That's nice about X11, I don't think it cares that your OS is "command line only" or not. There are several X11 servers for Windows, which can run graphical apps on your "command line" linux or Unix.
Anectodal evidence, but some stupid smartphone from 2013 can read VP8 fine, at least if it's in a.webm. Make a webm as if it were for youtube and I'm suspecting it's rather well supported on the long term. H264 is the obviously easier choice but only in.mp4 container else it fails. Mmm,.3gp can contain H264 too actually. Well I sort of don't like all this crap. But if something can read video from USB, there's good chance it can read H264 mp4.
No laptops with FreeDOS?, from MSI, etc. on retailer sites. That'd be the easiest to find, laptops with linux are very rare since no one wants to be left supporting it.
Think old games with "illegal" floppy disk sectors, but this time with some anomalous out of spec bursts on the signal. Now, either you gear defeats this old analog stuff, or it is of no consequence given it was intended to make a second VCR in writing mode fail.
BTW the one converter I saw was not really a converter per se, but a combined VCR and DVD player and burner. An old TV tuner PCI card would be cool too : there's usually a composite input, and even if the TV antenna input isn't useful for TV anymore you may use it to receive FM radio instead.
lol this one uses the Doom engine. (you can even press F11 to brighten it up). Not sure if javascript can do that yet. Well, it could but before Doom (real version) was removed from the web it ran at snail's pace.
Flash 11.2 on linux still works. I would wonder about the Ubuntu on Windows 10 thing : run Firefox's linux version and Flash 11.2, coming through apt-get upgrade?
For that matter, make a 16/10 21" CRT with HDMI etc. inputs and I'd be very interested. With 1920x1200 85Hz for some stuff, 1440x900 120Hz for other stuff (like most casual desktop usage), 1920x1080 60Hz works if you plug in random crap, 1024x768 or 1280x1024 with black bars for the odd thing, etc.
It would be trivial technologically wise (except for concerns of "lost technology") and there would be something of a market already with nostalgia gamers, fringe LCD haters and old fucks, what have you. But in these times, you can't have anything different. Even with LCD monitors, there's more choice lately but you can't get a monitor that's 16/10 and high refresh, or 16/10 and big, or all three at once. (nor even a 27" 1080p at 144Hz)
The idea is to have video output flow arbitrarily. Imagine adding more outputs on a card for your integrated graphics, without needing to go dual GPU ; or on the contrary, have two different GPU, one for Windows and one for Linux but just one set of outputs. So that you don't need to fiddle with a KVM switch, dual input monitors and their menus, be stuck with one or two Linux monitors next to one Windows monitor (all fixed), etc.
There are some existing technologies that do something like that but in specific use cases : laptops with Intel + nvidia (etc.) GPUs, DMA_BUF in GPL open source linux drivers (no idea what it's actually used for in the real world), USB 3 to video output adapters, GPU that output to their H264 or H265 encoder (then stuff happens on a network), Xbox with special hardware for compositing of Metro apps (whatever you call them) with game output - the latter is something that all happens on the same, single physical chip.
What if you've got a near future PC, where hardware can just send and receive compressed Displayport over PCIe 4.0, and it's somehow easily supported (by layers of crap like software, drivers, multiple vendors, hypervisors..). Blends with video inputs too.
Passwords are on my computer but I can't access them! What's in/etc/shadow is completely garbled and not the right size. Anyway, what's your freedom on Facebok? How do you download gmail and run it on your server? With everything revolving around a few handfuls of "services", you may as well run linux of varying ideological purity, NetBSD or the Hurd and you'll still be fucked if you don't realize what you're doing.
Looks like 1080p screens? (with that stupid 16:9 and 1080 width, but that's still a decent compromise) Could be cheapie monitors, 21.5" non-TN. It would be only a slight exageration to pretend that you can get the whole set up, everything for $1K. Well, with something like a dual core CPU and two Radeon 360 in crossfire (and running Windows for the support) and praying for a low end game to run at 10 megapixels on that you might barely get it quite affordable.
Same usually ; these releases used to be called RC not Beta. But with Mint 18 there's a jump to a "weird" version of Ubuntu (systemd instead of upstart, just observing that this is the biggest changed I've ever seen), GTK3 went really rogue so little stupid things like the Gnome Minesweeper and games will be crapified.
So for the first time I feel like waiting for 18.1, although it's just that I'd rather get a new hard drive to install the new OS on and leave the older one alone.
Xbox 360 was the first really power hungry console and the last one to have all custom hardware (CPU and GPU used nowhere else, special eDRAM die with ROP hardware..). Even some regular PC had trouble back then too : Pentium 4 3GHz Prescott on low end motherboard, that's like over 60 amps that go through the socket? (not a pb if the stuff keeps up), followed by major GPU solder trouble the next year. I suspect the Xbox One will not have any of these troubles, and has more generous cooling so it out to keep working.
Would a modern DOS be something that runs on top of UEFI, or somehow inside UEFI? Framebuffer instead of (or in addition to) 80x25, UEFI's mouse instead of DOS mouse driver, etc. For all I care it could be single tasking with a flat 64bit memory space. It might run on all supported CPU architectures even. But you're still stuck with PC speaker and no sound I believe.
Eh now there's FTP stuff with fuse. Or Jedit in early 00s to edit files on an ftp (there must be a thousand editors that do this but this one was - is - a desktop java application and thus cross-platform in Windows 9x, XP, Unix)
I like to download the iso (something that boots FreeDOS and runs some graphical wizard stuff I'm not interested in), mount the iso, extract the BIOS and flashing program from subdirectories/archive/floppy image, put them on USB and boot MS-DOS 7.10 to run the thing.
Oh crap, I had no idea to look for keyboard input there:) Availability of.BAS example files/games may have varied between DOS, Windows 95 and 98. So I should have looked for off-line help back then be it a book, people that knew about programming, getting someone to print nibbles.bas. Yes scrolling like a NES game wasn't something I even considered doable (doing something tiled-based, slow and naive in 40x25 text mode would have been fun already)
Qbasic was included in Windows 9x and even NT4 apparently. Notably, "Microsoft Edit" was a shim that called qbasic.exe in editor-only mode (it's still better than vi and nano). Qbasic itself allows to play short high pitched tones through the PC speaker to startle people around you, or to annoy them much with a long duration 4KHz for instance.
What's too bad is the keyboard input, unless there's some other way you couldn't really use continuous keyboard input for something like a space invader clone. Everyone used a loop like 10 A$=INKEY$ : IF A$="" THEN 10 which let you input a single key without needing to hit return, but you would just move single step by single step or trigger keyboard repeating and move wildly. Tweaking keyboard repeating in BIOS (or with a DOS program?) might have helped in some way. That alone prevented attempts at making "serious" games (and in mid to late 90s, Internet access was prohibitively expensive in Western Europe still so Qbasic and its detailed help files is what you got for free)
Mind you, I would be okay with rifle companies lobbying for gun control and Lockheed Martin funding anti-war protests, while that's still an excessive use of private money power for political power that'd be a change.
Hire some talented programmers to write a program, and then maintain it forever. You revile binary compatibility because it's an enabler of proprietary software (most of it freeware written by a single person), the flipside is your stuff stops working after a few years.
Like many here I've eventually abandoned Windows but face it, then the fun is over. Not much to do except spend your time in firefox, bash and vlc.
In Europe where fuel efficiency was a thing even post-WW2 (what with the war and imported oil) the cars have been increasing in weight for the last two decades.
The average PC has Intel graphics or an old midrange or low end graphics card. In fact the average new PC is likely behind that 5 year old top of the line PC.
Here you could leave it on, hopefully it blanks the screen and sits there eating 0.5 watt. Better yet, have the option for save/load state to be used automatically on start up and shut down, but with no backtracking (in that mode) and when you're dead and game over, you're dead. Start over or get lost.
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That's nice about X11, I don't think it cares that your OS is "command line only" or not.
There are several X11 servers for Windows, which can run graphical apps on your "command line" linux or Unix.
Not accurate : you can poison your wife or husband to death and re-marry. You'll be well considered, as long as you don't get caught.
Same reason I miss floppies.
Anectodal evidence, but some stupid smartphone from 2013 can read VP8 fine, at least if it's in a .webm. Make a webm as if it were for youtube and I'm suspecting it's rather well supported on the long term. .mp4 container else it fails. Mmm, .3gp can contain H264 too actually. Well I sort of don't like all this crap. But if something can read video from USB, there's good chance it can read H264 mp4.
H264 is the obviously easier choice but only in
No laptops with FreeDOS?, from MSI, etc. on retailer sites.
That'd be the easiest to find, laptops with linux are very rare since no one wants to be left supporting it.
Think old games with "illegal" floppy disk sectors, but this time with some anomalous out of spec bursts on the signal.
Now, either you gear defeats this old analog stuff, or it is of no consequence given it was intended to make a second VCR in writing mode fail.
BTW the one converter I saw was not really a converter per se, but a combined VCR and DVD player and burner.
An old TV tuner PCI card would be cool too : there's usually a composite input, and even if the TV antenna input isn't useful for TV anymore you may use it to receive FM radio instead.
lol this one uses the Doom engine. (you can even press F11 to brighten it up).
Not sure if javascript can do that yet. Well, it could but before Doom (real version) was removed from the web it ran at snail's pace.
http://www.officegamespot.com/...
Flash 11.2 on linux still works. I would wonder about the Ubuntu on Windows 10 thing : run Firefox's linux version and Flash 11.2, coming through apt-get upgrade?
Flashblock works? There was a time it was dead, had to use ad blocking instead.
When it did work, there was a whitelist feature that worked.
For that matter, make a 16/10 21" CRT with HDMI etc. inputs and I'd be very interested. With 1920x1200 85Hz for some stuff, 1440x900 120Hz for other stuff (like most casual desktop usage), 1920x1080 60Hz works if you plug in random crap, 1024x768 or 1280x1024 with black bars for the odd thing, etc.
It would be trivial technologically wise (except for concerns of "lost technology") and there would be something of a market already with nostalgia gamers, fringe LCD haters and old fucks, what have you. But in these times, you can't have anything different.
Even with LCD monitors, there's more choice lately but you can't get a monitor that's 16/10 and high refresh, or 16/10 and big, or all three at once. (nor even a 27" 1080p at 144Hz)
The idea is to have video output flow arbitrarily. Imagine adding more outputs on a card for your integrated graphics, without needing to go dual GPU ; or on the contrary, have two different GPU, one for Windows and one for Linux but just one set of outputs. So that you don't need to fiddle with a KVM switch, dual input monitors and their menus, be stuck with one or two Linux monitors next to one Windows monitor (all fixed), etc.
There are some existing technologies that do something like that but in specific use cases : laptops with Intel + nvidia (etc.) GPUs, DMA_BUF in GPL open source linux drivers (no idea what it's actually used for in the real world), USB 3 to video output adapters, GPU that output to their H264 or H265 encoder (then stuff happens on a network), Xbox with special hardware for compositing of Metro apps (whatever you call them) with game output - the latter is something that all happens on the same, single physical chip.
What if you've got a near future PC, where hardware can just send and receive compressed Displayport over PCIe 4.0, and it's somehow easily supported (by layers of crap like software, drivers, multiple vendors, hypervisors..).
Blends with video inputs too.
Passwords are on my computer but I can't access them! What's in /etc/shadow is completely garbled and not the right size.
Anyway, what's your freedom on Facebok? How do you download gmail and run it on your server?
With everything revolving around a few handfuls of "services", you may as well run linux of varying ideological purity, NetBSD or the Hurd and you'll still be fucked if you don't realize what you're doing.
Looks like 1080p screens? (with that stupid 16:9 and 1080 width, but that's still a decent compromise)
Could be cheapie monitors, 21.5" non-TN. It would be only a slight exageration to pretend that you can get the whole set up, everything for $1K.
Well, with something like a dual core CPU and two Radeon 360 in crossfire (and running Windows for the support) and praying for a low end game to run at 10 megapixels on that you might barely get it quite affordable.
Same usually ; these releases used to be called RC not Beta. But with Mint 18 there's a jump to a "weird" version of Ubuntu (systemd instead of upstart, just observing that this is the biggest changed I've ever seen), GTK3 went really rogue so little stupid things like the Gnome Minesweeper and games will be crapified.
So for the first time I feel like waiting for 18.1, although it's just that I'd rather get a new hard drive to install the new OS on and leave the older one alone.
Xbox 360 was the first really power hungry console and the last one to have all custom hardware (CPU and GPU used nowhere else, special eDRAM die with ROP hardware..).
Even some regular PC had trouble back then too : Pentium 4 3GHz Prescott on low end motherboard, that's like over 60 amps that go through the socket? (not a pb if the stuff keeps up), followed by major GPU solder trouble the next year.
I suspect the Xbox One will not have any of these troubles, and has more generous cooling so it out to keep working.
Would a modern DOS be something that runs on top of UEFI, or somehow inside UEFI?
Framebuffer instead of (or in addition to) 80x25, UEFI's mouse instead of DOS mouse driver, etc.
For all I care it could be single tasking with a flat 64bit memory space.
It might run on all supported CPU architectures even.
But you're still stuck with PC speaker and no sound I believe.
Eh now there's FTP stuff with fuse. Or Jedit in early 00s to edit files on an ftp (there must be a thousand editors that do this but this one was - is - a desktop java application and thus cross-platform in Windows 9x, XP, Unix)
I like to download the iso (something that boots FreeDOS and runs some graphical wizard stuff I'm not interested in), mount the iso, extract the BIOS and flashing program from subdirectories/archive/floppy image, put them on USB and boot MS-DOS 7.10 to run the thing.
Oh crap, I had no idea to look for keyboard input there :) .BAS example files/games may have varied between DOS, Windows 95 and 98.
Availability of
So I should have looked for off-line help back then be it a book, people that knew about programming, getting someone to print nibbles.bas.
Yes scrolling like a NES game wasn't something I even considered doable (doing something tiled-based, slow and naive in 40x25 text mode would have been fun already)
Qbasic was included in Windows 9x and even NT4 apparently. Notably, "Microsoft Edit" was a shim that called qbasic.exe in editor-only mode (it's still better than vi and nano). Qbasic itself allows to play short high pitched tones through the PC speaker to startle people around you, or to annoy them much with a long duration 4KHz for instance.
What's too bad is the keyboard input, unless there's some other way you couldn't really use continuous keyboard input for something like a space invader clone. Everyone used a loop like 10 A$=INKEY$ : IF A$="" THEN 10 which let you input a single key without needing to hit return, but you would just move single step by single step or trigger keyboard repeating and move wildly. Tweaking keyboard repeating in BIOS (or with a DOS program?) might have helped in some way.
That alone prevented attempts at making "serious" games (and in mid to late 90s, Internet access was prohibitively expensive in Western Europe still so Qbasic and its detailed help files is what you got for free)
Mind you, I would be okay with rifle companies lobbying for gun control and Lockheed Martin funding anti-war protests, while that's still an excessive use of private money power for political power that'd be a change.
Hire some talented programmers to write a program, and then maintain it forever.
You revile binary compatibility because it's an enabler of proprietary software (most of it freeware written by a single person), the flipside is your stuff stops working after a few years.
Like many here I've eventually abandoned Windows but face it, then the fun is over. Not much to do except spend your time in firefox, bash and vlc.
In Europe where fuel efficiency was a thing even post-WW2 (what with the war and imported oil) the cars have been increasing in weight for the last two decades.
The average PC has Intel graphics or an old midrange or low end graphics card. In fact the average new PC is likely behind that 5 year old top of the line PC.
Here you could leave it on, hopefully it blanks the screen and sits there eating 0.5 watt.
Better yet, have the option for save/load state to be used automatically on start up and shut down, but with no backtracking (in that mode) and when you're dead and game over, you're dead. Start over or get lost.