Retro-spective C++

well, it's not all doom & gloom. lol, well, it is, but it isn't.

I was clearing out a couple of rooms in the house, I've basically sold off all my old ATARI ST machines and accessories (2x1040STs, 1x520ST & 1x520ST with 4MB upgrade), including a genuine colour monitor, an Megafile 30, an SH204 and other harddrives, loads & loads of other things Atari related that took me years to acquire.

I also sold off the Sinclair Spectrum machines, books, tapes, etc... and the Atari 800XL machines (3 or maybe 4 of them?), along with cartridge games and a side3 cartridge and a FujiNet device, again, with a load of software, disc drives, tape drives, etc... all working.  I also threw in the Toshiba MSX machines (2x!) and tape drives and software.

As I was in the mood, I threw in an Amiga A500 with a 2Mb plug in with 2xhard-drives, LOADS of floppy discs, software and a genuine monitor too. 

yeah, that hurt, a lot. especially seeing as it was for £650. I know, I know, I know. I could have doubled or tripled that, if I had the patience to sell each item, faff about with postage, etc..etc.. but the guy who bought it all did it in bulk - he was honest, he's going to flip most of it & be very thankful / happy along the way.

I have however still kept my Amstrad CPC 464/6128 machines.  I'll probably keep those now until the end of time - I made the mistake of getting rid of those once before, not doing that again.  They stay with me.

I do still have LOADS more to get rid of, an Atari Portfolio handheld (as used in the Terminator 2 movie), HP 200lx handheld PCs x 2 (both work perfect, run DOS and run from AA batteries!)

I have loads of IBM PC110 devices, with a whole variety of accessories etc.. now, these are worth a small fortune - these I'll sell properly to a specialist set of people as they are rare as hens teeth - if I recall, I even had them all set with MS-DOS connecting to the WiFi. lol

I have a load of SONY PSP devices (maybe 3 or 4?) with loads of software & accessories - again, pretty rare to have such a large collection.

I have the usual PS1 (with original box from 1995 - in fact, it was my original machine!), I have the PS-One (2 or 3 maybe?), I have a PS2 and an XBox 360.

I have a load of laptops ranging from Compaq 486 machines (yes! they run DOS and are awesome!) through to tablet/keyboard devices that are again super rare devices.  These I might list online when I get time.

And, I probably need to get up in the loft to clear out LOADS more hardware & software that I accumulated over the past 30years.

Hahahaa - I just realised I went off on a tangent - nothing new there!

What I really want to get to, was the point that whilst clearing out the above, I picked up a book that I was going to "go through" about 5 years ago, but got distracted by work/work.

The book is called: Programming Computer Games in C. here is a copy on archive.org.

Now, I know what you're going to say, "you can get that info online, there are 1000s of online resources, you could even use a xxxGPT to attempt to write it for you".  However, I wanted to use this book specifically as it is mostly, raw "C", even though they use Microsoft C++ v7 IDE to code, compile & build, they only write in raw "C" and it runs from MS-DOS.

In order to do this, I actually do have several machines / notebooks / laptops that I can actually boot to MS-DOS, have access to the original software, can install natively and get everything working, like it is the 1990s all over again.  However, those machine are big, they are heavy, the PSUs are big, heavy and random. So what I wanted was to use my HONOR laptop and use VirtualBox to set it all up, so I can travel, I can take this machine and run a virtual environment - as you can tell from above, yes, I LOVE(d) having original hardware, nothing beats it - but if / when you are travelling & downsizing to basically live in a campervan, you have to make some choices & running everything from my laptop is my compromise.

So......what is this post all about?  It's a reminder for myself about how I setup the VirtualBox environment in order to be able to follow the book and code, compile, build & execute C code.

Follow me.

First - install VirtualBox.

I'm running UBuntu 24, so it's pretty simple / easy to install, in fact I think I was even lazy and used the SNAP install for VirtualBox. I don't actually remember, but I believe I installed it that way?

Then, from within VirtualBox you need to create a NEW machine, the only important thing is change the Hard Disk.  Select an existing Virtual Hard Disk:

Now, where do I get that HDD image from?

https://archive.org/download/msdos622virtualbox/MS-DOS%206.22.vmdk

Once you have then started the VirtualBox image, it will boot to MS-DOS v6.22.

It will boot really fast.

Now, next step is to install Microsoft C++ 7.  Where do you get that from?

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-c-c/7x

I downloaded the image file above, they are in compressed format.  You can extract them to a directory each.

I opted to use the August version:

These are basically the 9 floppy discs that were provided with the original software.

From within Settings, select Storage, then select top-right Floppy Drive, the little icon.

This will let you navigate to the folder where the above .img files are located.

Select disk01.img

Now, boot the Virtual Machine and it will boot into MS-DOS v6.22.

If you type: 

$ A:

$ dir

$ setup

You will then start the installation of the software.  When asked to switch discs, go back to the Settings, Storage and Floppy Drive and select the next .img file.  You will need to do this for all 9 discs.

Once done, you can remove the .img files and set to None - if you do not, when you reboot, the machine will attempt to boot from the Floppy (unless you've unchecked it in System settings)

The installation will have modified the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, so all params should be good.

However, if you start up PWB (that''s the IDE environment for Microsoft C++ 7), you will not be able to compile, build & execute any code - you will get an error that is a little confusing.

Simplest way to resolve this is to install a memory management piece of software.

How to do that?  simples.

Visit here: https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/drivers/386max

but that is NOT what you are looking for, this is: https://winworldpc.com/product/386max/8x

As before, download and place into the same directory as the others.  Switch to VirtualBox, Settings, Storage and Floppy Drive.  Select the image file.

Then switch to $ A: and perform the installation.  It does a few reboots in order to calibrate everything.

It will modify the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, everything is vanilla, so it will work perfectly.

After the reboots, you'll see the reference to QMAX shoot up the top of the screen when you start.

Now, when you go to PWB, either load an existing project from SAMPLES or write your own "hello world", it will now compile, build and execute perfectly okay! yay.

Let's do the infamous super simple code - I included the graph.h as I wanted to test that it was there for me to test / use from the examples from the book, even though it is not used in this code:

That looks good & what should happen.

oh, in case you were wondering, "why PWB?", here's why:

Right, we're all ready to go now.

Oh, one last thing.

There is a disc in the back of the book:

Here is the companion disc from archive.org.

Again, repeat the above steps for Settings, Storage, Floppy Drive and then perform a $ A:\install.bat

This installs the software into the C: drive (and it will put it into wherever you happen to have been on the C: drive before you flipped to the A: drive - just a word of caution!)

The good things is the floppy disc installs not only the TOOLS that are referenced in the book, but also the SOURCE CODE for the chapters.  But, as a bonus they also include the .EXE and the .MAK files (you can load the .MAK files as Project files within PWB, as this contains the extra settings if they are needed)

This means you also have the finished result .exe as per the book, so you can run them to see the output before you start tweaking / fiddling with the existing C code.

Right, now is the time to "get to understand the code", then look at extending it & enhancing it to do what my creative brain wants to do.

I've had an amusing idea.  How about I make a "game", where, as you progress through the game and achieve progress / win, you get to "unlock" information about me, my history & my life. Bit ego-tistical, but a good way of someone "discovering" more about you without the need to sit down and talk for hours & hours & hours, or a good way to share trauma experiences that you don't really want to discuss openly, something like that.

Might be boring & might be convoluted, but with persistence, if someone is willing to play for long enough, they can find out things about me that go beyond just idle chit-chat or work social discussions.

Hmmm.... can also orientate it with choices too, ie. if you pick certain paths, then it filters the content or you miss out on certain pieces of information & if you ever do "get to the end", in true end of level Doom style, you'll get a grade of how much you completed - then you'll see you only know 57/100 - time to go back around and find more hidden gems :-D

that sounds like a fun & amusing way to gamify getting to know someone.

LOL - I may have stumbled on a way to make the Gen Alpha/Beta Social Media/interaction problem a little bit more entertaining, albeit that will probably be a mobile app/game that is accessible from TikTok or similar.  anyway, let me do the boring C code first.  I'll find that more fun.

GAMIFICATION - abused by the workplace. lol.

Why abused?  Well, I used to have > 100.  They have now set them to "expire" after a period of time, like you "forget" the info?! Appreciate that is worthwhile if they update the info. makes sense. but really?!

Just for amusement, I still have 90 badges. yay, go gamification! :-D