PB DOS

[Brice Manuel]

What is the point of using ancient hard- and software? Are you curating a computer museum?

To clarify, the laptop is actually new hardware, and includes newer technology. Considering all of my 386 laptops back in the day had grayscale screens, I am thrilled with 256 colors at 640x480 on an IPS screen and love the form factor.

The development software is old, which sadly I do not have much choice in. The only thing hard to track down was Teddy Matsumoto’s Diet 1.44 (freeware) which is a must-have for DOS/3.11 systems. Since you can load it as a TSR, you can use it for whole drive compression (it handles data as well as EXEs) and it was always far more reliable than DriveSpace.

As to the why? To understand my mindset, my vehicle is a 43 year old '84 Toyota 4WD Pickup. Still has the original transmission with over 240,000 miles on it and it is still going strong. 22 inch ground clearance will more than get me through the snow getting ready to hit. Newer is not always better.

I preordered a Commodore 64 Ultimate, and plan to develop for it. After spending 4+ years looking for a replacement HYDRA, I found one and ordered it and will be developing for it once again, as well as my Fuzebox and Meggy Jr. RGB. I will also be targeting Game Boy and NES, but will not be seeking publishing deals to get in cartridge form. Also use my Orange Pi 800 and Raspberry Pi 500+. Also have my old Palm M130 which is new and never been used and a Psion Series 3a, which is in excellent shape. Those may see some games as well.

I do appreciate newer. My daily driver is a maxed out M3 Air. Very powerful system, and allows me to run GPTs OSS 20B MXFP4 model locally. A powerhouse I can use for coding, audio & video production and literally replaced several Windows machines.