I read Masters of Doom a few weeks ago, and it inspired me to do some old-school DOS VGA graphics programming.

https://github.com/cheydrick/VGA-Mandelbrot

When I was a kid I played around with some sample programs that came with DJGPP or Borland C or Turbo Pascal that did various interesting things with VGA graphics, but beyond modifying the routines slightly to see the effects I never truly understood what exactly was happening.

There’s a fantastic VGA programming tutorial here: http://www.brackeen.com/vga/. Big thanks to David Brackeen for writing that.

I managed to get Borland C installed in DOSBox using this tutorial: http://borlandc.org/how-to-install-borland-c-on-windows-8-avoiding-application-cant-run-on-your-pc-contact-with-your-software-publisher/

Unfortunately there are not a lot of good DOS programming resources that are easily searchable. I’d really like to figure out how to read keypresses. David’s tutorial covers registering mouse activity, but I can’t find anything for the keyboard.