New Basics Electronic Cookbook

What works

Just put the disc or mount the disc image and open the main executable on root disc directory (sp.exe).

-Since it was a MS-DOS program, Wine calls native DosBox, which mounts the target virtual drive and executes correctly the application.

- It is possible to use the keyboard to navigate the menus.

- The program opens correctly the images attachments when they are available on context menus.

What does not

- Native VIS joystick support are absent on vanilla DosBox (Even for Windows 3.0 VIS applications), which would require a custom patch.

- It is not possible to save custom recipes, since Wine or vanilla DosBox don't support the proprietary SaveIt memory cards (And there's no documentation available on-line).

Workarounds

What was not tested

- The program appears to be usable, but I not make a real test apart some basic experiments.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

After some testing and watching the (very) few Youtube videos about the Tandy VIS, I notice all VIS discs had a special file called "control.tat" which is special text file with custom control characters that tells to the machine which executable should run when the disc are inserted, and also the full application name that was prompted on start-up screen during start-up. Basically the VIS boots a custom MS-DOS shell which parses the control.tat and execute the main executable, and in some rare cases, some DOS extra drivers located on VIS CD-ROM title. If the VIS title uses the custom Windows 3.0, control.tat specifies the minwin.com which in turn loads the system.ini and win.ini located on VIS disc title, that on [boot]\shell will specify the main Win16 executable to run.