I have been teaching myself the new XNA library for Zune by working on a small tetris clone for that system. I don’t have any working code to show off yet, but here is an asset mock-up to ogle. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will have something playable to try out.

The DOS machine has been keeping me entertained with some Monkey Island 1&2 and Command&Conquer lately. I have also been able to successfully dual-boot both DOS 6.22 and Windows Me.
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I accidentally misreported the system specs, it is actually a P3 500MHz with 192MB of RAM. I bought a 10GB hard drive to put in it from the local used comp parts store.

I started out by installing DOS7.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Both installed fine but when I went to install audio and network drivers, everything broke. Both of these are on-board devices, and appear to have DOS drivers, but I have had zero luck getting them to run.

I ended up installing a Sound Blaster AWE64 card I had sitting around, which I have gotten working good, but it required installing DOS6.22 instead. With a little experimentation I was able to get the newer interface features from 7.1 working on 6.22. I had to copy the Command.com and doskey.com from a 7.1 installation and paste them into the 6.22 directory.

Today’s milestone was rewarded with a very enjoyable session of Commander Keen 4.

Well, not the operating system specifically, just the games I used to play on it.

I can’t get my Creative X-Fi card working in DOSBox, so I decided I am going to build a new computer just for running DOS. So far I’ve dug out an old P2 333MHz computer with 384MB of ram in it. I still need to find a hard drive to stick in it, and a VGA monitor. I actually managed to find my old DOS 6.22 discs but they don’t seem to work any more. Fortunately, bittorrent was able to provide a suitable replacement. I’ll post again when I get it all put together and let you know how it runs.