MSX essential tools and (free) games

Scribe (1743)

17-08-2018, 01:40

fr3nd wrote:

Thank you guys, those are really good lists where to start from. I'm worried about the legal status of some of those apps though. Although they are commonly distributed without any problems, I'm not so sure about how legal would that be...

Add support for repositories and provide the software to run your own repository, and I'm sure people who are less worried about the legal status, will provide non-free software repos.

By fr3nd

Expert (112)

17-08-2018, 13:37

Fortunately, it seems to be no issues distributing this software... even archive.org has MSX-DOS available to download: https://archive.org/details/MSXDOS :) I'm now reconsidering to include them to the repository.

I'm now having some trouble deciding where to install the software once the package have been downloaded. My first idea was to install everything under the same directory. For example: A:\PROGRAMS\VI or A:\PROGRAMS\SOFARUN

But this seems problematic for several reasons...

First of all, the path... As a user, I'd like some of the apps to be in the path so it's easier to launch them. This is specially important for your preferred text editor for example. How should be this managed? I don't want to mess with the AUTOEXEC.BAT file every time a new package is installed.. also I don't think every application needs to be in the path...

Second, some applications are usually installed to some specific directories. For example, the MSX-DOS tools are usually installed in \TOOLS or \UTILS so it's easier to add them to the path... What if someone tries to install an application to a path already exists?

In linux those problems do not exist because the binaries are always installed to /usr/bin, but with DOS is completely different...

Any suggestions on how to deal with those problems? What's the more common directory structure for most MSX users?