FUCK IT, MISSING DOS WEDNESDAY

Trying to locate an Australian DOS game from ≈ 1988, 𝐋𝐞𝐱, 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐅𝐮𝐧 𝟏.

The game was part of a series of four Edutainment games by Reckon Software/John Grimley.

Here's the box cover art, a text ad, and screenshots of 2 other games in the series! Help a gal out!?

#retrogaming #retrocomputing #msdos #dosgaming #australia

Alt...

Lex, Word Fun One cover art. Wizard with helicopters. Incredible concept. The game allows you to become a wordy pilot of the Semantic Squadron, I've read!

Alt...

Word Fun 1 Based on a helicopter theme, this package provides learners with plenty of hands on action as they take control of their various aircraft. Its interesting graphics reinforce the fantasy aspect of a skill building word rescue assignment. Oppocopter uses words taken from a large pool of carefully selected exact opposite pairs, that have beeen graded into four levels of difficulty. The learner manoeuvres a helicopter to shoot down the correct opposite from a multiple selection. A scorebar counts correct answers, but if an error is made, the correct answer is highlighted. At each level, one of four speeds can be chosen to place a time limit on answering each question. Synocopter asks the learner to effect a rescue by helicopter, by matching a word with its exact synonym to correctly locate the target. There are three levels of difficulty and three speeds to choose from. Alphacopter provides a unique way to practise alphabetical skills as well as strategic problem solving skills. Using a helicopter to lift the top word block off one of three piles and then to move it to another pile, the learner is able to transform a randomly ordered pile of words into an alphabetically ordered array. Six levels grade this activity from a simple task to a most demanding one. The exciting action in all three games gives this package a particularly strong computer games appeal which is well balanced by its sound educational content.

Alt...

Spelling Fun 1 menu screen. In fetching CGA!

Alt...

Lex, Wizard of Words commencement screen. Yet more lovely CGA!

The DOS essentials program list.

Feel free to add to it.

1. Stereo Shell / STS
2. Telix (Terminal Program)
3. ARJ and ZIP compression
4. QE (Text Editor)
5. List (Text Viewer)
6. Norton Utilities
7. The Draw
8. GoldEd (Mail editor / composer)

#DOS #RetroComputing

I bought this board off eBay for the 386EX, but now that I look at it, it appears somewhat interesting.

All those socketed dip chips on the bottom board are ULN2003AN Darlington transistor arrays. They're an open collector design.

The square chips on the left are NEC uPD71055 3x parallel interfaces.

#retrocomputing

Alt...

A photo of two PCBs stacked on top of each other - the smaller board is a 386EX single-board computer with ROM, SRAM , watchdog and an RTC. header pins connect it to the board below, which has a bunch of darlington arrays, 6 40 pin headers, and 4 NEC parallel interface chips.

My husband bought me this many years ago in support of my writing and it's still in pristine condition. The Iomega 250 MB Zip drive sold for $250, $1.00 per megabyte. As of today, 2026-01-16, a comparably price drive is 22TB around $300, and roughly holds 92,274 of these zip disks.

#retro #retrocomputing #throwback #computers #90s

Alt...

A purple zip drive.

Alt...

The Iomega 250 Megabyte zip disk and case.

Fools! I was paying $40 per megabyte of RAM back in 1993!

#retrocomputing

This sketch also runs on #DOjS, my #p5js compatible #CreativeCoding platform for #MSDOS.
Only change is that I needed to remove the SVG rendering as that is not supported.

I will make the source available later.

#RetroComputing #JavaScript

Alt...

A DOS console code editor showing some JavaScript

Alt...

One of the colorful rotational patterns from above

It is not too late to register your Trumpet Winsock.

https://www.tattsoft.com/index.php/sales

#retrocomputing

Alt...

the icon for Trumpet Winsock, showing a blue background, yellow pixel-art trumpet, and green letters "TCP"

Judging by the number of #NetBSD bugreports, i386 gets 3x as many reports as eg. arm:

Category             critical  serious non-crit  TOTAL           Median TTC
port-arm                    8       36        7       51      2m 28d 20:02:56
port-i386                  34      105       52      191      7m  6d 15:28:21

I don't think this says #i386 is 3x as problematic as arm, but may have a lot to do with the size of the userbase.

FreeBSD soft-ditched i386, Debian is hard-ditching it, OpenBSD has nobody to compile ports... Yet the stats seem to indicate demand.

Not quite dead yet.

#RUNBSD #retrocomputing

VCF PNW is back! We are looking for exhibitors and presentations. Get the details at https://vcfpnw.org/ .

#retrocomputing

Alt...

Unofficial VCF PNW 2026 Logo.

I work with nerds.

I traded external personal email addresses with somebody. I sent an email with the subject 'SYN', and got back a reply with SYN-ACK as the subject. Which of course means I had to change the subject again to ACK.

#retrocomputing

More progress on my PC Emulation Book.

I wrote an mdbook plugin to generate tables from CSV references, including a custom syntax that produces in-line links.

So this entire Bios Data Area table is generated from a single line:

{{#csvtable bda.csv}}

#retrocomputing #emulation

Alt...

A screenshot of the HTML rendered chapter on the BIOS Data Area from the "PC Emulation Book" in progress. A table of various values of the BDA are shown - the actual information displayed here is not really relevant so forgive me for not stuffing it all in the alt-text.

Was digging around the Wayback Machine to try to find some old Tseng Labs drivers.

Behold their website from 1997. Best web site ever.

#retrocomputing

Alt...

a very 90's looking web page for Tseng Labs, makers of PC video cards. The page displays very obvious frames, the right side having a bit-too-photorealistic brick texture background for some reason. "Welcome to Tseng Labs" is spray-painted on with what looks to be MS Paint.

HOLY #%@ I FOUND THE DRIVERS

https://discmaster.textfiles.com/browse/29984/wbiz0000-0009/wbiz0005.tar/wbiz0005/NECGRABD.ARC

Everything's there! Even the CMON and CMOFF utilities that control the Z80 CMII card!

#retrocomputing

If you're running Windows and still using WinImage for handling basic floppy disk images, it is time to retire it. It served us well, but there is now a replacement called DiskImageTool that is superior in every conceivable way and is completely free and open source.

The latest version adds a small drag & drop feature I requested, and it's just the final touch that makes it a perfect replacement for me.

https://github.com/Digitoxin1/DiskImageTool

#retrocomputing #emulation

Alt...

A screenshot of DiskImageTool's main interface. An "IMD" image of King's Quest is open. On the left we see a panel of basic disk information and some metadata extracted from the boot sector. On the right we see the contents of the FAT filesystem. Files can be dropped into the right pane to add them to the image.

@hollowone This is a picture from an event I presented at in October. The memory map has separate reserved space for both the CGA and MDA cards. Later EGA and VGA took over the CGA address space, but the MDA address space was left reserved.

These are simple memory mapped devices; software can write to any spot in the memory map to generate text or graphics on the connected display.

You can see the MDA display being used with a debugger to debug the graphics program.

#retrocomputing

Alt...

Pair programming an debugging 1990s style. The 80486 based computer has both a VGA card and an MDA card, giving it dual screen capability.

Happiness is buying a $5 eBay card, having it arrive with excellent packaging and it being as described, adding it to your 486, and not having anything go wrong that then requires 3 hours of debugging.

(I added a cheap Hercules clone to my 486 so that I can enjoy dual screens without having to steal an original IBM MDA card from an XT.)

#retrocomputing

Would you like to see UNIX V4 on MissPiggy? #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #unix #softwarepreservation

EtherSlip users - I have found another bug in the Etherslip driver distributed in the Crynwr packet driver collection. This bug is in the simulated ARP handling that the driver provides while emulating Ethernet. It can corrupt a random six bytes in your network program's memory.

I'm going to change mTCP to not send ARP requests at all when a SLIP connection is in use. I've also patched EtherSlip and will make that available for WATTCP users after doing some more testing.

#retrocomputing

So I got myself a couple of IBM PS/2 model P70 386[1] luggable computers. I see they're quite the fad in some corners of the Retroverse, so I thought I'd pull my usual shenanigans and install OS/2 on one. I went with version 2.11 which is probably the most lightweight version, while also being really beautiful. I'll document my travails in this thread..

Stay tuned, more to come!

Image: My P70 duing the initial attempts at booting the OS/2 2.11 installation floppies.

[1] https://www.ardent-tool.com/8573/P70_Project.html

#Retrocomputing #Installfest #Retrohardware #IBM #OS2

Alt...

Image described in post.

#Christmas #Retrocomputing #Larry #Sierra

Alt...

Screenshot from Sierra's 1990 Christmas Card application depicting a stage with Cupid flying above it with his bow and two dead(?) lovers on the floor with arrows sticking out of their backs. 16-color EGA resolution.

@ltning Okay tags on #Peertube don't do what I think they do, so .. #Floppy #Museum #Retrocomputing #DOS

Ever wanted to connect to a public Unix system with all the thrill of a DEC terminal but the security of Ed25519?

Introducing SSHtty Gateway:  be the envy of your friends, conspire in secret, profit handsomely!

#retrocomputing

The existence of Sun Microsystems implies the existence of Earth Nanosystems.

#retrocomputing #shitpost

Any recommendations for interesting software/games/demos running on a 386SX-25 with 10MB RAM? Still have another 60MB free on that giant hard drive :) Soundblaster and GUS can be added.

Current favorites already running:
- mTCP
- Windows 3.11
- Norton Commander
- Crystal Dream
- Links 386
- Stunts (barely playable)
- Epic Pinball

#retrocomputing #doscember #x86

I just published v0.99 of #jSH, a #JavaScript scripting environment for #MSDOS. This is the 'little' text-mode brother to #DOjS.

- fixed `Screen` object.
- fixed `CGets()`.
- added missing include
- updated zip, mbedTLS and curl

https://github.com/SuperIlu/jSH

#RetroComputing #FreeDOS #DJGPP #RetroDev #RetroDevelopment

Stopped by the Atlanta historical computing society’s holiday party in Lawrenceville! #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #ahcs #georgia