January 2022 Development Roundup (Patreon)

First development roundup of the near year, woo! As usual, here is a detailed writeup of everything I worked on in the past month, exclusively for patrons.

Cobalt OS

I worked on a project in 2016 called Cobalt, which was a distribution of FreeDOS with a partially-custom installer and some packages thrown in. Because it was based on FreeDOS, it could run just about any apps and games built for MS-DOS, which is most PC software from the late 1980's to the mid 1990's (roughly).

Cobalt had a few releases in 2016, but when I didn't care to work on it anymore, I handed it off to Ercan Ersoy (who develops other DOS software), who kept working on it for a little while longer before moving onto other projects.

Lately I've wanted to restart development, but it would have to be mostly from scratch — the original version of Cobalt was an unorganized mix of proprietary code and open-source code, and probably violated some licenses. Sorry 'bout that.

During January, I started working on the new Cobalt project. Some of the installer components have been carried over from the old Cobalt project (the parts that were either mine, or FreeDOS free software), but the rest is all-new.

Just like the original Cobalt, my goal (right now) is to create a DOS operating system that is super easy to install and use, on both physical PCs and virtual machines. The goals might shift as I keep working on it, but that's what I'm going with right now.

Most of my initial work has been on the installer, which had to be partially re-written to use all free software components. I've also spent a while making a custom build system, which obtains packages from the FreeDOS repositories and creates an installation disc in a few seconds. It's somewhat modular (the list of packages can be easily modified), and I'm using GitHub Actions to use the build system to create a new downloadable CD image every week automatically in the cloud.

There's not a lot to play with right now, but I plan to keep working on this.

Wii Shop Music Extension

I already did a post about version 2.0 of the Wii Shop Channel Music extension, so I won't go over all that again. However, since that post was published, Google approved the Chrome version following the Firefox version being updated.

At the end of January, the extension went viral on Twitter again, which led to a few news websites noticing! The Wii Shop Music extension was covered on 9to5Google, Kotaku, NintendoLife, MyNintendoNews, Nintendo Player, and a few other places. In turn, that resulted in even more feature requests and suggestions for more sites. I'll start working through those soon.