Writing a word puzzle game

[@Morality124]

Hello Jim. Off-topic other than FreeDOS, but have you seen this blog post regarding what HP is doing to boot FreeDOS on newer laptops (involving a convoluted Linux/X11/QEMU boot configuration)? I'd share the link but I think KZbin flags it as spam.

[@freedosproject]

Thanks, I saw that one. It's really interesting; it's booting into Linux, which runs the QEMU virtual machine, which boots FreeDOS. That's not a surprise, because I expect this system is running UEFI only (no "Legacy" BIOS mode). And FreeDOS, like any DOS, requires a BIOS to run.

[@Morality124]

​@@freedosproject Like you said, no surprise; makes perfect sense how HP employees arrived at this outcome, except why go through all the scope creep just to include the FreeDOS OS option, especially when Linux has to be included (and there is already a free Ubuntu option)? At that point, might as well switch to a minimal *nix installation like Alpine or something. Very bizarre. As a fun thought experiment though, I wonder how a similar solution using dosemu2 from a tty would work out (bypassing the need for x11).

[@vicokoby]

These videos are good but could you make one about networking and internet connection in real machine please?

[@freedosproject]

FYI that I don't boot FreeDOS on real hardware, only in a virtual machine. So I can't do a video about networking FreeDOS on real hardware. However, the trick will be finding a DOS driver for your network card. Depending on what hardware you have (such as a laptop) this may not easy to find.

[@OpenGL4ever]

FreeDOOM crashes with a segmentation violation in FreeDOS 1.3 when trying to save a game. Tested on FreeDOS 1.3 with QEMU 7 from bullseye-backport package. Hostmachine Debian Bullseye.

[@freedosproject]

Can you add that as a bug in our bug tracker?

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@freedosproject Sry, but i don't have a Gitlab account. That's why i did report it here.

[@ahmad-murery]

I smell the lovely old PC, this game is as fun to play as it is to code Thanks Jim

[@freedosproject]

I'm glad you liked it! I love programming on DOS, especially with conio.

[@ahmad-murery]

@@freedosproject Exactly, focus on the game logic not on the UI which be improved later on (if needed) Thanks once again Jim and hope it doesn't take too long before you bring us another great video,

[@philtoa334]

Nice.

[@kneekoo]

After I had recently found "Windle" (Win 3.x game) I figured I might take a shot at making it for FreeDOS, just for fun. But I had other things to do and now there's this. :P At least I had fun working on something else (unrelated to DOS), so I'm happy to see this game is now available. I'm still tempted to take it up a few notches, but the priority is way lower - although this one badly needs a dictionary. :) P.S. Fun video, thanks for making it! :)

[@freedosproject]

Thanks, glad you liked it! I was curious about it for a while, so I decided to write a version for FreeDOS. I actually had written it long ago, but it took this long to do a video about it.

[@kneekoo]

Well, you made the video so it's far better than me thinking about writing the program one day. 😄 To paraphrase Elon: Thinking is easy, writing the code is orders of magnitude harder.

[@freedosproject]

Something I learned a long time ago when teaching myself programming on an Apple II is "don't be afraid to try something." I wrote a lot of programs on the Apple II that were kind of impressive, even looking back today. And I wrote them because I just gave it a shot. I might experiment with an idea and write a prototype, just to figure out how to make it work. Then I'll rewrite it a better way. That's actually how I started writing this Wordy game, by experimenting with a few functions to see how I might write different parts of the game.

[@kneekoo]

Well, I'm fine with experimenting. Being organized and not get lost in the details is the hard part. My 386 and other older PCs are back home, so I have to virtualize to get anything done. And then I have to remember where I put those VMs, etc. Now nothing's really hard or complicated here, other than my shifting priorities getting ahead of me. Having lots of spare time was really great back in high school and university. :)