I briefly talked about Xtras and XObjects in the first part of this series . To recap, Xtras and XObjects are specially crafted libraries that extend Macromedia Director’s functionality by exporting additional functions that can then be used in the Lingo scripts powering the individual application. This allows a deeper integration with the operating system, since the Xtras and XObjects can provide a bridge between Macromedia Director and the operating system’s API. Masters of the Elements...| fabulous.systems
For my next small side project, I’m running a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as a proxy server for my website. In fact, right now, fabulous.system is served from this exact Pi! For this task, the limited CPU capabilities are not that big of a deal, but the limited RAM is. Sometimes, 512 MB is really not enough memory. Clearly I can’t simply add more RAM to the Pi, so I decided to disable as many hardware features as possible. I don’t need WiFi, sound or accelerated video; all I need is USB for m...| fabulous.systems
In Macromedia Director, everything is related to cinematography and theaters. A Director project consists of individual movies, timed and coordinated by the score. The canvas where you place all the objects is the stage; objects and scripts compose the cast, and each object and script is a cast member. Then, there’s the Projector, the executable file that plays all movies in the defined order. And just like a real movie projector shines light through the film, we have to reverse this proces...| fabulous.systems
Hugo's support for syntax highlighting provides an easy way to make your code snippets more readable. Unfortunately, there are compatibility issues with iOS.| fabulous.systems
The game I enjoyed the most in my childhood stopped working on Windows 2000, never to be seen again. This is the complete story of how I fixed it - by digging into Windows internals, splitting the light, and eventually learning how to program in Lingo.| fabulous.systems
Anubis, designed to protect your website from unwanted requests from AI crawlers, is way more powerful than you might think.| fabulous.systems
In June 2022, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would be phased out. In February 2023, they deactivated it with a Windows 10 updated and encouraged users to switch to their Edge browser. If you ever tried to start Internet Explorer through iexplore.exe after this date or on a fresh Windows 11 installation, Windows opens the Edge browser instead. If you want to use a web application that only supports Internet Explorer, Microsoft recommends using the compatibility mode in the Edge bro...| fabulous.systems
web.archive.org has one goal: Create a copy of all websites ever created. The project is an incredible resource for my research, so it is time to give something back.| fabulous.systems
Microsoft released the source code for MS-DOS 4.00 a few weeks ago. Time to create new installation media for it!| fabulous.systems
March 1995. Although PCs had been around for many years at this point, less than 40% of households in the US owned one. Back then, people mostly associated PCs with being a machine used at work, not a thing you’d even need at home. They were complicated and… unfriendly. Just a few months before the launch of the all-new Windows 95, Microsoft Bob was an attempt to create a user-friendly interface that runs on top of Windows to increase the popularity of PCs at home and show how valuable a ...| fabulous.systems
Today, I'm excited to finally announce a new side project I've been working on for quite a while.| fabulous.systems
Introduction Have you ever noticed that a pixel-perfect screenshot from a virtual machine running MS-DOS in the default VGA text mode looks slightly off? The characters are too wide, and the whole image seems stretched. At the very least, it doesn’t evoke the same nostalgic feeling as the old CRT days, does it? But did you know that what you’re seeing is a perfect representation of the actual image, while your monitor from 1995 was deceiving you? Let’s have a closer look. Using a VGA or...| fabulous.systems
Do you know what computer games and the Voyager space probes have in common? Clever engineering can extend their missions way beyond their intended lifetime. 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet, the iconic game bundled with the Microsoft Plus! packs and included in Windows NT4 up to Windows XP, is preserved for decades to come thanks to a reverse engineering project by Andrey Muzychenko. Andrey’s work involved decompiling the executable that shipped with Windows XP and creating a modern ...| fabulous.systems
Microsoft released the source code for MS-DOS 4.00 a few weeks ago. Thanks to meticulous reverse engineering, we now also have the sources for 4.01.| fabulous.systems
Microsoft released the source code for MS-DOS 4.00. Unfortunately, their release is broken --- but the community fixed it in just under a week.| fabulous.systems
I launched my Daily MS-DOS command bot a few months ago. Starting simple, it turned out to be quite an adventure.| fabulous.systems
Even though MS-DOS itself is dead since decades, people still develop new software for this ancient relic. Thanks to a set of modern tools, we can connect MS-DOS to the internet — and to the fediverse.| fabulous.systems
Thanks to the magic of pkmn.li, you'll encounter a random wild Pokémon each time you open your terminal!| fabulous.systems
Meta is about to join the fediverse. No, they probably don't care about the community at all.| fabulous.systems
Contrary to the list of the accounts you follow, Mastodon doesn't provide an easy way to export a list of your own followers. API to the rescue!| fabulous.systems
There are some things in life you will remember forever. In case you are just like me, then the very first PC you ever used is most likely one of these things.| fabulous.systems
Since virtual machines created with KVM/QEMU are not simple containers but quite isolated from the host's environment, exchanging data and information between the host and the VMs can be a bit tricky. Therefore, QEMU offers a companion service called qemu-guest-agent for Linux guests. qemu-guest-agent acts as an interface between the VMs and the host system.| fabulous.systems
If you ever tried to run a 16-bit application from the Windows 3.x days, any 64-bit Windows version will refuse to run it. Open source to the rescue!| fabulous.systems
Welcome to fabulous.systems - the place where we take a deep-dive into the wonderful world of (sometimes pretty obsolete) technology| fabulous.systems
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Ever since I discovered the Myst series back in 2005, I’m in love with it. To me, the Myst series feels like an immersive trip to another world - it is truly something different compared to your average point-and-click adventure game. Needless to say that especially the first entries in the series - the original Myst and its successor Riven - are truly remarkable games. In my opinion, the immersion these games provide is partially created due to technical limitations. The original Myst was ...| fabulous.systems
Over the last couple of years, I aquired a nice collection of various domains. Since I only keep them for historical purposes, I decided to redirect all domains to this blog domain. Usually, you can achieve such a redirection by simply pointing all your domains to the same virtual host within your web server configuration in case you are using WordPress. However, this won’t work when using some caching plugins. Some .htaccess magic will help though.| fabulous.systems
Apache2: mod_autoindex and UTF-8| fabulous.systems
Remember how I said that DOSBox-X is not able to run Windows XP? Well, turns out I was wrong. I was very, very wrong.| fabulous.systems
One of the main advantages of snap packages is the possibility to use them not only on one Linux distribution like ’traditional’ packages, but on a wide variety of distributions without having to modify or rebuild them. Many distributions provide the necessary snapd daemon in their repositories. It is entirely possible to use snap packages with Gentoo too. Even building new snap packages with snapcraft and multipass or LXD will be possible afterwards.| fabulous.systems
DOSBox-X is not only a DOS runtime environment. Providing full system emulation, you can run operating systems that are far beyond DOS.| fabulous.systems