A Bootable eBook for MS-DOS PCs! Chromaspace Conscript
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- čas přidán 10. 04. 2022
- Checking out the e-book version of Chromaspace: Conscript designed specifically for DOS computers! It's distributed as a bootable floppy disk image, which when written will load on classic systems like the IBM PC 5170. Let's check it out under MS-DOS 6.22!
More info on the novel by Megan Alnico here:
www.chromaspace.net/
This definitely runs in line with Techmoan's point about niche merch from bands, authors, etc. It's super interesting and rare enough that even a lot of the intended audience may never know this exists.
Yeah, kinda weird how that synced up, huh?
This probably runs on DosBox tho, so very approcheable if one cares.
It's very different to a "sound cylinder", that required an antique to be enjoyed lmao
@@Basomga I agree. But if you want to experience it in the manner intended (and not through emulation), you need a computer running a physical release version of the DOS operating system, with a floppy drive. Which I'm fairly sure only like 2% of people have, nowadays.
@@willsofer3679 2% is way too high. I would say 0.002% or less. You basically need a 2005 computer or older to have a floppy drive and such computer is useless today. It's too slow to display even simplest modern web pages not to mention that you need lightweight Linux since Windows 7 won't run well and older Windows aren't supported by popular browsers for years now (there are some alternatives though).
No one will use such computers, since you can buy used office PC with Core i3 for like 50€ that is at least 400% faster and has hardware codecs for youtube etc.
However, 99% of modern PCs can still run DOS. It's not 100% anymore since you need a computer with legacy BIOS boot feature and some newest PCs dropped this for example Steam Deck can't boot to MS-DOS or FreeDOS. So, you can either boot from USB drive or even use USB floppy drive.
Text mode works fine on modern GPUs, but VGA support isn't 100% anymore. Games work, but some have glitches.
@@willsofer3679 The disk includes its own install of FreeDOS, so you don't need anything installed on your PC.
"Sticking" that sheet of paper to the CRT gave me a big smile! Oh, the memories!
Can't do that with an LCD TV!
I remember waving my hand furiously in front of my childhood VGA monitor and then touching my cat. He didn't really like that ;)
How to get LGR to read in Duke Nukem's voice in 5 easy steps:
1. Become an LGR patreon.
2. Write a book.
3. Make an eBook reader for MS-DOS.
4. Send them both on 3.5 inch floppy disks to LGR and ask him to read the first few lines in Duke's voice.
5. Wait a few months and hope that eventually he'll make a Blerb in Duke's voice.
We need a Duke Nukem reads childrens stories. LMAO ;)
You and more people should make more ms dos books.
It's a great idea. 👍
He could have a patreon perk to do that haha
@Neil Roy
Duke Nukem reading Go the f*ck to sleep lmao
Why not simply just ask? (Just a thought?). If he likes to read it and share it, then he will.
This feels wildly futuristic, but in a late-1970s kind of way. A bootable e-book for MS-DOS computers. It's like something is expect to see in an Aliens movie or something.
Loved the boot-up sounds.. All of that whirring and spinning made you feel like you had something very powerful at your fingertips back in the day!
it also sounds like it going to take off
It always made me think it was giving me cancer.
Atari's boot-up sound was a fart. 😥
But only if you didn't have a disk drive, or a disk in the drive. :) It was the sound of the serial bus as it made 13 retries at reading the disk. With the data itself too high-pitched to be reproduced by the TV, (19.2kbps) you only really heard the start and end of each little block of control data.
Edit: I wrote that before LGR typed "farts" at the prompt. 🤣
Ah, nice and easy on the eyes!
That aside, the Duke Nukem audiobook narration is something I didn't realize I needed from Audible.
was great!
Let me know and I'll start a kicakstater for the "LRG reads audiobook version".
@@megan_alnico Might be more successful if you tried to get, you know, Jon St. John? =)
@@jubuttib I don't think I can afford either of them.
@@megan_alnico That's quite likely yeah, but at least one of them does voice stuff as a job, so might have time to do it. =)
Great job on this project, really happy to see quirky stuff like this!
0:49 Man, that's a trait I loved about CRTs, generating enough electrical charge to hold a sheet of paper.
It's been too long since I've seen that. I once stuck cling wrap on my monitor so I could trace something in marker and then tried to replicate it in Maya because I couldn't figure out how to import an image.
I laughed out loud when you casually stuck the paper to the monitor. I forgot you could do that.
Clint, if you ever get tired of this job, you could always read for audiobooks.
50 shades of grey... as read by Duke
@@KarlBaron More like 50 Shades of Kicking Ass as read by Duke Nukem!
After watching this I feel like we need a series called “LGR Reads” where everything is read in Duke’s voice 😂
This is a solution looking for a problem....AND I LOVE IT! Who'd have thought a DOS ebook is what my life was missing, and those beeps and hum of the AT in the background helps build the ambience, as does the natural glow of the EGA monitor ;) the Duke voiceover was also a fitting touch, I think everyone agrees. However, no IBM keyboard, tut tut....and the 5.25" drive being physically above the 3.25" drive isn't doing much for my OCD haha :) great vid, thanks!
Well I guess Megan has her voice actor ready to go for the upcoming animated tv series. Study your lines Clint!
Now thats an idea!!!
This is awesome!!! I just downloaded the preview DOS version, created the bootable disk and booted my Acer AspireOne into the book via usb floppy drive... It is so much fun! :D
The bootimage uses FreeDOS and pipes the touchpad of my netbook to a virtual PS/2 port - the error message you've got at 4:05 "file not found" has something to do with the port emulation.
I will definitly buy the full version of this book!
*Thank you* LGR for this video! Otherwise I would never have known about it. :)
I just bought the bootable DOS version of the book to support the author and her very cool distribution method! So far, I like the setting, though the writing style is a bit jarring. The bolded words everywhere and slightly "internet-casual" style of dialogue don't mesh well with the rest of the narration, at least for me. However, I'm only a couple chapters in, so I'll give it more time to grow on me. Either way, it's a very cool project, and I know how much god damn work writing something like this is.
Keep in mind that the bold segments would appear as italics on other platforms and in the print version. I suppose you just can't display italics in character mode.
@@der4rdi Real DOS actually can change text fonts, but I'm not sure it could do so on only part of the screen.
I suspect using bold is a stylistic choice, because that's how emphasis was done back then.
Well done with the screen static, using that to hold the paper was just perfect.
There's a dyslexic version of the book (according to the "A Word from the Author" at 6:24). That's really cool that she made an accessible version of the book for people who have dyslexia.
I don't want to criticize accessibility, but there's been actual scientific research on the OpenDysliexic font, which the "accessible" version of this ebook uses. The research is from 2017 by Jessica J. Wery and Jennifer A. Diliberto. The conclusions their study reaches is that there is no statistical difference in the ability of dyslexic students to name random letters quickly, to read words fluently, or to read randomly created nonsense words. While they do not dismiss the value of future research (quite the contrary), they do caution that good intentioned efforts like OpenDyslexic can frustrate students who are often exposed to experimental attempts to increase reading intelligibility for them, and these failures can be seen as personal failures rather than experimental or methodological failures. Similar research in this area has reached similar conclusions.
While I am not criticizing anyone's intentions - when it comes to efforts like OpenDyslexic and the desire to use it, the intentions are probably universally good - it is important to recognize that results matter, and those of us outside the dyslexia community would probably do well to recognize that the results of OpenDyslexia have thus far proven no more or less effective than using Arial or Times New Roman, unfortunately.
I think reading an Action Sci-Fi story on a DOS machine is very fitting. I never thought I wanted to read on one ever, in fact.
It kind of reminds me of an old digital comic game lol
I've always loved reading on the computer for the sci-fi connotations. :D The sad thing is my eyes are too sensitive for the bright-for-bold thing, but it's not a problem if I pick the right system to read on. My favourite is still a late-model Sharp Zaurus with a 4 inch 640x480 screen. I used a big font in XTerm with the colors set to suit my eyes - in fact, I read books with no highlighting.
This is really creative, niche, and marvelous. What a lot of fun. Fun that it's an actual PC/AT compatible HTML viewer, with a bit of an animation and shell, and the good old "change the dos prompt and name things carefully to make a creative menu" trick.
The fan noise and ‘beep!’ after switching on, underlines how far technology has come. I’m watching this on an impossibly over-powered iPad.
Gives me memories of all the book-authoring software for DOS back then, and the gopher-y looking book browser with links.
The early IBMs just make me want to sit down and start coding.
My dev environment of choice is a bunch of kwrite windows on a high resolution ultra wide, but that CRT, the clicky keyboard, the whirring MFM drive and PSU fan ... it just inspires me to want to write something.
Definite Techmoan vibe.. New stuff released for old machines.. Neato
That is super cool! For some reason the concept of reading an eBook in DOS never crossed my mind.
I'm surprised that it didn't become a thing too much until fairly recently.
Last book I read in dos was the anarchist cookbook, laughed my butt off the entire time.
The parts about bananas, and hooking up generators to the telephone system killed me.
doesn't George RR Martin write on a DOS machine? i always thought it's pretty cool idea for 'minimalist' writing setup.
@@dataterminal good times good times.
I've seen on archive videos showing medical information books being put on to computers like this so that doctors could look up symptoms in a database and read about various conditions but I've never just a book like this that is fiction for entertainment purposes.
lol. your duke nukem voice never gets old. cracks me up still lol
Why am I suddenly thinking of how a duke nukem voice on a gps would be like?
Such a cool idea, kinda reminds me of the Fallout terminals, but with less eye straining green 😅
There was a mod that it was one of the fall-outs that added a library and I'm fairly sure that there were actually books on holo types something about a squirrel that was one the story.
And I believe there was also a short horror or mystery-type story.(a boutique style place in don't remember much about that story I just remember it was new Job and it was his first day. It reminded me of creepypasta.
Buy if I remember you can adjust the colors on pipboys so they don't hurt your eyes.
I don't know why, but you made me laugh out loud when you used that static monitor to show the message. Love hearing that beast power up. My own computer still has a DVD/CD reader and I still love hearing it initialize when i start up my machine. :) The first PC I build in the 1990s (I was a late comer, having owned Commodore machines like t he Amiga before that) was one where I got a used case like the on in this video. Loved that first PC and DOS.
Duke Nukem reads stories... I am laughing at the thought of Duke reading "Mary had a little lamb... it's fleece... as white as snow..." LMAO
Look at that IBM AT. A thing of beauty!
There was a product from Alchemy Mindworks back in the early 1990s that allowed the creation of hypertext books with B&W illustrations in DOS (supported CGA and VGA, probably Hercules but I can't remember), but unfortunately, I'm coming up short with its name and a location to download it. I've already asked the author if he knows where a copy is.
The author does not have a copy, but I've narrowed it down to Alchemy Mindworks Storyteller, which was distributed on BBSes as storyt10.zip if anyone would like to search their archives.
Well, I was hooked at the end of the first page! Brilliant way to display and read the book.
I love the AT. It's got perfect aesthetics in my opinion.
What a lovely sounding machine!
I love hearing that thing start up. Brings back so many computing memories.
i love how you're dancing around talking about the isa USB card, because you hadnt shown us that video yet lol. i saw this after the usb video. neat stuff!
The computer I had in high school was also an IBM AT, so now I'm having fuzzy nostalgic memories of staring into that small CRT monitor, typing on that clacky Model M keyboard, writing school assignments and assorted early embarrassing works of fiction into WordPerfect 5.1. I tried writing my current novel in DOS, but I found myself spoiled by newfangled modern contrivances like copy and paste, word wrap, and having more than 2 documents open at once. But this makes me think, maybe I should offer a DOS floppy e-book once my novel is ready for publication :)
IIRC FreeDOS' edit program supports more than one file being open at once along with copy and paste. MS also released Word for DOS 5.5 for free so it might be worth checking that out as well.
I actually use my 386 SX 16 to write term and research papers (albeit in Windows 3.1 - Word) as there are no distractions like social media and CZcams ;)
you could do many of those things in WP 5 for DOS, but you had to know how to make and use the macros. The WordPerfect company got rid of the old macros, and then tried to make a new macro system in Windows. SMH. I believe the floppy here is made with FreeDOS, you could also take a look at VDE text editor, or can I still interest you in Emacs?😉
I love the aesthetic of this whole setup
So happy this exists... purchased and booting up my 286 👍
Now I really want Clint to narrate this whole story as an audio book.
As an alumni of CompUSA I appreciate your choice of mouse pad sir.
Now people want Clint to read the great works of the history of literature with the Duke Nukem voice.
I want to do something similar to this with one of the stories that I am writing and had been wanting to do this for a while. I find it awesome that someone else has already done this. Will need to check this story out.
This is such a cool concept! Also, love the COMPUSA mousepad, I still have and use mine (albeit mine is minty green). The irony is that I also live legit walking distance, about a mile, maybe 2 at most, from where our local COMPUSA used to be (they turned it into an Odd Lots/Big Lots after they went out of business).
Thanks so much! I was considering a SNES or Genesis version also but really need to commission some pixel art if I'm going that way.
@@megan_alnico Definitely would be a really awesome collector item as well! Maybe down the road consider it for future publishings? Also, I may just buy the book, seems intriguing to someone like me who loves space and considers himself a Trekkie, lol. Good luck with future publishings!
There's a local mom-and-pop style computer shop right near me, but I do still miss the local CompUSA and its Nerd Wall of waterblocks and cold cathodes I would aspire to one day own.
I have a Corel SCSI mousepad - Made in France on top of it all ;)
Heyyy, it’s Megan Alnico! She’s a very cool lady.
Hahah, calling a ship _Contempt_ really tickles me.
What an amazing concept.
Boot up sounds of these old systems are so satisfying
Okay - now i NEED this as Audiobook, read by you. With some of those older Hard Drive sounds sprinkled in and so on...please!
If you read here Meagan.
This is awesome!
I really love the immersion you have created. And would love to read the book on a cyberdeck in the future!
Well, I was looking into buying an e-reader, but guess I'll just buy a DOS machine now.
Yes
Exactly what i needed this morning
8:15 "But there was no response, and another 20 minutes later, *there was still wasn't* a response."
See this is what I like to see.
Thanks 😊.
Good video.
Screen prompt: Type "CS" to read secret documents
LGR: Hmm, a command prompt of sorts. I don't actually know what you can do here.
Oh, Clint.
The AT was such a solid machine. Very niche approach for an eBook that's for sure, we had similar eZines back in the day...
i Kinda dig the fallout terminal vibes this is giving seems to be inline with the book's theme
That sound ohhh man 😁 gave me some of my best memories
There's just something special about reading books that way. I read a lot of books in a lot of different editors before specialized software and epub were even invented. Now I still regularly read books in Nano on Linux on an old netbook. A 10" screen with 80x24 window is all you need. :-)
Nano is a plain text editor in terminal, so you read books in plain text format. Seems cool. I remember trying to open huge text files on emulated Amiga with text editors from early 90's and some of them were unable to open files bigger than 1MB, even if there was enough RAM for it.
@@mattx5499 Depends on the kind of RAM (Chip or Fast?), and I can imagine prgrammers didn't really care about handling such large text files correctly in those days. All Amigas can handle such files in RAM, without swapping, but it might require some extra work by the programmer to make sure the right type of memory is used.
@@ArumesYT I've found that some old text editors had file size limit, because nobody back then thought somebody will create or open such a big file since standard Amiga floppy was only 880KB, but there were other editors that were able to open files over 1MB but it took some time to open. My test file was Frank Herbert's original 'Dune' in plain text format. 😊
@@mattx5499 Yeah sure, but it's the specific 1 MB limit. It's not about supporting large files in general, because then you'd expect a limit at either 24 bit addressing (16 MB) or 32 bit (4 GB). Encountering a 1 MB limit on the Amiga only makes sense if it's a Chip/Fast RAM issue.
@@ArumesYT Or it was some emulation inaccuracy. Hard to tell. Emulator shows a warning if memory is badly configured and then it's chopped to the proper possible maximum sizes. I had plenty of memory on the emulated Amiga, probably more than 90% of people had when these text editors were released, so I don't really know any other explanation as the file size limit.
This is really awesome idea. I can see this kind of e-books may get some popularity among retrocomputing people. Amiga had it's own hypertext format called AmigaGuide (it was created for software manuals) and I would like somebody release an e-book on a bootable Amiga floppy using this format or any other that can work in similar fashion as this MS-DOS release.
Ha! Really, really smart of her in this retro computer boom era. Thumbs up!
Dude I totally forgot about the days when your monitor would kick out static electricity enough that you could get a sheet of paper to "Stick" to it! Ha! It's the little things you forget about.
@Egmont a little before smartphones, and perhaps even now?, students would pull a prank by playing a pitch too high for most middle-aged teachers to hear. I remember also hearing that sound when the cable box was left on when the TV was off (and vice-versa, maybe?) and my parents would seemingly ignore it. I used to think "why don't they hear that?"
You reminded me of the 8-bit guy sticking the paper on the screen...."whatever is on the screen will be faxed" :-D
wow, a very good idea to use old computers to read, because there are not distractions.
This is awesome. I love it.
That is so cool. Reminds me of the kind of stuff I’d download from the local BBS in the 80’s on my CGA equipped IBM 5150 / 5153 using a 1200 baud modem. I was inspired by ASCII / ANSI / BASIC cartoons, especially one with a smiley faced character named Tom Carducci. I made a few of my own similar cartoons in BASIC, naming my character Harry Hormone. Those were the days.
I have been experimenting with my programming my Commodore PET 4016, TRS-80 CoCo and a few others, to see what I can remember and maybe elevate my BASIC programming skills again. I hope to get my 5150 working again so I can try reading my old 5 1/4 inch floppies again. Those darned tantalum capacitors and battery leak really messed it up in the 25 years that it’s been stored, yet my AT&T pc compatible still works great all of these years later, with only a few missing key caps. I still fire it up to play Alternate Reality when the mood hits me just right. Having the classic computers at my arcade also makes for some interesting conversations with customers about our similar experiences with these early microcomputers and the programs we’d play with and what we wrote ourselves.
Anyhow, another cool video Clint. I rarely comment but this one hit me in the sentimental funny bone so I couldn’t help myself.
Saw this back in October on Adrian's Digital Basement.
Got the disk image and dropped it on DosBox --- Bingo !
Son of a ...Duke. She stole my idea. Okay, she didn't steal it. We just both had similar ideas and she got her's done before me. I am working on my third book and I was going to release it on floppy disk for DOS and win3.11. This is really cool. I'll check it out. Thanks for making a video about it.
It would have been a terrific idea to release a copy of Ready Player One in a similar format at the time. Great idea from the author. And I’ll definitely check her book out. It’s my kind of thing.
I didn't know how much I needed a book read by Duke Nukem, but oh man that tickled my fancy in all kinds of weird places!
I love that old IBM Computer. I was going to buy one once but components are too hard to find and cost to much money for use in Gaming. So I just built a Standard IBM Open Architecture 386. Components are easy to find and inexpensive. Works Great for DOS gaming and using Utility I can slow it down to 286@20mhz. So same as the IBM 5170 AT.
I've bought the DOS book!!! $4.99 is cheap enough! Need to get my IBM 486 up and running to read it!!!!
A DOS-based ebook reader..., something I never knew the world needed.
Clint-look to Patchwork Girl as a good representation of mid-90s hypertext fiction for retro computers (Macs in this case). It’s probably the most successful example of the era and is still available today.
but ouch! $24.99 for "Mac version on USB" which, I don't understand... do they mean OS9?? and No other formats? reminds me of a multimediaCD I have of Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel. It was clunky multimedia back in the day-- and I'm not sure if it works in emulators.
Now we know what your backup career is if the channel falls through: amazing voice acting
Holy crap! You are voicing a Duke Nukem really good! :)
this book is great! even if it didn't come on a floppy (image), I would buy it. looking forward to the next in the series
The combination of hypertext and a terminal-based interface is very reminiscent of the GNU project's info(1).
This is more fun, though!
I came for the IBM AT bootup sounds, I stayed for Duke Nukem voice.
I like cuddling up with a good IBM AT ❤
AHH awesome, have you been taking tips from Usagi Electronics about using CRT static to hold paper to the display?
You knowing about ls makes me happy cause it shows you've probably used Linux before (possibly the terminal in macOS but eh...)
Soooo cool!!!
Heh you shout record the audiobook version of that :)
All with your Duke voice
MS-DOS and eBook in the same sentences. Is this something I never thought I would read/seen
Reminds me of some of the Infocom stuff...minus the choices.
I want this as an audiobook read by you.
Reminds me of those old dial-up BBS ansi games.
If Squirrel Monkey did a video "If E-books Were Around In the 80's", I imagine they would be just like this.
Dir the bin directory!!
Also want an audiobook version read by you.
Love the seek test.
After having had a quick look at the free demo with just the first chapters, the "File not found" message seems to be from "LH \bin\ctmouse.exe" failing when the floppy contents are not in the root directory (presumably of a floppy) as intended, but in some other directory as was the case here.
Ie, if one were to write the image to a floppy and boot from it (or boot from the image in a VM or whatever) it should just work, including having a mouse driver loaded automatically, and without that error message.
The sound of it booting up is nerd/geek paradise 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
Nice keyboard : )
Can Clint Nukem do Pride and Prejudice next? Pretty please? XD I mean, LGR Audiobooks Channel needs to be a thing soon enough, right? Right?
Also, as much as I love the IBM PC AT, and I do, as well as ANSI.SYS shenanigans, it's a shame this won't run on a PC Portable 5155 (or could it?) As that would be the ultimate in portable ebook readers methinks, with that lovely glow of the built in mono/amber monitor too, it's got an Alien Isolation vibe ;)
why would you think it wouldn't? AT is often just a generic term for everything later than the PC or XT. There were some weird features in the first generations, like 5-pin keyboard connectors(non-compatible with either the AT or later PS/2), which is why they are put in a separate category "AT". But this should run on about every DOS computer after that, and probably DOSBox, too.
@@squirlmy I know it will work on an AT, as per the video (!). My question was about the PC Portable 5155 which had a monochrome display (although a CGA adaptor I think?) - could/would it work on that?
(4:33) So, are the bad command or file name errors part of the intro or are they actual errors? Just wondering after the FNF error earlier. Or...was that one part of the experience, too? I'm so confused! LOL! 😉 🤪 Going ti have to check this out! 😎
Wow, ANSI DOS is so cute, I think this ebook should be tried on Radius Pivot monitor
DOS Ansi drivers are much to big.
best part is the ASMR bootup!
Hi, which keyboard were you using? Looked like a modern one and I wonder how you connected it to the IBM.
how did you connect that modern keyboard to AT, i am surprised
MX518 4 Life, baby!
Also I want to point out that I think there was the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories on the cost before I'm thinking a long time ago like a late 80s to 90 or something I just remember seeing them in school. Cuz there was you know books that the one of those old computers and I'm fairly sure it was Ms dos.( because I read it on and old computer and it was before windows.
So yeah it's cool people still make it.
Or that anyone took the time to do that. Because if you could find my entire newspapers and books on microfiche who's to say there weren't more stories on floppy disk or tape for your old computers.