Back in the summer, I was going over my old CDs looking for any code I might still have from 15+ years ago. I started programming back in the early 90s in QBasic and moved on to Pascal and HTML 4.0 towards to end of the decade. The early 2000s were focused on Visual Basic and then C#, Java, and finally lately Python. I was so thrilled to find some of my early codes in Pascal containing my very first 3D astronomical software. With it, I also found another piece of software (3DStars) written by a student at Manchester University back in 1998. I can say that this was one of the programs that caught my attention back then and drove me to start writing my own 3D space simulators. It was before OpenUniverse and later Celestia became popular. In addition, my Visual Basic app (sadly without code) in which I migrated my initial Pascal code was also there. I used this code to get my high school certificate of competence in informatics. The limited version of it can run on the Windows 95 image but the advanced one cannot (not even on a Windows 98 with VB runtime but I am working on it and hopefully will get to have it run. It was an amazing software as it allowed for voice control!). At some point (hopefully not too far away), I will post a custom Windows 98 image with the VB applications as well.
So this weekend, I finally got to install DOSBox with a Windows 95 image on it and create a custom image that you can also use after installing DOSBox yourself. To my surprise, I got to run the 3DStars and my own 3Dmap applications straight away. I took this opportunity to install Turbo Pascal on the Windows Image and update the user interface of my program to English so that you can enjoy it too.
To run the software:
- Download and install DOSBox.
- Download and unzip the archive containing the custom Windows 95 image.
- Run the DOSBox 0.74-3 Run Old Astro Software.bat file by double-clicking on it.
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