#Wordstar is now freely distributable and Robert J. Sawyer has worked hard to create a .zip with both WS and DOSBox-X already configured for running after unzipping.
It comes configured for a Windows system with local C:/ drive. You need to put the WS folder in the Zip in your local C:/ root path, and then DB-X will auto-mount and run WS automatically.
Mac and Linux users will need their own DB-X and to edit the .conf for mounting to Unixy paths.
@ellabellafull I can't seem to find any announcement where Mattel (current owner of the successor companies of MicroPro) would have relinquished the rights to WordStar.. so "freely distributable" doesn't really seem true. And Mattel is one of the companies that is sadly well known for their rather aggressive lawyers.
Also wtf did Sawyer do to that program to make it 700MB? I recall WordStar to fit on a handful of floppy disks..
@ellabellafull @WooShell
I downloaded this instead: https://winworldpc.com/product/wordstar/7 (6 MB)
It has the added benefit of letting you do a biblically accurate install from 19 floppies. (For some reason the installer didn't ask for disk 7, even though I selected all the features.) If you wanna skip that step, here's the C drive resulting from that install: http://ybshare.com/download/7hn42z8szb
@ellabellafull @WooShell Yup, half the file size is from poorly compressed PDFs. (They should be much smaller, given they're mostly black-and-white. [Not greyscale!])
There's also lots of other vaguely related stuff in there. Unfortunately, picking that out is a pain because it's all dumped into the WordStar directory with no obvious organisation.