The Caffeinated Equine Thread

I WARNED YOU ABOUT DIVIDING BY ZERO BRO!!!! I TOLD YOU DOG!

But I had to see what happens.

You had to see what happens? You've doomed is all, thats what happened. What an age-old cult had failed to do by design, you did by curiosity!

I finally made a difference!

FreeDOS is great and I love it, but I have had a few programs fail to work because they look for files the FreeDOS developers renamed for no reason except to feel special, because FOSS developers are cursed that way.

So I'm trying a weird fork of DR-DOS instead. I already miss some of the modern features FreeDOS has, but damn is it immediately obvious that DR-DOS is a more solid foundation than what FreeDOS is built on. Personal computing truly went wrong.

I guarantee this is not how anyone else on planet Earth just spent their Saturday.

Because apparently I cannot spend a Saturday like a normal person, I am now building my DOS machine inside OS/2 Warp instead of FreeDOS or DR-DOS.

OS/2 is actually good for this. I cannot tell what it is good for other than using it to run DOS sessions, but at least it is good for that one thing. As awesome as FreeDOS is, it still can't quite run Windows 3.1 properly yet, while OS/2 Warp does it out of the box.

A phone call had me on hold for over an hour today so I went back to my DOS project. I found out that OS/2 has a tool that scans your drives and suggests programs you can set up inside the built-in Windows VM, and if you approve it'll set them up for you. Neat.

... English, man! English!

I was idly clicking stuff, and my operating system suddenly offered to do my work for me.

Does that help?

It was a cry for mercy.

Trying Linux again, because I do still need a modern browser.

If this goes through, yay it worked.

I keep getting the same Uber and Doordash drivers. I'm sure they have a somewhat regular route, so I could place my orders on a schedule that happens to align with theirs, but I am not doing that. My schedule is highly variable, but it's still lining up such that I get the same drivers.

Damn. I had a map for one of my recurring dream locations. A crystal clear map. If I still had it in my hands I would be recreating it in 3D right now.

But I'm awake, and it's gone.

Is it even physically possible to recreate one of your dream maps in real life 3D? I mean, I might be able to recreate my dream mall map even though geography is sometimes questionable. My dream highway though is the definition of non-euclidian.

The places I see are totally consistent, so recreating them is theoretically possible. The map actually cleared up something I was confused about. Apparently my dreamscapes are like early 3Dgame levels, in that unseen geometry doesn't exist. If it's only possible to see one side of something, they don't bother making the other side. It's how seemingly huge maps were just a few kilobytes. I miss that.

So this area has some upper floors I've never figured how to reach. I can see them, and from my perspective they look connected to the rest of the area, but I can't figure out how to get to them. Well according to this map, which was a top-down plan of the entire place, the parts I've never figured out how to reach aren't connected. They're just floating there, and they're totally empty. It's been a perspective trick the whole time.

Okay, my next computer will not run Windows.

Microsoft tweaked something and it broke all my virtual machines. All that work gone.

I've rebuilt two virtual machines so far.

I am dreading rebuilding my OS/2 machine. It's a good OS, but it is a nightmare to virtualize. It wants to run on IBM hardware and nothing else, and it is not easily fooled.

I don't know what day it is. I just spent countless hours installing DOS 4.0 in a virtual machine. The bad one. One installation guide recommends asking yourself why you would want to try in the first place. So I had to try it.

I tested approximately 365475 hardware combinations that should have worked, but didn't.

When my setups didn't immediately fail outright, I got to the dreaded installer. People were not kidding. It is the worst installer I have ever encountered. Sometimes I got a few steps into it before it failed.

When it finally didn't fail, it turned out that the installer insists on copying files to a blank floppy as a backup. This is by design. It is a mandatory step, for whatever reason the developers thought it should be. Problem is, I don't have a program that can create blank iso files to trick this dumb program into thinking it's writing to a blank floppy. I have piles of actual floppies around here, but no way to make a blank virtual one. So I was stuck.

So I dug around until I found a different set of DOS 4.0 isos that conveniently came with a blank for this purpose. So that set let me finally get past that step... but then the installation just failed anyway.

So I decided to try one of my other sets, just swapping in the one blank iso from the corrupted set. It shouldn't matter what set the blank is from, right?

But then I was back to the first problem of getting a config to even boot to the installer. So I tweaked the hardware combination. And tweaked the bios settings. And tweaked the hardware combination. And tweaked the BIOS settings. I probably should have looked for a manual to see if there's a recommended config, but I thought I could guess. And tweaked the hardware combo. And tweaked the BIOS settings. Failure after failure after failure.

Finally I tweaked something... and the installer started in the middle of the process. And it just... skipped the step of copying to a blank floppy. It doesn't do that, but it did.

And I ended up with a completely working install.



I broke a broken piece of software so much that it became unbroken.

Eat shit, Microsoft. I have rebuilt my Linux VM.

I still don't actually like Linux. But they broke my stuff, so I wasn't going to stop until I got it fixed.