I finally did it and moved to a more appropriate "home realm" for a #FreeBSD enthusiast. Thanks @stefano for offering this!
Moving followers worked flawlessly, restoring all my settings was pretty quick, but of course all my old toots are left on https://techhub.social/@zirias 🙈
So I guess I'll introduce myself here by writing a little thread, adding a few of my works that someone might find interesting. But first a bit of "who am I":
I'm a "professional" software architect/developer (mostly #dotnet platform in the day job), FreeBSD hobby-admin and ports committer, #C64 fan (and occassionally coder and even musician), and apart from computers also interested in music (playing a few instruments myself), traveling, cooking, sometimes sports, sometimes politics ... but probably won't toot about any non-technical stuff (or, very very rarely).
Also quite recent: #dos2ansi. This is a very versatile converter for #MSDOS#ansiart (and other "text") files to a format using #Unicode and only standard #ANSI#SGR escape sequences, so, suitable for today's terminals like #xterm. It includes an ansiart viewer which is "just" a shellscript, leveraging dos2ansi, xterm, less and some nice original #IBM fonts to do its job. So, maybe something for the #retrocomputing fans.
In 1994, our puzzle game Clockwiser was released for Amiga (OCS and AGA), CD32 console, MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.
This is the 𝙩𝙞𝙩𝙡𝙚 𝙨𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 tune by our composer Ramon Braumuller, created with our own Digital Mugician Amiga music editor, published by the British Thalamus in 1990.
The construction and repair units in Waterworld are static, while the harvesting units are mobile. This is a reversal of roles compared to The Polar Expedition, and gives players of this campaign some new strategies to experiment with. #barrenplanet#ibmpc#msdos#cga
The broken source code for MS-DOS 4.0 has been restored!
In less than a week after the initial release, on April 30, 2024, the community provided all necessary patches to restore the source code to its original state, matching the 1988 release of MS-DOS 4.00.
Virtually Fun cleaned up the recently published DOS 4.0 source code and now NTDEV made this real time video of getting it compiling on a period appropriate processor (albeit several years later variant in terms of clock speed) #RetroComputing#history#msdos Compiling MS-DOS 4.0 - on a 386 in real time!
Growing up with MS-DOS, I knew its role in today's Windows' usage of \ to separate directories and / for command-line arguments (choices that sound quirk-y in an Unix-influenced world that uses / and -, respectively.)
I never understood why MSFT - a very Unix-aware shop, having released their XENIX a year before MS-DOS - went with such an odd choice, until I looked at the (recently open-sourced) MS-DOS source code.
The files include documentation for computer manufacturers (so they could write compatible BIOS code, customize distribution, etc.), and this piece on MS-DOS 2.0 (which introduced subdirectories) suggests that - as usual in those times - the party behind the odd decision was none other than IBM:
🧠💻 This isn't just a personal organizer - this little HP 200LX (1994) means business, boasting a 7.91 MHz 80186 processor and running the MS-DOS operating system 🤩
Last week, Microsoft released DOS 4.0 as open source. In this blog post, I explore why DOS 4 was the version most people avoided in the past, where to get a fork that builds without issue, and why we already have a better DOS 4 than we did in the 80s. #retrocomputing#msdos#opensourcehttps://dfarq.homeip.net/why-not-use-ms-dos-4-0/
Buildings provide excellent protective cover for Combat Droids. If you're defending a base, you need to keep enemy Combat Droids out of here, as once they get in, the droids are very difficult to shift with all but the most powerful units. #barrenplanet#ibmpc#msdos#cga