The best GUI for DOS you haven't heard of: COSTA [runs on XT PC!] 

I pulled the code and got it to compile. Just like to say this is some really nice clean code and thanks for all your notes. Great project!

@@stevedegeorge726 Happy to hear! I hope you have fun with it. And thank you for the compliment of my code - even as a hobby developer it means a lot to me that people appreciate my work!

This is the next thing I'm installing on my DOS machines. I love seeing new DOS software. I wonder if it will run on my Tandy 1000. It's incredible that you made this thing in Visual BASIC. Mind blown. Great work!

@@IndianaJoenz I would be very interested to hear if it runs on your Tandy! I've never had one of those, so it would be fun to have that tested. And also, thank you for the nice words!

Great work! I’m blown away by the thought of using open-source DOS 4.0 and this for a true open-source DOS computing experience! Any thoughts about a POSIX layer and GUI terminal for it? This would pair perfectly with all the Book88, Book86, Book386 handheld laptop type retro-modern machines.

Bad video. Although I am indeed ignorant for not including the GEM GUI that was mentioned in previous comments, I was aware of Arachne, PC-MOS 386, and Win95, and I purposely didn't include them. They don't exactly fall in the traditional GUI sense category. Arachne is a web browser, pc-mos386 is a dos clone and win95 had its own Dos version that was fundamentaly intergrated with Windows.

Latest msdos I can think of, would have been 98ME... As for GUI dosshells, DosStart from 2002 comes in mind (it's compatible with freedos). I remember Norton Commander. I think that alternative was Volkov commander, and devs behind WinRAR had something in the spirit as well. In Linux Midnight Commander ('mc') is in the spirit.

Not everyone here is 14 mate... Us 50 year olds were running 6800's, Atari's etc... MS DOS was one of many in the space until the 1990's, when the PC won.

@@tcpnetworks He's right. When Costa was released in 2004, most former DOS users already used Windows XP. No one used Costa in the 80s, it just didn't exist.

@@tcpnetworks i'm almos 50, been using PC from the XT/286 era and never heard about this shell for MS-DOS and i have old computers with XP, 7, 98+6.22 running. I think you misunderstood the comment of @jameslewis2635

You are absolutely right, Costa is and always was a niche product, even from the beginning. It's intended to be used on old DOS computers, or in DOS virtual machines or emulators such as DOSBox. Most of all, it's a hobby project that I enjoy working on every once in a blue moon :)

Tiles? Windows? What's next? Plates?

​@@southernflatland are u dumb?

@@southernflatlandforks

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

I find they’re much less efficient. The best use of Window tiling is Apple’s Expose feature where you can make all the windows tile when you want and then find the one you want

An open source implementation of Windows 3.1 or, better yet, Windows 95 would be great. But unfortunately the effort is so high and the benefit is so low, with a dying generation of C and x86 assembler developers who grew up with it, that it will probably remain a dream forever. For pure Windows applications, Wine on top of a Linux kernel or simply ReactOS is sufficient in the open source area. But for old computers it would be powerful in combination with FreeDOS.

I did consider moving Costa to FreeBASIC, but two things held me back. The big difference being that FreeBASIC is 32-bit. Moving to 32-bit would mean incompatibility with older CPUs, like the one in the XT in the video. One of the goals is to make Costa run on almost anything. The other reason I haven't switched to FreeBASIC, is that Visual Basic for DOS is much more constrained. I've run into limits many times while developing, which I see as a challenge to try to fit things into as little memory and as small files as possible. It's part of the fun when developing for DOS, in my opinion :)

​@@OpenGL4ever I personally just want a "Winbox", something like Dosbox but specifically for emulating old 16 bit Windows games. Sadly, because nothing like that exists there are many early Windows games that just can't be legally rereleased because they can't be made to run on modern systems. Even using Wine in the past I've not been able to figure out how to deal with games that require 256 color mode.

There is now an open source implementation for modern operating systems of GW-Basic called PC-Basic. The name is a bit unfortunate as it coincides with the original Basic that shipped with IBM PCs. The original was simply called PC Basic too and GW- Basic is basically Microsoft's standalone version that no longer requires Microsoft's Basic in the IBM BIOS.

I am sorry, I didn't know about it. It looks very cool.

@@djopensourceThe music app that uses the Tandy 3 voice sound chip is pretty neat - especially for the time - The Tandy 1000 hardware is a sort of cloned and improved version of the PC Jr - It has a 16 color mode that's not EGA but instead an enhanced version of CGA. I could run the game "Beetlejuice Skeletons in the closet" in the Tandy 16 color mode at the cost of a little resolution back in the day.

Hells to the yeah - you didn't mention that there are several greatly differing versions of Deskmate too - Personal Deskmate 2 is clearly and obviously different from all the flavors of Deskmate 3. You can switch DOSBox to Tandy emulation mode to run PDM2 and use the music app - The TVDog Tandy 1000 archive is still up after al this time and there are still a lot .SNG files there to use with Deskmate Music

I had a 1000 RLX, I loved Desk Mate, learned DOS and BASIC!

Quick Menu 3 was great - I've used that in the past as well.

Slight correction: The 8-bit Atari's 6502 ran at 1.79MHz. That said, I do remember a GUI for the 8-bit, and it was pretty neat, but not too practical. The one I remember wasn't written in BASIC though.

@@VaporChaseThe frequency depended on which side of Atlantic your system was made for - the NTSC systems ran at 1.79, while PAL systems ran at 1.77 - the CPU frequency had to be in sync with color clock & pixel clock (pixel clock was always 4x CPU clock, if I calculate correctly, and color clock was half of that). And as for the GUI in BASIC - I myself wrote a thing not too dissimilar for the exact same system and in the same BASIC - a drawing program which, by the time I was about to implement the last functions, was too large to fit in memory and was overflowing to the memory space that I reserved for the graphical screen...so I actually never got to finish it :)

@@Beus38Ah, I did not know the CPU frequency was slightly different on PAL machines, but it does make sense that it would have to be. :) Cool about the drawing program, but I know what it's like to run up against the limitations of paged memory. :) That's when you start going through all your code and trying to weed out every last byte of unnecessary code you can to try and cram it all in there. And sometimes it just doesn't work.

@@VaporChaseSeems like I need to split my replies to a few shorter ones - any longer ones are simply disappearing because YT thinks it's funny... Yeah, that's also why Atari 2600's 6507 CPU ran at 1.19 MHz (1.193182) in NTSC vs. 1.18 MHz (1.182298) in PAL - the 1977 silicon was not that speed-capable yet, so this was just below its maximum, and it was exactly color clock / 3.

@@VaporChaseAnd yes, the memory limitations - that's where I learned about them the hard way, but that's also when I realised another fundamental truth - that high-level languages like BASIC will never be as speed- and memory-efficient as the low-level ones (when written well). So instead of going through my code and trying in vain to save some byte of the BASIC pseudocode here and there, it was in that time that I changed lane completely and instead started to code in assembler (which I was already superficially familiar with at the time).

The joint partnership wasn't the problem, the problem of OS/2 was, they shipped it with Windows 3.x. As a result, no developer saw a reason to develop a GUI application natively for OS/2. Because when he developed for Windows alone, he covered both platforms. Because OS/2 Warp 3.0 was shipped with Windows in the blue spine version. Therefore, OS/2 did not succeed due to the lack of applications. There were a few other mistakes from IBM, but that was definitely the biggest one.

Thanks, I only remember it as another operating system that did not get used much or for long. Somewhere around I have a copy of it and my copy and memory was always that it had it own package and came stand alone. It coming as part of a bundle only would have not been good for it and I have a vague memory of that bundle maybe. @@OpenGL4ever

As it also was the GUI for the Atari ST. I wonder if the PC world had taken that route, would we have better computing now or would all have ended up the same, just with slightly different icons?

I think you mean "Norton Desktop for DOS". "DOS Navigator" is a freeware Norton Commander clone.

@@ssokolow It's as much of NC clone as Quake is Doom clone. If you worked with it extensively you know it's much more versatile than NC - and in many cases works quite differently too.

@@jwhite5008 My point is that NC and DN are both orthodox file managers, while Norton Desktop for DOS is probably best described as "What if DOS Shell and the Macintosh Finder had a text-mode baby?" (Though, to be fair, I thought it's what you meant by "let's turn norton commander into almost an OS" because Norton Desktop for DOS 1.0 is more or less literally "let's take our Norton Commander source code and use it to implement an approximation of Norton Desktop for Windows 2.0 in text mode".)

I've uploaded a screenshot of Norton Desktop for DOS v1.0 as imgur album "j7K4YRL" (image "jwsCmEm")... though, given RU-vid's attitude toward links, you'll have to construct the link yourself.

​@@jwhite5008Perfectly put ;) I myself switched from using NC to DN as soon as I learned of its existence, have used it for years and years and never turned back :) An amazing tool indeed...and I still run it to this day on my old DOS PCs :)

Yes, indeed! Would be fun to see that in action, who would have thought back in the day that we would ever see MS-DOS open sourced.

To complete the open source experience, an open source reimplementation of Windows for Workgroups 3.1 would be required.

Glad to hear you like my GUI - FreeDOS is one of the OS'es I've tested on, so it should run just fine :)

Calmira is an awesome project. I’ve used it a lot back in the day. It was also open source so I had some fun trying to customize the code - using Borland Delphi if I remember correctly.

ε τι έκανε; τα σκάτωσε και το μετανιωσε πικρά 😆

A common misconception is that Windows 9x "ran on dos." While it uses DOS to boot up, Windows 95 uses its own kernel which takes over after DOS has started(which is to say, almost immediately).

​@@Megatog615 You could "exit to DOS" from Windows without rebooting, so it was a DOS shell.

@@jimbotron70 yes, you could. the 9x kernel gives up control.

@@jimbotron70 No it wasn't. Windows 95 was an operating system, the same applies to Windows 3.0 btw. The latter just required DOS as boot loader. But by and large it was an operating system and Windows 3.0 had its own kernel. Megatog615 is therefore right. Assuming it's just a GUI is a common misconception. This is mostly said by laypeople who don't understand much about the internals of an operating system.

@@OpenGL4ever It was an hybrid OS with dual kernels.

Or pacman -S mc us folks who use Arch btw will not be silenced!

I never needed Norton Commander. Back then I was mostly a gamer and NC simply required too much memory. So I learned the DOS command line commands. That's why I still use the command line today under Linux.

I have a huge sympathy for version 2.

Ο αλγόριθμος του youtube φταίει για όλα ... δεν πειράζει. Και πάλι οτι καλύτερο εύχομαι@@djopensource

The exact same thing that you do with all the rest things in your life: Waste some time until death fulfills our destiny.

You have no idea how many people have asked me that while I've worked on it - "Who do you expect to use that?" I use it myself, a few family and friends use it on their DOSBox emulators. Really, I just enjoy coding it and trying to fit as much as I can while working against the constraints of DOS and BASIC. It's a fun project. Anyone who uses it for real, well that's just a welcome bonus that brings me joy! :)

Well, good work, I like such projects. 👍

Google returned no results for this. Could you share a link?

@@djopensource See too the 'BlackStrip Shell'.

and SEAL gui

That's wrong. The reason why it was limited to one application at a time was that the first two Windows versions all ran in real mode and therefore only had at best 640 KiB of RAM available for Windows and the application based on it. This limitation could only be broken with Windows 3.0, because Windows 3.0 could also run in protected mode and Windows 3.1 only ran in protected mode. In protected mode you had access to up to 16 MiB of RAM for 286 processors and theoretically up to 4 GiB on 386 processors.

There was also xtree and pctool, but once win3 was out they were not really used as much Same with the first overall menu system once the pc booted eg Power Menu , Menu works

Windows 98 is not a GUI, it's an operating system moving the DOS kernel mostly out of the way.

Good notice. It is unusable. But the slow load concerns the graphics, so perhaps it is usable with a strong ISA graphic card.

@@djopensource It would make sense to compile it with FreeBasic. This may optimize machine code better than Quick Basic. Otherwise, the 8-bit XT-BUS is simply far too slow for EGA and VGA graphics and high resolutions. The pixel fill rate you can achieve with it is abysmally slow. A GUI screams for at least a 16 bit ISA bus or even better 32 bit VESA local bus or PCI.

The best one is Windows 3.0 of these. It was the first one that could offer native GUI applications more than 640 KiB of RAM because it ran in protected mode and it was able to switch the CPU back to real mode on a 286 CPU. That was the big trick of Windows 3.0 and the reason that paved its success.

It was never meant as a competitor for Windows or other major GUIs, it’s a hobby project aimed at old DOS PCs and DOS emulators such as DOSBox.

Well, yes and no. It is certainly true that languages such as C or Assembly would produce faster code, but for the most part the code is executed fast enough for the user not to notice any delays. There’s two main sources of delay in Costa - disk and graphics. The disks in these old computers are slow, and Costa doesn’t have any cache for icon files etc. in memory, which is why disk caching software such as SmartDrive is recommended to be used with Costa. That really helps. Graphics are tougher. Costa utilizes built-in graphics routines from the Microsoft BASIC run-time library to draw pixels on screen, and this could potentially be optimized with custom assembly code. But the fact remains that the planar design of the 640x350 resolution used is inherently slow compared to say the flat layout of the 320x200 resolution. Costa was designed and tested on a 386sx, on which it runs just fine. It’s been tested on older machines, but performance will of course decrease. I hope this doesn’t come off as a defensive rant, it’s not meant to be. It’s just a discussion that’s really interesting to me, as I’ve always been balancing my goals with Costa up against the time I am able to invest in this hobby project :)

The red/yellow theme shown in the video is included as a throwback to the “Hotdog Stand” theme in Windows 3.x, it’s not the default theme ;)

I have MS-DOS installed on a floppy disk, and it's not very fast.. ☹️

Windows 95 is far more powerful (in the meaning of faster) than MS-DOS, thanks to 32-bit hardware access and 32-bit memory management. MS-DOS is a bottleneck on a 32 bit machine starting from an 386 an on-wards that essentially slows down the machine's potential.

Disneyland.

😂

He sounds Greek