MegaMagic
A graphical DOS shell with an icon editor and memory monitor.
Borland C++, BGI graphics, MS-DOS
Author’s notes
Amir Husain · software I wrote
A windowing shell I wrote to sit on top of MS-DOS, with a title bar, a toolbar and a desktop of icons. Each icon is a small text file naming a program, its command and its picture, and the toolbar holds the shell's own tools: an icon editor that paints a forty by forty icon one cell at a time, Add Icon, which asks for a name, a path and a picture and writes the file that puts a new program on the desktop, and the memory monitor. That monitor reads the DOS memory map and reports what every resident program has taken: HIMEM, SETVER, DOSKEY, the CD-ROM driver, the mouse driver, and MAGIC itself at 98K.
Writing a graphical shell for a machine with 640K of conventional memory meant the shell competed with the programs it existed to launch, and the monitor let me inspect that overhead.
Reading the demonstration
Open the shell’s tools, draw an icon, add a program, and inspect the memory monitor. The monitor lists resident programs alongside the shell’s own allocation.
About this recording and recovery
The icon art in this recording was drawn for it. The icons in the archive survive only as blank blue squares and the program files that describe them were wiped, so this is the shell as it was meant to look rather than as it was found.
Archive record
- Author
- Amir Husain
- Date
- c. 1995
- Environment
- Borland C++, BGI graphics, MS-DOS
- Reference
- ATX-SW-MEGAMAGIC
The software archive preserves dates, implementation notes, and surviving source material. Contact the museum to explore the program’s documentation.