Hello, all!
Is there a recent version of Inform 6 for authoring purely in MSDOS? If so what executable and Library files version would I need?
There don’t seem to be any DOS builds after 2004, I think, which was the 6.30 release. Not a lot happened around that time that wasn’t in the service of I7, so it’s kind of a stable platform for the Library of the era.
If you want to do something more modern with a maintained version, you may find that you can build from source using DJGPP the way the old versions were. This would be something of a project.
Are you looking for MS-DOS (or its contemporaries, such as DR-DOS) specifically, or would a more modern FreeDOS build meet your needs? I can see an I6 build environment fitting into the spirit of that project
an important advice: USE ONLY THE 386 BINARY !!
I have used the 8086 binary only once (Inform 5.4), is painfully slow… (tested back in 1995 on a 386sx/20Mhz, I shiver at the very idea of running inform on a 4.77 Mhz 8088..)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I would like to write it on a retro 486 tower running MS-DOS 6.22. The dream is to be able to write IF on the PC I had at the time I first discovered it as a young teenager.
The idea of attempting a source build using DJGPP sounds intriguing as I actually just installed the most recent DOS version DJGPP on the 486 about five hours ago via floppy disks. Very cathartic.
I’m going to take a shot at the source build. I guess it would be easier to build it on my more recent computer. Can you point me to any helpful documentation or do I just grab the source and get busy?
Gotcha. That’s the binary I’ve downloaded. I love the slowness of old computers but the 8086’s are slow enough to sour the experience. I had a Tandy 1000 as my first computer and it amazes me what computers can do now vs. then.
I haven’t touched djgpp since the early 90s, and that was on the aforementioned 8088 type machinery. My memory was that I installed a full suite from Cygnus or someone that included make and sed and a few other things that build scripts often relied on from the Unix world.
I honestly haven’t thought about DOS in 30 years, but I do find this project stirs my own sense of nostalgia!
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On a whim I decided to look into DJGPP again this morning, and it seems that D.J. Delorie’s original site is still up and offering downloads!
It seems that most of the documentation is about using Unix systems to cross-compile DOS games, because that was how Doom and its contemporaries were built. I had completely forgotten about the Allegro library, but this is bringing back all manner of hazy memories.
There’s even an old Perl (probably requiring 5.004 or something) script to cross-compile from Debian i686 to DOS i386, which could probably be brought up to date by porting it to an older language…