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What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?

(devblogs.microsoft.com)
310 points rbanffy | 2 comments | 13 May 25 11:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.496s | source
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90s_dev ◴[16 May 25 13:28 UTC] No.44005274[source]▶
When I was a kid, my dad upgraded our home computer from DOS 5 or 6 to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It was the first GUI that I ever used, and it was amazing comparitively. Every app was mysterious and innovative and wonderful.

I tried Borland C++ and it was absolutely confusing, but I was probably just too young. Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time, but eventually I finally made a simple, terribly written and horribly broken Bomberman clone.

Those looking to experience something similar to that feeling should buy pico8.

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sksrbWgbfK ◴[16 May 25 14:10 UTC] No.44005746[source]▶
> Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time

For one whole year, I thought that Qbasic and Turbo Pascal were text editors that could also run games. I didn't understood that I had access to real compilers and that I could actually change the programs. Sometimes kids are stupid...

As for your Pico8 suggestion, you can always get the open-source equivalent https://tic80.com/ if you don't have the money.

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1. dec0dedab0de ◴[16 May 25 18:50 UTC] No.44008689[source]▶
That's ok, it took me like a decade to realize you could edit .bas files in any text editor.
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2. 3036e4 ◴[17 May 25 09:25 UTC] No.44013128[source]▶
Not with the files saved from GW-BASIC though, unless you add the extra A parameter to save as ASCII. I learned that recently when setting up a repo to experiment with GW-BASIC 1.0 (unlike the later Microsoft BASICs the original GW-BASIC is open source).

Annoying when saving the BAS files as ASCII they are still written as full blocks of some size 512 bytes?) with a ctrl-Z EOF to mark the end of the file. So there is some random binary garbage at the end of the file to strip away before committing changes. I wonder how common it was for DOS software to do that and how much sensitive information can be found at the end of released files if you look after the EOF marker?