For my father, Yasser Awad
In Port Said, from 1991 to 1993, with no internet and a Borland compiler, he taught a PC to write Arabic.
Then he built Arabic software at Sakhr in Cairo, and network software at Newbridge Networks and Alcatel in Kanata. There his name went on two patent filings. At DinarSoft, his phone apps won awards.
I made this site so his work keeps running, and so anyone can see what he built.
Youssef Awad, his son
How this site was made
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Unpacking
Every program was squeezed with DIET, a 1990s packer that works like a self-extracting zip: about 704 KB of program stored in 296 KB. Each one was left to unpack itself inside an emulator, and what it left in memory was saved.
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Reading
A disassembler turned the bytes back into readable assembly. Borland's compiler adds its own start-up code to every program. The Every Byte map shows which bytes he wrote and which came with his tools.
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Running
In your browser, js-dos runs DOSBox, a whole PC compiled to WebAssembly. Each program gets its own settings. The CPU speed is fixed, because several programs time their animations by counting in a loop, and a faster PC would rush them.
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Porting
ARABART on this site is his assembly, ported line by line to JavaScript. In 2,511 test drawings, the port and his original program light exactly the same pixels. A small emulator also drew the screens of ten programs from the unpacked code, and they match the screenshots here.
Credits
- Made by
- Youssef Awad, for his father
- DinarSoft
- Every recovered DinarSoft file and page comes from the Internet Archive: the Wayback Machine and archive.org.
- Text font
- IBM VGA font from The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack by VileR (int10h.org), CC BY-SA 4.0
- Emulation
- js-dos and DOSBox
- Motion
- GSAP, Lenis and OGL
- Analysis
- Detect It Easy, Unicorn and Capstone
- Type
- Archivo by Omnibus-Type, Reem Kufi by Khaled Hosny, Martian Mono by Evil Martians, Pixelify Sans by Stefie Justprince
- Site
- Astro. The colors come from the Borland Turbo C editor he worked in.
- Source
- github.com/DeadPackets/ARABART, MIT License