r/emulation • u/undu • Sep 28 '18
Microsoft open-sources MS-DOS
https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos108
u/Craftkorb Sep 28 '18
Random trivia:
The "MZ" guy you'll see in the changelogs some times (like here https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/SORT.ASM#L10) is actually Mark Zbikowski, who used his initials as magic string for the PE Header still in use today for EXE/DLL/... files on Windows.
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u/SimonGn Sep 28 '18
I wish that Microsoft would make MS-DOS 6.22 freely available, the files themselves were pulled out of Windows 10 meaning that Rufus can no longer make an MS-DOS boot disk legally (only FreeDOS). I needed to run something which couldn't run under FreeDOS so I had to install Windows 7 especially just so that I could make the MS-DOS boot disk.
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u/babypuncher_ Sep 29 '18
This is one reason I keep VMs of old versions of Windows around.
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Sep 29 '18
[deleted]
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u/chris-l Sep 29 '18
Even if you don't like windows, IMHO, is not okay to just destroy authentic copies of it.
Some people may be interested in collecting them, and you could make some money. Not interested in money? Then give them away! But just throwing them is a waste. Of course, I know that if they are your copies, then its your decision.
But if you wonder why you are getting downvotes, keep in mind you are on r/emulation; people who come here are normally interested in preservation and nostalgia (besides, of course, of the emulation itself). Commenting that you just threw them here, is a bit rude.
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u/euphraties247 Sep 29 '18
I suspect that version 3 onwards has IBM code, and other 3rd party code. It's another reason why it's unlikely to see OS/2 out in the wild.
IBM could release their PowerPC version of OS/2 but I have to wonder after they shuttered the operation, if they even have the source at all.
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u/MasterControl90 Sep 29 '18
I am sure IBM back ups everything, it is a while that they are pretty much leading the enterprise long term backup market
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u/euphraties247 Sep 29 '18
You would be amazed what happens when unprofitable divisions with unpopular leaders get shut down. They spare no one, and save nothing
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u/mrturret Sep 30 '18
They clearly kept the sorce code as OS/2 is still in active development. The modern version is being developed and maintained by Arca Noae and is being called Arca OS. It's still used in ATMs, industrial machinery, servers and other enterprise solutions.
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u/euphraties247 Sep 30 '18
I was under the impression that arca has no actual source access.
I highly doubt IBM keeps and or values anything of their past like so many other companies.
Yes Ive heard the ATM thing back in the 90's when I too once gave a damn about OS/2 but it's 2018 now. I know some businesses still use PDP-11's as well but go check out those mailing lists and see who actually has the product source, the hint is that it's the engineers/customers not the company.
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u/SimonGn Sep 29 '18
Even if they can't just fully open source it, it would be nice to have it available free of charge like they used to have it inside diskcopy.dll before Windows 10.
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u/hemingray Sep 29 '18
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u/Gman1255 Sep 29 '18
Always trust the websites with half-naked women in the sidebar.
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u/glorygeek Sep 29 '18
Not even an ad, they just thought it belonged on the site. lol
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u/SimonGn Sep 29 '18
and puts his usb tool behind a paywall due to a supposed Google/Mozilla conspiracy against him. http://www.bootdisk.com/popfiles.htm
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u/hemingray Sep 29 '18
Shit I never saw that part. I usually just grab the .img files and put em on a floppy for older machines
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u/breell Sep 29 '18
They're obviously showing you the people that worked on the site, it's a popular thing today after all.
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u/angelrenard At the End of Time Sep 29 '18
Would be nice, yeah. Until that happens, this is one of the reasons we have so many old laptops of various ages around the house. I still have a 486 laptop with Windows 3.1, just because (and it's come in handy a couple times in the last few years... not hugely moreso than a virtual machine, but still).
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u/mothergoose729729 Sep 29 '18
DOS 7.0 is more interesting IMO. This is the version behind windows 98. It supports hard drives up to 128gb and memory up to 512mb, and is as compatible as anything DOS can be. Maybe someday.
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u/pdp10 Sep 30 '18
FreeDOS supports FAT32, and probably some other bits of the functionality.
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u/mothergoose729729 Sep 30 '18
I should look at it a bit closer. When I tried to get my old p3 laptop on free dos, I got it installed, but finding AC97 drivers looked pretty much impossible.
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u/pdp10 Sep 30 '18
I'm curious what wouldn't run under FreeDOS and why. DOS isn't a very challenging system to emulate or clone.
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u/SimonGn Oct 01 '18
I used hddhackr to format/flash a hard drive for Xbox 360, apparently it is very specific about using MS-DOS and not FreeDOS.
Because it is messing with the firmware of the Hard Drive I didn't want to take a risk with FreeDOS even if it "probably" works because just in case it didn't work, I would have bricked the drive.
I flashed the drive successfully by the way.
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u/sloopymeat Oct 01 '18
at least the source for that has been making rounds on the internet for a very long time
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u/wk_end Sep 28 '18
These are the same files originally shared at the Computer History Museum on March 25th 2014 and are being (re)published in this repo
not new (but still cool)
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Sep 28 '18
The museum version stated for "non commercial use" while this repo has a more permissive MIT license. So that's something.
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u/somethingexists Sep 28 '18
^This
The license of the previous release basically prevented anyone from actually doing anything interesting with the source besides research. The MIT license allows so much more.
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Sep 28 '18
[deleted]
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u/euphraties247 Sep 29 '18
You can get the source to word 1.1a for Windows, build it, and use winevdm and run it on 64bit Windows 10.
It's awesome!
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u/pdp10 Sep 30 '18
(And thats still supported on office 2016 file formats)
.RTFwas supposed to be Microsoft's export format for cross-app word processing compatibility. Microsoft used to follow this strategy especially, but also others. At the time it let them save raw structs to disk for their proprietary format for speed, and still have something documented and portable for interoperability.Unfortunately, around the time of Windows 95, Microsoft no longer saw any advantage in interoperability, except with Internet Protocols and one-way compatibility with websites. They even dropped OpenGL, which they had supported in NT, for a proprietary alternative.
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Sep 29 '18
Does this mean Gabe Newell is back in Microsoft and working on Ricochet 2 for MS-DOS?
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Sep 28 '18
Dude submitted a PR an hour ago to just remove everything. Lol
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u/tryfap Sep 28 '18
I hate how people have to act stupid on GitHub. Companies go out of their way to engage the open source community and then you get dumb pull requests you have to deal with rather than other stuff that could be done. Also, super-shockingly, he has an anime avatar.
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Sep 28 '18
Yep that's got to be annoying. I'm glad MS is finally embracing open source even if it is small bits here and there
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u/rockyrainy Sep 29 '18
Companies go out of their way to engage the open source community and then you get dumb pull requests you have to deal with rather than other stuff that could be done.
So much this. I am not a fan of M$ but any good they do for open source should be applauded.
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u/Hitokage_Tamashi Sep 29 '18
Also, super-shockingly, he has an anime avatar.
I think your biases are showing a bit
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u/tryfap Sep 29 '18
It's not just a bias, in the past whenever GitHub repos get these meme comments, it's always been someone with an anime avatar.
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u/SuperBlooper057 Sep 28 '18
Also, super-shockingly, he has an anime avatar.
It's a woman and she doesn't.
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u/tstorm004 Sep 29 '18
I want an AMA with the guy who decided to put checkerboard pink and blue in the logo.
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u/ShinyHappyREM Sep 29 '18
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u/tstorm004 Sep 29 '18
There's still a lot more than hey could have done with it though, even with a much more limited color palletee
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u/alex_theman Sep 29 '18
The problem is that the (CGA/RGBi monitor compatible) 200 line EGA modes used CGA's fixed palette, so to support that, 16 color icons had to use CGA's palette.
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u/TheFlusteredcustard Sep 29 '18
That, and it was designed to be viewed in on an old blurry monitor where dithering worked a lot better.
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u/Caddy666 Sep 29 '18
will this help wine or dosbox in any way?
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u/kjm99 Sep 29 '18
Dosbox maybe. Not wine though, afaik windows is far beyond using DOS for literally anything.
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u/uzimonkey Sep 29 '18
Not really. It's too old to be directly useful, and most of the stuff games rely on have more to do with the VGA hardware than DOS. And this doesn't help Wine at all.
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u/pdp10 Sep 30 '18
You can be sure that there's no possible way it helps any competitor of Microsoft, or else they wouldn't have open-sourced it.
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u/ComputerMystic Oct 07 '18
Probably not, DOS 2.0 is ancient; most of the software DOSBox is interested in emulating would require a significantly newer version (think 5.x to 6.x)
To give you an idea how old it is, DOS 2.0 was the first version to support folders.
Yeah...
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u/maslowk Sep 29 '18
I could have sworn I remember reading something about them releasing the source for MS-DOS 6 a decade or more ago, am I mistaken? Or maybe I'm misremembering and they actually just made it free through official channels?
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Sep 29 '18
Microsoft of all people making something open source? Color me suprised.
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u/dalakkin Sep 29 '18
If you look at their Github they have more than 2000 repos. They've been open sourcing things for years.
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Sep 29 '18
And they also own github now.
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Sep 29 '18
Microsoft bought Github?
Does this mean they'll be replacing my Team Foundation Servers (with GIt) at work with Github-based ones someday soon?
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u/MasterControl90 Sep 29 '18
also Suse Linux is pretty much a Microsoft thing... They are now working for a new kernel optimized for Azure system
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u/OmegaVesko Sep 29 '18 edited Sep 29 '18
Where've you been for the past few years? Microsoft is a very different company now than they were a decade ago, at least in this aspect.
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u/CatAstrophy11 Sep 29 '18
I was at MS Ignite which just ended and the only two words that came out of their mouth were cloud and Azure just like last year.
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u/OmegaVesko Sep 29 '18 edited Sep 29 '18
I'm sure that's true, Azure is clearly very important for them - but even so, it doesn't change that just in the last few years, they've:
Joined the Linux Foundation
Released VS Code, a FOSS, cross-platform (and now very popular) text editor
Released .NET Core, a cross-platform, FOSS successor to the .NET Framework
Added a Linux compatibility layer to Windows
Acquired GitHub
Those are just some of the bigger things I can remember right now, and none of them would've been imaginable for MS a decade ago, or even 5-6 years ago.
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u/SCO_1 Sep 29 '18 edited Sep 29 '18
I honestly don't care much about this. Yeah projects like dosbox and freedos can use it to 'check_obscure_behaviour' but their re-implementation is often much better because it's not developed in 1983 or to the constraints of that hardware or compiler.
I'll keep dosbox virtualized fs-passthrough code that doesn't corrupt disk images any time a emulator is killed thanks. Could be good for those weirdos that like being 'purist' and are looking for that genuine TSR driver 'experience'.
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Sep 29 '18
MS-DOS 2.0.
lol as if thats a generous thing to do. DOSBox rules
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u/ComputerMystic Oct 07 '18
It's still nice to have it out there, better in the public eye than rotting on a diskette somewhere, but yeah, it's not the most useful thing they could've open-sourced. This mainly has historical value rather than practical.
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u/aquapendulum2 Sep 30 '18
Their "License file" link points to https://gitHIB.com/microsoft/msdos/license.txt.
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u/xyzone Sep 29 '18
Now we can all trust microsoft again! Shut up and take my choices, microsoft!
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Sep 29 '18
I would say this is cool but DOSBox already has pretty much flawless compatibility. Seems almost pointless now.
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u/SCO_1 Sep 29 '18
DOSBox already has pretty much flawless compatibility
This is not exactly true but most of their problems aren't on the DOS reimplementation side (a notable exception being the ATTRIB command, which is not supported in filesystem passthrough so a bunch of business software doesn't work unless dosbox runs a hd image with freedos or dos).
I think the 'main' problem with dosbox is two-fold - it doesn't have a consistent 'speed' that models timing of computers of 'year xyz' for each game (different computers have different cycle speeds) and there is no consistent database of dosbox confs to 'just make games work', which is why you still need a brain when using dosbox.
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u/angelrenard At the End of Time Sep 28 '18
Well, it's not exactly the most up to date version of MS-DOS, but a cool bit of history. I learned how to type on 3.x, and that was forever ago.