Visual DOS 2024 Professional Standard

Hi Cinnastar!

The man function was added in quite a while ago, I’m just adding hints and docs so people can know its there. I’m also trying to make the path more clear.

Historically, DOS wasn’t entirely MS-DOS. Microsoft was successful in throwing their weight around, but there were other variants, some with different sets of commands. In an alternate universe where Unix and Linux did not get very far, there could be a space for man in there.

Plus, the –ly switch doesn’t make sense with help. 🤣

The ‘interpreter’, to be generous, is a set of multiple functions that needs to be rewritten for fixtext /? to work properly without breaking the game further into the story, or for help to handle more than just kicking off the story.

The context for everything as it is now is: this was a funny shitpost between my kid and I that spiraled wildly out of control and now I have a few copies of the Visual DOS Concise User’s Guide on my desk, and there’s a window with bootloader code because we wanted to see if we could make it a real OS 🤣🤣

I will make QOL improvements on it tho. I keep putting it away and coming back to it.

I used a vax for long enough where I sometimes forget/don’t consider that DOS adds .EXE 😬

I don’t have a good solution for Tab at the moment.

I got stuck very early - typing FIXTEXT.EXE (sic) HELP.TXT prints a series of gibberish in big characters and then says “Bad command or file name”,

The gibberish big text is a cryptogram puzzle. Each letter has a text field. If you type a letter in it, it will fill it in for all the same letters to help you solve it faster. Once the puzzle is solved the story progresses and another puzzle is presented.

The news command contains additional story, and includes a hint or two on the final puzzle.

I definitely could make the description and in-game help better.

While working on making the in-game help better, I realized I really needed to update a few things that are very deficient. And since you let me know to begin with, it makes sense to let you know. :D

First: many of the system commands only have a reference in my printed help. I forgot to place them in the appropriate areas. Some commands like cd and catalog would be part of a COMMAND.COM and not show up in a system folder. Others should have really been in there, and they will be soon:

I also obviously can’t tell people to use the man command if it doesn’t work for some commands… my bad 😬. I’m working on adding more commands to it.

Once you know the stuff you need to know, the game is playable at least. And I should hopefully have this updated across platforms by end of tomorrow.

• many of these are in the development logs, but they really needed to be properly shown in the game too. Otherwise theres no way to know man or restart work.

The puzzles are randomly generated from a list, and the keys are randomly generated. What I should have done was attach a unique ID to each and add them to the Concise User’s Guide.

You’ll have to give me a hint for me to give you one. Can you attach a screenshot?

If you decide to do the puzzle later by using the restart command: it should generate a new puzzle with a new key. This will also happen if you quit and re-open the game.

I’m super glad you enjoyed it!