Everyone’s favourite opensource DOS GUI is back and better than ever in the new release, skinning support has been improved to allow better themeing, rather than just buttons skins, the Multimedia API(SFA) has been expanded to support more Audio Formats, the Disk Imager has been ported and many other improvements have been made, and still in just a 1.39MB download. Get your copy or take a look at a couple of screenshots: shot1 & shot2. Bad Desktop is also available as a separate download here.
Seal DOS GUI Version 2.00.11 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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A DOS GUI??? Why are people wasting their time with projects like this. Sure, it migh be neat from a nostalgic point of view, but beyond that, this is totaly useless. They should be devoting their skills to something a little bit more worth -while.
</My Opinion>
I hear that DOS is still being used in lots of embedded systems projects (even moreso than Linux is, if you can believe that).
Still, most embedded systems wouldn’t need this GUI.
A DOS GUI is like a talking dog. Even if the dog doesn’t talk all that well, it is astonishing just to witness that the dog is able to talk in the first place.
-A 486 processor or better
-At least 8mb of RAM (you may be able to run SEAL with less, but it is not recommended)
-A video card which supports at least 640×480 resolution in 256 colours, although 16-bit colour is recommended.
-At least 1.6mb of hard disk space (more recommended)
-MS-DOS 3.0 or higher (or compatible – DR-DOS, PC-DOS and FreeDOS all work with SEAL)
This is a modern-look OS that will run on a PC made up to 10 years ago
I would call that a significant achievement… besides which.. maybe they ENJOY coding, this is a proof of the authors skill and ingenuity as well as a tool to empower a PC which could otherwise be used a a doorstop and not much else.
Some of the icons in the screenshot look very similar to ones in Windows XP, although I am sure they are only “borrowing” them :->
Anyhow, looks like quite a technical feat, It certainly can not be accused of having bloat!
Hmmmm… Excellent and Amazing! 🙂
Imagine a GUI that pretty running on a 486…
I wonder why the mighty Microsoft cant get performance out of a computer like that?
Oh right, that might end up killing the computer hardware industry.
Personally, I think this is kick ass!
Really, really good work guys!
Heck, I’m gonna go resurect a 486 just so I can play with this…
RosinCore
A valid reason is that DOS is still widely used throughout the world. Not everyone can afford the upgrade schedule maintained in North America. So increasing the usability and productivity of DOS on a plentiful source of “mediocre” hardware would be worthwhile I think.
Well Dos has been around for a long time, I’m sure there are many many programs that geeks to Joe Smo wrote for dos and don’t feel like redoing them and would like to have somehting a little spiffyer than plain Dos. Most these type programs don’t need anything more than DOS. If this was some new GUI or something for an OS that doesn’t even exist any more that would be differant. But hey you could whip out an old PS/2 or something and plop this on it, looks better than a dos terminal.
on a side note
>>They should be devoting their skills to something a little bit more worth -while.
<<
What do you consider more worth while? I’m sure what ever it might be if you were to think about it someone else could see what you think as worth while as not being very worthwhile at all.
DOS is still very common, that gets my nod for being worth while
“Heck, I’m gonna go resurect a 486 just so I can play with this…”
It will run under Windows 98 in a full screen DOS window if you just want to play with it. I’ve been messing with it that way and it seems pretty cool. It even supports long file names when running under Windows.
if you’d like some other skins for Seal2 then you can always take a look at http://www.vmlinuz.freeserve.co.uk/ and click on the seal stuff button.
I like DOS. DOS is cool.
I even have a DOS entry in my boot manager.
While I don’t use any DOS GUIs (DOS Navigator does everything I want), I like that DOS is still supported.
The answer why they are doing this is easy: Because they can.
It’s simmilar to FreeDOS: Nobody really needs it. Almost everybody has some version of MS-DOS somewhere, but those projects are cool.
You can also get QubeOS, which is faster and better looking… http://www.qubeos.com , may I also say it was developed by the same guy who created Seal
but of course QubeOS, which is not an OS, has larger hardware requirements, less software, is not open source, cannot play any kind of media files, doesn’t print, and is a commercial projects.
I am a DOS fan. I don’t get to use it very much, lately, but I still thik that games written for DOS run the best. When I play Heroes of MIght and Magic i or II, I always play them under DOS; cuz then I have fullscreen and much better performance. I also like to play some other DOS games.
BTW, does anyone know if there is Centipede for DOS?
you know a nice dos bootable cdrom with a seal interface would be a nice addition to my pc repair toolkit…
heh, perhaps i should explore this further
such a creature could be put together, shouldn’t be too difficult, maybe using RAM drives to allow configuration, albeit temporary.
…and plunk this on top of the Linux kernel. Good kernel, drivers, etc. and a very small GUI…
Whaddaya think?
Their AA font engine (freetype?) needs lots of work or just some tweaking (enable hinting for example). It looks really bad currently.
Why?
What (x86) hardware worth supporting is there that a version of DOS does not support?
Or even just run DOSEMU
ruprecht asks “Why a DOS GUI?” (Poetic License # 14234A)
I can tell you one reason; I detest the bloat of X which, once you add the incredible bloat of KDE or Gnome, is bordering on ususable, even on current hardware.
The sources are there, this is GPL software. Perhaps a port to Linux would give us an X-Free (pardon the pun) alternative.
Cheers,
Ant
Otherwise, Antarius’ idea for a linux port would be a lot of work. If it does, Wouldn’t it have to run setuid root?
I’ve installed it and and tried last night without knowing it is just released. It run quite fast on my Win98 DOS mode but it look like there are problem with the driver for my video card and causing it not capable of doing resolution higher than 640 x 480.
The responsiveness it very good, far better than my Linux + XFree86. Maybe I’ll try to compile it to run on FreeDOS32 to see how good is the performance.
I think the comment in “Let’s Borrow A Page From the AtheOS guys…” make sense especially to those who complaining Xwindows is huge, slow or bloat. For me I still admire the ability of X although Seal give me back the memory in the past.
> but of course QubeOS, which is not an OS, has larger hardware
>requirements, less software, is not open source, cannot play
>any kind of media files, doesn’t print, and is a commercial
>projects.
Yes. Please restrict future comments to non-commercial operating systems like WinXP and Mac OS X.
A port to Linux shouldn’t be too hard though… Since SEAL is developed on the gcc tools… You know… they are ported to DOS too! 😉
to correct the resoloution problem you may want to try running at 16bit or 32bit instead of 24bit colour depth as most systems have trouble with that above 640×480.
I would love to see this on Unix. Maybe then I could dispose of the hask of X-Window.
Granted, X is bloated. KDE and GNOME are bloated. But I think that you’re exaggerating a bit. It’s not bloated to a point of unusability. I use an U10 (300Mhz) as my main workstation running WindowMaker as a window manager. This machine is *very* responsive. And this is with about 250 processes running on it constantly.
‘cmon, man. You now that there are plenty of other projects out there that could be considered *much* more important/valuable than hacking a GUI on top of an *ancient* os. And I’m not saying that I should be a judge of what is considered wortwhile.
QubeOS 3p, which is a desktop version, is free, the api is open-source the kernel is closed. All in all… it’s FREE not commercial… the embedded version that is to be released is commercial, funny how biggyp left that out
the sdk is available… Seal doesn’t have an sdk, did biggyp tell you guys that? no? hmmm… thats funny too.. QubeOS may not have much because it only has one developer right now, Michal, who also made Seal2 which I see I do have to say again… Seal2 was also picked up by Julien who left Seal for the same reason Michal did. Because those that remained with Seal2 are assholes, they fight too much and hardly code anything. Most of the apps were made by Julien, he has requested them to be removed 
Seal won’t have much now !!!!
all in all though Qube is a commercial product, it is not particularly feature rich at this stage, it has no coding going on that we know of, and the likes of this QubeOS guy, who sounds a lot like JGX22, post abusive messages in the Guestbook http://www.qubeos.com/guest/index.php on their site.
i haven’t seen a fight in Seal2 for quite a while, well, not since you last posted anyway.
with regards to the apps that Julien wants removed, that means SIMP, yes it is the only graphics editor for Seal, but it’s not very usable as it stands anyway, VDEV had potential and was a usefull tool, but is not essential, and the others are just a couple of games, we have more.
as for an SDK, all you need with Seal is a DEV Release with sources and a copy of DJGPP and thats it.
they fight too much and hardly code anything
sounds like the guys on the qubeos guestbook…
It probably wouldn’t be too hard to port SEAL to Linux. The DLX system would have to be ported, or someone could just write a small DLX “layer” that just uses the standard Linux .so files. As SEAL uses Allegro, and Allegro works on *NIX (as well as BeOS, Windows, Mac OS X, Mac OS and of course DOS), that won’t be a problem, and most of the libraries, if not all, are open source and most have a port to Linux anyway.
Owen Rudge (SEAL maintainer)
http://www.owenrudge.co.uk/