Month: July 2021

(credit: Sean Gallagher)

Update, July 5, 2021: It's the July 4 holiday weekend in the US, which means Ars staff gets a well-deserved holiday to catch up on this summer's Steam sale (or maybe just to rest). As such, we're resurfacing a few classics from the Ars archives, including this somewhat masochistic experiment. Back in 2014, Ars' Editor Emeritus Sean Gallagher decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary of MS-DOS's end-of-life by working in the operating system within a modern context. It... went about as smoothly as you'd expect.

Now 27 years after Microsoft announced that it would end support for the MS-DOS, we're resurfacing this exercise (and very much appreciating our present day options as we all work from home a bit more). This story originally ran on July 3, 2014, and it appears unchanged below.

Twenty years ago this week, as Microsoft announced that it would end support for the MS-DOS operating system, James Hall announced to the world that he intended to create a public domain version of the OS in order to keep the universe of character-based DOS software alive. Hall’s “PD-DOS” project eventually became FreeDOS, which today supports an ecosystem of developers, retro gamers, and diehards who will give up their WordStar when you pry the floppies from their cold, dead fingers.

In tribute to the project's two decades (and to those brave souls who keep the DOS fires burning), I decided to spend a day this week working in FreeDOS. I set up a machine running the latest distribution of the OS along with software from the FreeDOS Package Manager repositories. I then added whatever other software I could scrape together—open source software, freeware, and “abandonware” found on the Web, plus some software graciously sent by Lee Hutchinson from his own personal reserve of DOSware. I wanted to know if it was possible to do modern Web-based work in DOS—and just how painful it might prove to be.

Enlarge / A visitor looks at displayed artifacts at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (NMEC) during its official reopening a day after the Pharaohs' Golden Parade ceremony, a procession held to transport the mummified bodies of 22 ancient Egyptian kings and queens from the Egyptian Museum to their new resting place at the NMEC. (credit: Gehad Hamdy/picture alliance via Getty Images)

In 1823, the chief surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, John Warren, prepared to autopsy a 2,500-year-old corpse. Warren figured examining the Egyptian mummy—a gift from a patron that had been placed in the hospital’s surgical ward to collect quarters from gawkers—would advance knowledge of the ancients. He carefully began cutting through the old linen, and then stopped. He had exposed a blackened but exquisitely preserved head: high cheekbones, wisps of brown hair, gleaming white teeth. As Warren later recounted, this was a person, and “being unwilling to disturb” him further, he stopped there.

Fast forward to last October, when the press was on hand as Egyptian archaeologists opened the first of a cache of 59 recently discovered mummies for the whole world to see, revealing a perfectly wrapped body. Video of the event went viral, and the Twitter pushback followed: “Even in death POC can’t escape the prying and opportunistic advances of white people,” wrote one user, in a tweet that gained nearly a quarter-million likes.

The question of whether it is unseemly, ghoulish, disrespectful, or even racist to display ancient corpses, or whether it's a noble contribution to science and education, has nagged mummy displays since Warren took up his scalpel nearly 200 years ago. And the Black Lives Matter movement’s focus on issues of cultural ownership and appropriation has only added fuel to a persistent ethical dilemma for museums and experts who study mummies.

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  [credit: AtGames ]

If you'd told me at the beginning of 2021 that I'd review not one but two virtual pinball options for the home, I would have nodded and said, sure, that sounds entirely unsurprising. A replica arcade experience seems like a great antidote for any nerd going stir-crazy in a pandemic. Yet while stand-up arcade multi-cabinets have rarely gotten me excited, virtual pinball is another story.

When I play classics like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong on a console, I generally feel like it's the same experience as standing up with chunky joysticks (your mileage may vary, in which case, there are tons of products for you). But pinball's orientation, form factor, and tactile nature have always precluded it from feeling authentic when virtualized on something like an Xbox. I don't have the cash or space for a fleet of classic pinball machines, however, so I like the idea of a single system that emulates dozens of tables while maintaining the genre's physicality—staples like flipper buttons, nudge options, and a plunger.

Last month, this led me to test the Arcade1Up Williams Pinball table, and I was left amused, if not charmed. But its great virtual table selection and solid physical construction were marred by enough issues to make it a tough sell to anyone beyond families. Still, I saw its potential as a moddable machine, whether to add more virtual tables or to use its $600 base as a cheap path to a dreamy homemade system.