Re: dISAppointment - LPC to ISA adapter - ISA on modern motherboards

Posted on Yesterday, 08:40

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by digger

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

I guess there's not much industrial adapters needing ISA DMA, if so, probably more effort would already put in and big manufacturers would already offer some more working solutions. Also there maybe other obstacles by requirement of old control SW. I know that lot of such SW was designed for DOS …

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Re: Rant "Requires Windows"

Posted on Yesterday, 08:11

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by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

Just run the game under your current Windows version and see what happens. Either it works flawlessly (great!), it glitches (not so great), or it fails and gives you an error message, which usually provides more clarity on which exact Windows version it needs. Or better still, run it on Linux with …

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Re: List of open-source PC hardware projects

Posted on 2025-04-22, 22:28

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

86box - a 5150 emulator, not to be confused with box86 https://86box.net/ 8086 instruction set emulator - https://github.com/cttynul/f86-dos Thanks for sharing. But this thread is about open source hardware projects. As in: actual hardware projects with open source designs. Not hardware emulated in …

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Re: MFM Controllers and Data Recovery

Posted on 2025-04-22, 18:21

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by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I can wholeheartedly recommend this video by Adrian Black (of the YouTube channel "Adrian's Digital Basement") about this topic. He shows how such a device can be used both to back up data from a physical MFM drive, as well as emulate an MFM drive in a host computer. The MFM Hard Disk Reader/ …

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Re: DOS games with where a patch fixed a showstopper or changed the game a lot

Posted on 2025-04-22, 18:11

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by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

What is broken in Dune 2 or do you mean the fix that you have sound and MT32 sound? Just wondering because I played it in the install version through at least 2 times in the past. The version of Dune II that I played back in the day never had the Atreides get a wormsign when a sandworm was active …

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Re: Hardware you are glad you never bought

Posted on 2025-04-04, 12:08

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by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

A motherboard with RDRAM memory modules. I remember being disgusted about how Rambus tried to shove their patented crap down the collective PC industry's throat. Not only am I glad that I didn't touch that technology with a 10-foot pole, I'm also glad that the technology lost out to the industry- …

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Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators

Posted on 2025-04-02, 16:05

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by digger

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Are any of you in this thread familiar with the emulator MartyPC ? It apparently runs 8088 MPH successfully. So I guess it no longer "breaks all emulators". :winking_face: But it took emulator coders a long time to get it to run, so this demo remains an impressive feat regardless! Link the the …

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Re: TNDLPT : Tandy Sound on parallel port

Posted on 2025-04-01, 08:26

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Hi, sorry for the necro! Please don't be scared! 😅 I just want to mention that DR DOS and Novell DOS support an LPT4 device. MS-DOS stops at LPT3, though. To those TNDLPT utility developers reading this: Please consider adding LPT4 support, if you haven't yet! Thanks. :) @Jo22 Interesting, …

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Re: hardware you are glad you never bought

Posted on 2025-03-28, 10:59

by

by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

IBM Deskstar hard drives. People started calling them "Death stars" for a reason. 💀 According to Wikipedia, it was only the 75GXP series that had the infamously high failure rates. But that was enough to kill IBM's reputation on the computer storage market.

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Re: ITX-Llama (Vortex86EX ITX motherboard) - DONE!

Posted on 2025-03-19, 14:12

by

by digger

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Speaking of Demos, Second Reality’s audio now works under the latest version of FreeDOS on the ITX Llama. Under MSDos it’s a total mess with mostly pops, clicks and whistles. Quite interesting and unexpected. Any idea why this in particular works better in the latest version of FreeDOS? Any …

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Re: any users of Office 2019/2021?

Posted on 2025-03-16, 22:45

by

by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

As Ozzuneoj mentioned, LibreOffice is indeed an option worth considering, if you don't want to play the "you never really own any software anymore" game. LibreOffice has gotten really good over the years, including its support for both the later and earlier MS Office file formats. And it's actually …

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Re: New SVGA Windows 3.x driver supports multiple resolutions and color depth modes

Posted on 2025-03-16, 22:26

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I don't need to use this driver as I'm using a Voodoo 3 in my DOS/WfW311 machine, but to see people showing interest in getting Windows 3.x running again 30+ years later is fantastic! Was a Windows 3.x driver ever released for the Voodoo 3? That seems highly unlikely. If you're currently relying on …

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Re: What do you drive?

Posted on 2025-03-13, 14:53

by

by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

"I love Tesler!" 🤦🏽

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Re: XTMax - Software Defined 8-bit ISA expansion card using a Teensy 4.1

Posted on 2025-03-12, 22:06

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

That's exactly how it works in KiCad: Everything that can be connected to traces is modelled as component, this includes edge connectors. If you care only about the PCB and pick&place instructions, you can ignore the "component" BUS_ISA_8bit. If you want to import the schematic into another …

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Re: XTMax - Software Defined 8-bit ISA expansion card using a Teensy 4.1

Posted on 2025-03-12, 12:47

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Question for those familiar with the XTMax PCB design: I imported the KiCad PCB project file of the XTMax project in the AISLER sandbox , and it appears to have successfully parsed the BOM and pick-and-place data from it, along with the PCB schematic. It still requires me to manually assign most of …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2025-03-07, 10:11

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Another gem I got myself back - Dell Optiplex GX1, the 450MHz P3 variant. Anyone know how much worth is the ATI GPU inside it? As in, can a Voodoo 2 save its butt? I have the 500MHz variant. It sucks that there is no way to completely switch off the on-board ATI GPU. There is neither a jumper nor a …

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Re: Super annoyed by eBay sellers jacking up prices and inflating shipping

Posted on 2025-03-07, 10:04

by

by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

I can see EU members keeping sales local because they would have to deal with VAT on imports, shipping gets pricey, and you have time limits to PayPal disputes and stuff just takes too long to deliver. For old gear you also have PAL vs NTSC and 120VAC to 240VAC issues. Yep. I blew the fuse of a …

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Re: Super annoyed by eBay sellers jacking up prices and inflating shipping

Posted on 2025-03-07, 09:59

by

by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

I do not sell on ebay much, but I feel like this thread is very US centric. I do not know about shipping costs in America, maybe it is cheaper. But here in Europe, something like 20-30 euro for shipping is not completely unreasonable. The absolute cheapest international postage, up to 1 kg, is an …

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Re: Super annoyed by eBay sellers jacking up prices and inflating shipping

Posted on 2025-03-06, 14:31

by

by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

Not for rare and obscure parts. Have you considered starting one yourself? (Assuming you'd be in the position to do so.) It's a niche business, but I'm sure there's quite a few retro enthusiasts in your country that would love to have such an alternative as much as you would. Maybe you can make a …

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Re: which option conveys more fun? (hint Intel/Apple server related)

Posted on 2025-03-05, 13:29

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Maybe it would be a fun (although not exactly cheap) idea to retrofit an Ampere Altra motherboard from ASRock Rack into such an aluminum Mac Pro case? After all, Apple already transitioned to the ARM architecture, so having such a case house a powerful ARM-based server would be kind of fitting. How …

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