The platinum sponsor demonstrates the 100 ways for poor Larry Laffer to die (and resurrect) #EBC25 #RunBSD #EuroBSDcon #EuroBSDCon2025 #DOS #OS2 #retrogaming #SierraOnline

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Man with a vintage computer playing LeisySuit Larry

I'm going to be talking about C compilers and DOS at my next retrocomputing event and I'm going to hand out "quick reference" style cards to anybody that passes by. Here is my first draft; what am I missing that I should include?

(I'm targeting an index card for these, so space is limited.)

#retrocomputing #dos

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C Programming in DOS Tips quick reference card draft.

I'm going to be participating at the next Interim Computer Festival in Seattle in two weeks. Here is the banner for the table that I'm having printed.

https://sdf.org/icf/

October 4th and 5th, Seattle

#retrocomputing #dos

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Banner for ICF - "C programming in DOS is fun. Change my mind."

Here we go again, #EuroBSDCon! I may have mentioned it, but it's really happening*: I'm giving a talk again, this time titled:

Dirty Tricks: Using #nginx and #Lua to thwart bots and skript kiddies

This talk is specifically for anyone who

• has tried to host a BBS on the Internet,
• is struggling with scrapers and bots,
• lives in the #RetroComputing bubble,
• wants to see an early '90s PC on stage,
• needs a telnet captcha, or
• simply has nothing better to do.

Read more about it here, take a look at the conference schedule, and buy your ticket!

See you there!

#FreeBSD #Security #BSD #RunBSD #DOS #RunDOS #TheDraw #AnsiArt

* I didn't want to post this until I was fairly certain I could even pull this off..

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Introduction screen from my talk, presented in ANSI art. The words "nginx" and "LUA" in large ANSI fonts in the top left and bottom right corners, with some of the text from the talk description (linked in the post) in the middle.

Now THIS is how I like it. 86Box 5.0 has quickly taken over my existing virtual machines without any issues. Everything seems to be working fine and its new VM manager is looking really nice!

P. S.: First impression: PS/2 mouse support feels so much smoother than before!

86Box 5.0: https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases/tag/v5.0
ROM repository: https://github.com/86Box/roms

#86Box #Emulation #PCGaming #DOSGaming #RetroGaming #RetroComputing #Windows #Microsoft #MSDOS #DOS #VirtualMachine

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86Box upgraded to version 5.0. Looking good!

Expanded the list of #MSDOS development resources with suggestions from the community...

#RetroDev #RetroComputing #RetroDevelopment #DOS

I added more compiler and a treasure trove of documentation for #MSDOS programming!

#RetroDev #RetroComputing #RetroDevelopment #DOS

Do you remember using WordStar on the Televideo Tele-PC? Of course you don’t!
But now you can. Don’t you want to frob that keyboard?

#retrocomputing #dos #pc #wordstar #wordprocessor

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A televideo Tele-PC

The contenders: QuickView Pro version (dvpro), Digital Sound System 3.1 (dss) and MPXPlay 1.67 (mpx). The file: Astral Projection's "Bizarre Contact" from the album "Ten".

Enjoy these clips :D

#Retrocomputing #VacationInMyHead #Multimedia

As promised: PartUtil a limited partition editor that makes dual booting DOS and Win 9x without a boot manager easier.

Hide, unhide and make partitions active. Save and restore MBRs to files. And a few extra tricks that help with initial setup. Runs on any PC compatible and any version of DOS. Source code included.

(I've been using an earlier version of this for years on a PCjr. This is a complete rewrite that is finally worth sharing.)

http://www.brutman.com/PartUtil/PartUtil.html

#retrocomputing #dos

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PartUtil, a limited partition editor that makes dual booting without a boot manager easier.

Coming soon ... a utility to make swapping active partitions easier.

On my PCjr I like to switch between DOS 3.3 and DOS 5, while keeping the drive letters in the extended partition the same. To do that you have to mark the new partition active, but also hide the old partition. FDISK doesn't allow that.

Other tools exist but they are often not small machine friendly. I wrote a similar utility years ago but I lost the source code, so here it is recreated and enhanced.

#retrocomputing #dos

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A screen shot of a hard drive partition table editor. DOS 6.3 is active, while DOS 2.1 and DOS 3.3 are hidden.

Yay! Or maybe AIEEE! Seems like I'm giving a talk at #EuroBSDCon again this year!

Anyone who has been following me here for a while will know I'm a hopeless #retrocomputing nerd, and I will make no attempt at hiding it during my talk:

Dirty Tricks: Using nginx and Lua to thwart bots and skript kiddies

I'll (try to) show how you can protect your #BBS from drive-by portscans and your production systems from #DDoS attacks using all the wrong tools.

Dietary warning: may contain traces of floppies.

https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2025/talk/review/RHDFBQWZEVC833T3WDLDEXYFQVRWJKMN #FreeBSD #BSD #Unix #DOS #RunBSD

For any #MTCP, #DOS and #Retrocomputing nerds out there who are also running httpserv and want pretty graphs, poke me for a recipe for a hideosly bloated #logstash configuration to ingest the UDP logs.

I feed it to #Graylog which stores the data in #Opensearch - a pipeline that combined (and this is accurate) needs, conservatively, 4096 times as much RAM as the floppy museum itself (8MB).

And while looking at this when making this screenshot: I wonder why someone would hit http//floppy.museum with a Referer-header indicating they come from a salesforce-dot-com address? http-colon-slashslash-136.146.46.127 (about halfway down the list).

#msdos #bloatware #theremustbeabetterway

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Screenshot of a Graylog dashboard showing number of hits in the last 24h, a world map with geographic distribution of the source IPs, a doughnut showing the distribution of pages visited (mostly the root path), a bar graph showing request counts per URI over time, and finally a list of all the recent requests. This list contains timestamp, which museum server handled the request, the remote IP, the country code of the remote IP, the path requested, and the Referer, if any.

Time for a #DOS #retrogaming #LAN party!

We're going to play Carmageddon, C&C, Descent, Doom (1,2), Duke3D, GTA, OMF2097, Quake, Red Alert, Rise of the Triad, Terminal Velocity, and Warcraft 2.

#retrocomputing #freedos

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A picture of 4 pentium 2 systems around a table with LCD screens

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A picture of an eight socket extension cable, with 7 plugs in

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A rats nest of cables in the middle of 4 LCD screens

The latest mTCP for DOS is available!

This version includes some changes to improve TCP reliability on long running (but idle) connections, black & white Sixel graphics in Telnet, a Telnet emulation bug fix, and other small fixes sprinkled around.

The source code to NetDrive (network attached storage) is also published now - enjoy reading an unholy mix of x86 assembly code talking to Golang over UDP!

Spread the word! Friends don't let friends run old code ...

#retrocomputing #dos #mtcp