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MPNQBEnSpireMe: The Secrets You Never Knew
It sure is a blast from the past to go into the GUI archives, dig out EnSpireMe, and run its craptacular QBASIC-powered "kernel" in DOSbox. Frankly, given my limited experience at the time, I'm amazed the platform starts up and runs consistently.

To me though, what mattered more than the code quality or the proper operation was the very ideas I was going to use EnSpireMe toward, but had failed to do so because of practicality justifications, inexperience, an annoying tendency to not finish what I started, or sheer lack of time. If you look in the ZIP folder for both public EnSpireMe releases, you will find many bits and pieces of unfinished side projects I was planning to integrate into EnSpireMe. Since I've nothing better to do on a slow and lonely Saturday night, I'll tell you all the things you never knew about EnSpireMe.


TEN THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT EnSpireMe:

10. "Gigateq GameBox" Game Console Platform

The very best Qbasic games had a very unique charm to them, almost as if they should have had their own television console. I had planned to piece together old computer parts around the house, build them into a wooden set-top case I drew up plans and measurements for, and connect it to the television as a sort of MS-DOS powered Qbasic games console, using PS/2 numpad keyboards as controllers. An EnSpireMe derivative known as "Gamebox" would be the frontend to it all, providing a menu for which to select a Qbasic game compiled into EXE files, and even run them from floppies as well. The remanants of this vaporware can be found in the "gbEGL" as two bitmap backgrounds: gbBoot.bmp and gbmenu.bmp.

9. EnSpireMe-ENDAZe

I was rather fascinated with the ENDAZe windowing system produced by MrChrome back in 2000. Early in the EnSpireMe development plan, the idea of this project was to implement the look, feel of ENDAZE with the function of RocketBoy's CDOS into EnSpireMe. The only remnants of this project are found in the "mydesk\endaze4" folder of the EnSpireMe directory structure as a text file, empty application, and QB file which was to contain a driving game test program before the application structure was moved from CHAINing BAS files into running RealScript III APPs.

Later on, in the development of FreeBASIC 32-bit EnSpireMe v0.5.x, I would implement the EnSpireMe-ENDAZe idea to its fullest extent, going so far as to create what was nearly an exact duplicate of ENDAZe III before I had added functions such as the scripter and user interface.

8. "Cclone"

The reason the folder is titled "Cclone" was that early in the project, the UI paradigm was intended to mimic CDOS, as mentioned before. The "C" stood for CDOS, and the project folder stood for "CDOS Clone." Later in development, the paradigm focused on duplicating that of Windows XP in MS-DOS, and the CDOS angle was dropped.

7. SchoolPro

SchoolPro is an idea I've had ever since my days of being a technologically-inclined grade school student. The idea was a complete suite of school-related software in one executable: an e-text reader, a quiz application, a grade tracker, and study aids. When I had finally learned Qbasic and later Visual Basic, priority one was implementing this long-held idea. I had written both an EnSpireMe APP and a Windows Visual Basic .NET application. The APP only featured the e-text reader, however my Windows port was much more fully featured and had a quiz component as well (which I had planned to implement as a separate APP called "Quick Quiz".) Unfortunately, it never worked out the way I had intended due to limited experience in coding and lack of time. The SchoolPro APP can be launched right from the EnSpireMe desktop, and remnants of Quick Quiz can be seen in BMPs scattered throughout the EnSpireMe v0.3.0 release, and an unfinished, hidden APP in the "dcanse" folder which can only be launched from the "Run" prompt.

6. Cosmic Jake in Andromeda

Cosmic Jake is a cartoon I drew in the back of my high school math notebooks whenever I was bored in school, and depicted an interplanetary war from the first-person viewpoint of one specific space soldier. Upon the release of EnSpireMe v0.3.0, I had planned to make it into a pseudo-3D space shooter using drafted but unwritten game APIs which were to go into EnSpireMe. Another part of the game was to include scans of the comics I had drawn, which would show off a sort of "comics reader" APP. Only the game APP had been written though, and the most it does is display the title screen and non-functional game menu before closing back to the EnSpireMe desktop. The remnants of this game consist of an icon, two bitmaps, and an unfinished APP in the "cjgame" folder of EnSpireMe v0.3.0.

5. EnSpireMe Presentations

The idea behind EnSpireMe Presentation was to make an APP that could output APPs of its own that do nothing more than display bitmap images as slides, subroutines consisting of a bunch of graphics primitives for transitions, and pause statements as a sort of timer. Needless to say, this had never been completed either, and remains as an unfinished APP and a few bitmaps in the EnSpireMe v0.3.0 folder.

Oddly enough, I had released a presentation that ran on v0.2.0 called the "EnSpireMe New Technologies Showcase," or "Newdemo.APP" This was the only APP ever made for EnSpireMe that was released independent of the main version. It was nothing more than an APP using the outline detailed above...however it was created entirely by hand to get a feel for the structure I wanted. Newdemo.app was included in a ZIP file inside the EnSpireMe v0.3.0 release, and can be launched by unzipping the "newdemo.app" into the root of "cclone" and running it from the "Run" menu.

4. RealScript III Window Maker

I had intended to use Nabosoft's NBASIC Window Maker (from KMAX) as a base for a form designer for EnSpireMe. The code was never modified beyond a few lines, and remains as a 99% unmodified version of NBASIC, renamed RSWINMKR.BAS in the EnSpireMe v0.3.0 root directory.

3. "Codename Eagle Program Manager"

When development on EnSpireMe was first underway in September or October of 2004, it was known internally as "Codename Eagle." In the kernel file, CCLONE.BAS, there are two subroutines referencing a "BuiltInLauncher" which consisted of nothing more than a large window that was titled "Codename Eagle Program Manager." You can find this legacy code in the "old" subroutine in CCLONE.BAS. The code cannot be activated in any way, unless you modify the program considerably, and was left in there for show as the comments in "old" will indicate.

2. Panic Box

Panic Box was an ON ERROR sub that handled an exception triggered either by EnSpireMe itself or any running APP. It consisted of a large box that displayed on-screen and looked much like the Palm OS "Fatal Alert" screen. I removed it in favor of a more descriptive error screen, and the code remains as an orphan SUB titled "panicbox."

1. SuperSecretDOSDevTest, and the MAKELINK utility.

You may never have known this, but there are two secret prompts in EnSpireMe that do little to nothing, but were left in as pieces of components never finished. The first one is the SuperSecretDOSDevTest (which wasn't terribly secret to begin with), which can be enabled by pressing "s" at the right time when you see the white-on-black "Starting EnSpireMe" prompt (in versions where the prompt is displayed.) This dumps you into a mode where I had tested a method of which to display both DOS input and DOS output in the graphical mode, like MS-DOS Prompt in Windows. It never worked properly, and I left it for dead in the SUB SuperSecretDOSDevTest.

The second secret prompt is upon shutdown. When shutting down EnSpireMe, press "d" at the screen that says it is now OK to turn off your computer. You will be dumped into a test program called MAKELINK. MAKELINK was intended to be a sort of IDE to write Vision Link Libraries, shared libraries much like DLLs in Windows, directly in EnSpireMe. Besides the forms displayed, no actual code was written for MAKELINK, and EnSpireMe will quickly dump out to DOS or Qbasic shortly after placing the forms on the screen.

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There were only three public releases of EnSpireMe: the two Qbasic versions v0.2.0 and v0.3.0, and the FreeBASIC powered EnSpireMe Professional v0.5.0, which was released in early 2008. Version 0.5.0 featured a fully-functioning window system, scripter, and controls, however it suffers a debilitating bug which fails to clear the controls properly when a program closes, and thus is unusable. However, there are at least two other versions of EnSpireMe which exist (or have existed.) Version v0.1.5 was titled "EnSpire" and was sent to only one friend in early 2005. This version was very broken and barely worked, however the appearance and structure was intact, as was the scripter. I no longer have this copy as my hard drive has since crashed.

Version v0.4.0, which was planned as the last version of the Qbasic kernel, featured additional applications, the EnSpireMe sidebar with autohide, and some minor scripting improvements. It also featured a dark boardwalk background image. This version may or may not still exist on one of my hard disks, and if I ever find it, I'll be sure to drop a ZIP.

Today, EnSpireMe exists solely as a name and not much else. Since the abandonment of FreeDOS and the decline of DOS in general, I have not written any more GUIs. I've tossed around the idea of writing a Linux or mobile version of a GUI, however the practicality would not justify the investment of time.

Will I write any more GUIs someday? Honestly, who knows? The EnSpireMe name may still live on in an as-yet unfinished Menuet derivative I've planned to tinker with, or it may live on in a touch-screen frontend I've planned to build for Windows-powered tablet computers. The real future for GUI development is building such frontends for tablets running non-tablet OS's, and I invite all you guys to give it a shot one day.

Either way, I'm still alive, and I haven't forgotten what I've cut my teeth on. Nice to see the old guys around here drop in every now and then, and maybe one day I'll come in here with something that'll really knock your socks off.

But for now...college calculus is eating me alive! O.o So don't expect me to release anything anytime soon...at all.		2010-11-069:20 PM
BrandonRe:EnSpireMe: The Secrets You Never Knew
EnSpireMe has always been my favorite GUI that has been released since I've been active in the community, and possibly my favorite of all time. I'm not really sure why, I think it's because trying a new release was like getting a bunch of presents with little surprises hidden everywhere. EnSpireMe was not predicable in any sense, and did things sort of out of the box/circle.
2010-11-069:54 PM

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