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Interesting, "All files within this repo are released under the MIT License as per the LICENSE file stored in the root of this repo," but did they include the source for the toolchain? I may be looking in the wrong place...

The "difference" is, that this is the FreeDOS project, thus they focus on that environment.

The Digital Mars compiler for DOS is available for free.

https://www.digitalmars.com/

Not really, I was expecteding the tutorial to somehow dig out Turbo C, or Quick C.

I'm guessing that PC-Hack 1.0, the ancestor of Nethack, contains a fair subset of curses, and pdcurses is from 01987 according to the bottom of https://github.com/wmcbrine/PDCurses/blob/master/docs/HISTOR.... But on the IBM, curses mostly solved the problem of porting Unix software to MS-DOS. The problems it solved on Unix, like minimizing characters transmitted to the terminal, papering over differences between terminal types, and setting cbreak mode, just didn't exist.

Most of us coding at the time only cared about Turbo Vision, starting with Turbo Pascal 6. and Turbo C++ 3.0.

Or the other variant being TUI libraries for Clipper.

By 1994, most folks on PC were already doing Windows 3.x, and only using MS-DOS for games.

I only got to learn about curses years later.

AFAIK, curses worked with ANSI codes while conio directly accessed the screen buffer. ANSI support on DOS wasn’t enabled commonly as it needed a separate device driver, ANSI.SYS, to work, and it usually made DOS text output slower.

So, even if curses were available on DOS at the time, nobody would have preferred to use it.

The typical 320x200 mode that games used back then ran at 70Hz.

I used FreeDOS once to run ancient software which controlled an industrial size oven. The client was having an ever increasing challenge of sourcing IDE disks (in 2008) so I was contracted to find a solution.

Eventually we settled on industrial PCs, solid state media and FreeDOS.

It was significantly cheaper than replacing the oven at £1M each.... in 50 of their factories worldwide.

I hobby-code for DOS, partly because of nostalgia, but much also because it (specifically DOSBox, or DOSBox-X) is such a fantastic and stable virtual machine. No one is going to deprecate even some minor part of the API. And some emulators give you fun features like allowing any screen resolution to be set up to run in fullscreen on a modern monitor (exposed using standard VESA API inside of DOS).

There are some other retro computer or consoles that could probably be just as useful for this. But DOSBox (as well as QEMU+FreeDOS, for those that prefer that) are nice because they have fully open source implementation from the CPU-level up to the user utilities, so there is no need to mess with dodgy ROM downloads or such to get things working.

(Not development in C)

I've used FreeDOS for doing BIOS updates. In the pre-UEFI days it was common for manufacturers to provide BIOS updates as a DOS executable, apparently with the expectation that the customer would be able to dig up some old MS-DOS disk somewhere.

I suppose nowadays there isn't much use for that anymore thanks to doing FW updates via UEFI capsules. Though at least on the Linux side (LVFS/fwupd) it seems most PC clone vendors aren't on board yet.

I have it on my to-do list to install FreeDOS on bare metal to set up a retro gaming box. Tried once, but for some reason the installer failed writing to disk. Anyway, if anyone is making new FreeDOS games, I'll gladly pay for them, and it'll give me an excuse to go down that avenue again.

I suppose there could be a use for programming for computers that would otherwise be ewaste, although I'm not sure how much ewaste is out there that can run DOS but not, say, Linux or a BSD. Lots has already been trashed or recycled, and my impression is that retrocomputing enthusiasts are thinning out the market as well.

MS-DOS was a reasonable bootloader for Linux and Windows 95; I imagine FreeDOS might be a better one if you wanted to do hobby OSDev. Historically you could get hard real time performance for things like controlling steppers from your parallel port under MS-DOS, but nowadays you'd just use Freeduino or an iCE40. Also maybe brushless motors.

Almost zero, the non-zero ones are about supporting legacy software/hardware. Also I would not touch C on any DOS platform, since the great Turbo Pascal exists for it. Nothing else even compares to it.

From the soydev extension.