, but I definitely will in the future, as soon as I can get an AVR programmer.

Another option is to use an FPGA or CPLD for the video output. Have it pull pixel data directly from the RAM.

If I had the development platforms to work with FPGAs/CPLDs, I'd just download a VGA core or something.

PeExecutable,

Your program works on my machine (Windows 10 x64, AMD GPU).

I agree with what you are saying about asm. I feel similar.
I have to use C++ at work but I use asm for my personal projects.

You are working on a game, right? Are you considering github repo?

Trinitek, randall, thanks for confirming.

randall, maybe, who knows what happens. I don't really have any plan for anything, I just code what I think I will use in the future. And I know that I want to create games so I will probably need some of that

My opinion on this is middle ground between PeExecutable and axlucas. Yes, I remember DOS, where you could do wathever you wanted, use DOS functions? Sure. BIOS interrupts? No problem. Direct access to the hardware? The OS would not stand in your way with permissions. It was great, for sure.

But then, came 32 bit, and a new OS was needed. Sure, you could extend DOS, use unreal mode, because the OS, again, lets you do everything you want.

To me, the real problem came when graphics card manufacturers decided not to embrace a common standard, VESA VBE was never really adopted. The way to program the hardware directly was different for every card out there, and finally, the details of low level programming became proprietary and not known to the programmer.

The manufacturers began to release these "driver" thingies to hide that layer from the programmer. They already existed in DOS, but flourished in windows. The hardware became more and more complex, sound, video, network, from many different manufacturers. The drivers became absolutely necessary. To keep some sanity, the layer of API's was created to provide a common interface.

This is where I stop: I can't tolerate to go any layer above the windows API's and the C runtime, or else, what is the point of doing it in assembly? But I don't mind having all those functions to do the job for me

Above this, MFC, .NET, and gods know what, I don't touch that stuff.

Well, you wanted a new platform, so what about Linux? Maybe you can tolerate it better than Windows?

During this last year or so, I also learned enough electronics to be able to begin writing some AVR assembly code, interfacing with simple hardware, and stuff like that. It does the trick for me, brings back the purity of low level programming, and you are not isolated, its a large community (well, many people program in C like the Arduino stuff, but you don't have to, I have an Arduino but just use it to load programs in isolated AVR controlers I bought cheap on Ebay).

So I think there are some options for you as assembly hobbyist.

El Tangas: Thank you. That's exactly the point. It's not that I think new OSs are all bad and should be replaced with old style systems. I think new OSs are what average people want, more or less, and even when I want to do average things, they may be OK, but when I really want to enjoy programming, they don't fulfill me. I don't meant to replace them. I just want to have another platform. As a matter of fact, when DOS was no longer updated to support new hardware, I felt I needed another thing. I never liked Windows because of several reasons, not just its obscurity, so I chose Linux. But even though Linux is a lot more tolerable to me, it's still bloated, and forces me to use a set of services when the whole fun to me is precisely to program what those services do. I know OS developers don't have much choice, given the market wars among hardware vendors, as it's them who initiate this obscurity, but then I could just participate in free projects and be happy. So far, it's not that easy because these current projects require some knowledge on electronics, which I still don't know much about. I'm trying to get better at it.

If you don't care about consumers and you love Dos, it's not that you can't use Dos, you can create very nice "specialized" niche programs/games that targets only those who want to try it out for some reason. You can have fun that way too; Just to create something very "special" and just attract some people to use it, it might work. That is, damn all standards, damn all windows users, just aim to see if someone are attracted by what you make, and maybe they install Dos just to use that piece of software.

the matter is in what are you wish in real. any system has "obfuscated" levels. anyway you must learn how to read file in that dos. i'm sure you do not plan to move heads of the floppy drive forward-backward (even if you still have those heads). if you need dos to make a game - think well, who will play it? why must you know everything about how OS works? thousands men spent years to make it working. maybe it is not bloated but fully featured? you must decide what you are interesting in and learn OS in that directions to serve you program. the dos fans is another thing: they love dos just because they love dos as well as cp/m fans or geeks who still build own 4-bit cpus with transistors

(not too) long time ago there was a moment when mcus were not so cheap for me to buy just to play, so i kept a stack of used 286/386/486 boards exactly as a free hardware: yes, i made some experiments to run them with my own programs instead of bios or as a bios extension, but then i got that it was exactly useless monsterous garbage, and i throw all of them off now i prefer mcus to light leds but there is no way without basics of electronics here. the breadboard is good low level hardware here to start

http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=8189

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgv-b-ucyZ8

But these days you can get all kinds of cheap stuff via ebay. For less than €2 you can get a chinese Arduino Nano compatible board with USB interface, or just the DIP version of the ATmega 328P to play in your breadboard, and use the Arduino just to program it.
And learning (basic) electronics is not that hard, just seems hard in the beginning when you know nothing. Watch some youtube vids, "get" a good simulator like Labcenter Proteus, of if you want to use just free and legit software tina-ti from texas instruments or LTspice from linear technology. You will learn a lot just understanding the examples and playing around (there is a learning curve for the software, of course).
Actually, I spend much more time running simulations than building actual stuff on breadboards. You blow up less components that way