+---------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Back to the Future, or Phun with DOS | | | | by D!99y Dud3 | | | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ Gr33tz, slackers, and welcome to another action-packed adventure with your old pal, the Digster! I'm writing to you today from WordStar 4 for DOS. Hope this phile doesn't turn out too phunky because it's supposed to be a plain old ASCII textphile at the end of the day regardless of what proggy I use to type the phucker in. I'm gonna tell you how you can quit phucking around with DOSBox and other emulators and set up a real DOS computer with phloppy drives and a serial port on the cheap, but before I get into that, I want to give a shout out to author and former sysop Jennifer Petkus. I stumbled upon a short story Ms. Petkus wrote for Softalk Magazine in 1984 whilst perusing the Cult of the Dead Cow textphile archives on Jason Scott's website and decided to look her up. It turned out that she's written a few novels in the meantime, works as a Web designer, and has a few other weird hobbies that nerds like us can appreciate. She told me she used to run a BBS on her Apple ][, and that experience was the basis for her 2011 novel, "Good Cop, Dead Cop," which I urge you to check out. It's supposed to be a pretty absorbing read, if the Amazon customer reviews have anything to say about it. The reason I got off on this WordStar kick is that I read that a lot of famous writers still use it after all of these years, some of them going to great lengths to try to install it on their latest new computer each time they upgraded until the operating system incompatibilities made it infeasible. Putting together a dedicated DOS PC from slightly obsolete but still adequate modern hardware solves that problem beautifully. Anyway, here's how you get yourself a cheap DOS computer. There's at least one enterprising fellow on Ebay who takes those tiny HP and Dell thin client computers with the Viva chipset and loads them up with DOS/Windows 3.11 and a dozen or so vintage games, and sells them as retro gaming machines for $50 US or so. Those cute little phuckers are just old enough to have old school serial, printer, PS/2, and VGA ports in addition to USB and ethernet, which makes them ideal for phooling around with old peripherals, if you have any. The one I have has a solid state hard drive of some sort, and no other drives. Fortunately you can get TEAC 3.5" USB floppy drives pretty cheap too. Whether you use a USB or PS/2 mouse and keyboard with it is up to you. Every keyboard aficionado has his own preference, so I'm not going to try to advise you on that. If you're wanting to load your stash of old programs on 5.25" floppy disks onto your new DOS PC, I'm afraid you're going to have to Google a solution for that yourself. There are USB adapters made by independent hardware developers that will let a modern PC read those drives, but I don't have any 5.25" drives or disks, nor am I likely to ever acquire any this late in the game. I'm assuming you're a lazy bastard like me, and you're going to head on over to WinWorld and download all of the warez you want for this exercise. Now if you don't feel liking snaking a CAT-5 cable clear across the house from your little DOS box to the router in the living room so you can download the warez directly to the DOS box - which you can't do anyway because you don't have a Winsock installed on it yet - I recommend connecting one USB floppy drive to the DOS box and another one to your main PC, which is where you're gonna need to do a little pre-processing of files. That way you can make your floppies on the modern PC and sneakernet them over to the DOS box to install your programs. The disk images for WordStar 4 are 360kB 5.25" images. I downloaded a program on my laptop called DiskExplorer that can read and extract old floppy images. It'll only run on 32-bit Windows, so you 64-bit phags are shit out of luck. I extracted the files on the six WordStar disk images to separate folders in Windows 7, then copied the contents of each folder to a blank 3.5" floppy. The first thing I discovered after dicking around for a bit is that the installer program on the first WordStar disk doesn't actually install the program in the way you're probably accustomed. I was expecting to be asked to insert each disk as the installation progressed, but that ain't how it works. You copy all of the files from all six disks to your hard drive, then run the installer to configure the program if necessary. I didn't find it necessary. The executable runs fine right out of the box. I don't know how it is with other DOS programs, but that's the way of WordStar. Another thing I found out is that when you open a WordStar document in a plaintext editor, you're going to see gibberish. There's a simple Perl solution for that, but I'm a PHP guy. The equivalent PHP solution isn't as simple, unfortunately. Luckily, the same blog post where I read about the USB 5.25" floppy adapter also mentions another old(ish) program called HABit WordStar Converter that should do the trick. Don't bother trying to download it from the author's site though - your browser will phuck around for a long time trying to reach it, and probably time out. Get it from Softpedia. This, too, appears to be a 32- bit-only Windows program. I'm so glad that the guy who sold me my laptop from the back of his van in a gas station parking lot installed 32-bit Windows 7 on it now. It does a lot of things 64- bit Windows can't handle. For instance, PabloDraw, the ANSI art viewer relased by ACiD. ----------------------------------------------------------------- If this phile gripped you more than a muddy old river or reclining Buddha, please re-upload it to as many BBSes as you can. Danke schoen! Oh, and tell them you stole it from one of these fine boreds: Agency BBS Sysop: Avon telnet://agency.bbs.nz Borderline BBS Sysop: Balzabaar telnet://borderlinebbs.dyndns.org:6400 -----------------------------------------------------------------