Dos Squeak (was: sample new download page)

Nick Brown maillist at bredon-gill.demon.co.uk
Thu Nov 15 01:13:52 UTC 2001


On Wed, 14 Nov 2001 21:06:17 +0100, Karl Ramberg wrote:

>I noticed the link to DOS Squeak was dead so a little hunt brought 
>up this link:
>http://unicavia.com/Squeak/download/dosSqueak.zip
>
>Since people from time to time ask for this it's
>probably good to save a copy of the zip on the squeak ftp
>And maybe check if it works actually works...
>Time to dig out those 486 boxes folks :-)
>
>Karl

OK, I'm game. I remeber looking for this a while back, just out of
curiosity really, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.

First I ran it in a dos-box under windows millenium. Straight away a
screen comes up asking me to pick a video card type and resolution.
The autodetect function worked fine, and I could get resolution up to
800x600, and probably could have got higher if I had VESA drivers
installed for my video card. 

Next, Squeak complained about not being able to find
"squeak.ima.changes", which is not suprising since the file on disk is
called "squeak.cha". So I quit squeak and made a copy of the changes
file with the name that squeak was looking for, and tried again. This
worked ok.

So I was now into squeak proper - v1.23, Oct 4 1997, so it tells me.
All the regular stuff seemed to be working (ie mouse and keyboard
input, re-arranging windows, browsing code), except that trying to
open a FileList produced some floppy drive activity (I wasn't running
it from a floppy), and then a hang which I think I was able to Alt-.
out of.

Next I tried to sound examples (Bach Fugue etc) from the welcome
window. Again, this caused a hang. Finally, I tried networking, asking
HTTPSocked to retrieve and show a gif file from a webserver running on
the LAN here. This produced an error box saying that the host name
could not be found, so I tried again using the IP address in the URL
instead. This produced another error, (I should have written it down,
I suppose) to the effect that squeak believed that the socket was
already in use.


Then I decided to repeat the whole process under dos (or rather, from
a win '98 boot disk). The boot disk contained the dos port of the VNC
viewer, (which uses the same Allegro graphics and sound library as dos
squeak), and so contains the VESA driver for my video card, and an IP
Packet driver for the network card. 

Running squeak from the dos prompt produced the following error
message: "Load Error: no DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip".
The acronym DPMI seemed vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn't
remember what it was for. But then I noticed that my boot disk
contained a program called cwsdpmi.exe. Running this produced no
console output, even with a /? switch, but after this squeak loaded
ok. I was able to pick a resolution of 1024x768 (and could probably
have gone higher but my monitor won't take it). 

So I guess DPMI is something to do with graphics or the Allegro
library, and might be necessary for anyone else wanting to run dos
squeak. I'll try to investigate this further.

Again squeak complained about not being able to find the changes file
(since my previous quick fix for this had relied on windows' long
filename abilities), but by now I had noticed a .st file contaning
code to change the names of the source and changes files that squeak
was looking for. Opening a FileList now worked fine, and I was able to
file in this code. In order to test it it out I performed "Save and
Quit", the screen went blank (black) and I waited while the image was
saved.

And waited, and waited. A pattern of about 20 seconds continuous disk
activity followed by a 20 second pause started occuring. After about 3
mins, the following message appeared...

"Not ready reading drive C
Abort, Retry, Fail?"

...but there was no response to anything I typed. One reset and reboot
later and squeak was loading fine, and appeared to be finding the
changes file (although I only gave it a cursory look). So the image
was obviously saved ok. Not a pleasant experience, though.

Finally, I tried the network and sound capabilities again, and got
exactly the same results as before. (I had SoundBlaster 16 compatable
drivers loaded for the soundcard, which Allegro ought to be able to
work with, although I can't say for sure that I've had Allegro apps
working before).


So there we are. I just thought I'd share my experiences with you.
I'll keep the list posted if I make any further progress (although I'm
really only looking at dos squeak as a curiosity).

Regards, Nick Brown





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