The PsychDOS Desktop Environment | Hacker News Reader

The PsychDOS Desktop Environment

psychoslinux.gitlab.io

116 pointsmarttt33 comments

The quickguide [0] is beautiful and quite well written catalog of the features and included programs.

[0] https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/QCKGUIDE.PDF

A lot of time has gone into this. I wish more things were as well documented!

Oh, man. I feel like I should show it to my hacker friends at Cyberdelia and ask if it's worth the trouble of downloading/using.

The font is difficult for me to read.

Inside was a link to this awesome retro font site https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/

Oh wow. This disclaimer page is a piece of art in absurdity: https://theouterlinux.gitlab.io/disclaimer_mobile.html

macos users might try for a laugh

say -v Fred "(that pages text)"

I think I'm way more impressed by the website than I am the software itself.

yes, volkov commander is good enough. i'd like to have a good win3.11/9x browser that can display current ssl and css heavy websites. For freedos I compile things like the below myself. http://www.ausreg.com/dos_ports/index.htm

I'd also like a recent jvm for windows 3.11/9x. My wishes might never come true :-(

I remember when it was a big deal that I could play MOD files through my PC speaker (I forget the name of the tracker I used, but the interface was in German and was fast enough to run smoothly on my 386SX/25).

That mplayer now runs on DOS is amazing to me (even if it is on more powerful hardware) -- I could never back then have imagined computers playing full color video with audio.

Ah that's nice, I remember the win3.11 speaker.drv with which you could play through the speaker. Full color video with audio is a bridge to far with a 386 i think unless it's something like a 320x240 mpeg-1 with low bitrate audio, or that low bandwidth codec realvideo. Did the DVD decoding run on a 386? In any case it's indeed amazing that mplayer has been ported to dos.

Nice CRT effect using a CSS animation!

On the desktop, yes. Comes with some readability issues but does work well. However it doesn’t render correctly on mobile — half the site is lopped off.

Which mobile? Looks fine in Chrome on Android on a 1080px wide screen. Though some pages are too wide for portrait orientation, and not zoomable.

Works fine in Firefox Focus too.

I got flickering when looking at it on my iPad. I’m not sure if that was a deliberate attempt to emulate a CRT (and I don’t remember any of the CRTs I had when I was a kid flickering that bad, although I have certainly used some terrible CRT screens that flickered a lot).

Certain parts of the past are not worth emulating :)

Typical CRT flicker was pretty subtle, especially at high refresh rates. It becomes more pronounced at low refresh rates, or simply bad monitors.

Making a silly effect on a website to evoke a nostalgic feeling doesn't really have to be accurate, and it'd probably be near-impossible to accurately represent the subtleties of a CRT display without compounding them with the subtleties of LCDs, especially so when the LCDs an end user will be using is an unknown.

> Though some pages are too wide for portrait orientation, and not zoomable.

That’s exactly what I meant when I said half the page was lopped off.

(thinks of human Kryten in that episode of Red Dwarf trying to find the zoom function...)

Perhaps rotate your phone?

It is irritating when pages block zoom (sometimes intentionally but usually as a side effect of working around sizing oddities in some devices/browsers/versions) but here you may have all you need to solve the problem.

Unless you have a smaller device and it is still too wide in landscape orientation.

Rotating might work but the bigger problem is that it’s not immediately obvious that you’re losing half page. The retro effect makes it look like the screen fill is intentional. It’s not until you view the page on a desktop that it becomes clear just how much content is missing in portrait on mobile devices.

CSS was borrowed from here: http://aleclownes.com/2017/02/01/crt-display.html

Found it after inspecting the site to see how it was done.

Can't unsee the gitilab.io typo on their "DOS LIKE A BOSS" poster.

Somebody quick, register gitilab.io :)

For the rest it all seems very cool & retro.

.io domains are mega expensive - I'm sure they used to WAY cheaper?

The visual style is very reminiscent of VBDOS, e.g. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-visual-bas/10-for-d...

Looks kinda like LaunchBox.

https://forums.launchbox-app.com/files/file/934-launchbox-fo...

I wondered when these shells would make a comeback.

Containerized apps could do with a similar interface.

Nice, this looks like the GUI from Neopaint.

It seems very cool

Neat, but I'd remove the naked women pics from the user guide.

I suspect their web server logs have just seen a small but noticeable peak in requests for the user guide...

I agree it’s pretty inappropriate but in fairness to the author, they’ve gone for a retro vibe and content like that was, unfortunately, pretty common back then. It was a different era in many ways, not just in term of technology.

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