dos-like by Mattias Gustavsson

A downloadable tool for Windows, macOS, and Linux

dos-like is a programming library/framework, kind of like a tiny game engine, for writing games and programs with a similar feel to MS-DOS productions from the early 90s. But rather than writing code that would run on a real DOS machine, dos-like is about making programs which runs on modern platforms like Windows, Mac and Linux, but which attempts to recreate the look, feel, and sound of old DOS programs.

It includes a bunch of examples of classic DOS techniques and effects, which are depicted in the screenshots.

Github repo: https://github.com/mattiasgustavsson/dos-like

While running, you can use F11 to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode.

To start in windowed mode, add the flag -w or --window to the commandline when launching.

Building

dos-like does not make use of any complicated build systems - a simple command line call to the compiler is all that is needed to build both your program and the engine itself.

Windows

Tiny C Compiler for windows is included. To build all samples, run build_all.bat. To build individual samples, do:

  tcc\tcc source\stranded.c source\dos.c

where stranded.c should be replaced with the sample you would like to build.

Alternatively, from a Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt, do:

  cl source\stranded.c source\dos.c

where stranded.c should be replaced with the sample you would like to build.

Mac

To build all samples on Mac, run build_all_macos.sh. To build individual samples, do:

  clang source/stranded.c source/dos.c `sdl2-config --libs --cflags` -lGLEW -framework OpenGL -lpthread

where stranded.c should be replaced with the sample you would like to build.

SDL2 and GLEW are required - if you don't have them installed you can do so with Homebrew by running

  brew install sdl2 glew

Linux

To build all samples on Linux, run build_all_linux.sh. To build individual samples, do:

  gcc source/stranded.c source/dos.c `sdl2-config --libs --cflags` -lGLEW -lGL -lm -lpthread

where stranded.c should be replaced with the sample you would like to build.

SDL2 and GLEW are required - if you don't have them installed you can do so on Ubuntu (or wherever apt-get is available) by running

  sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev   sudo apt-get install libglew-dev

WebAssembly

To build all samples for WebAssembly, run build_all_wasm.bat. To build individual samples, do:

  wasm\node wasm\wajicup.js source/burn.c source/dos.c out.html

where burn.c should be replaced with the sample you would like to build.

You can embed asset files in the process with the -embed parameter. For examples of this, see the file build_all_wasm.bat

A WebAssembly build environment is required. You can download it (for Windows) here: releases/tag/wasm-env. Unzip it so that the wasm folder in the zip file is at your repository root. Note that if you downloaded dos-like from itch.io, the wasm build environment is already included.

The wasm build environment is a compact distribution of node, clang/wasm-ld, WAjic and wasm system libraries.

You can try running the wasm-built samples here: mattiasgustavsson.com/wasm

Code

It is very easy to write programs for dos-like. A simple program to draw some graphics looks like this:

And will produce this when it is run:

Project size

dos-like is a quite small project. Here is a list of all the source files, for the engine itself, the samples, and its dependencies, the libraries it includes.