Re: Will the Book 8088 be a future classic?

Posted on 2024-01-02, 22:16

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I wrote a small program to work around the issues with the Book 8088 not centering the display properly. It's a TSR that wraps the BIOS video interrupt and briefly sets pixels in the top left and bottom right of the screen to help the LCD display calibrate correctly. I've only tested on my V2 with …

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Re: Will the Book 8088 be a future classic?

Posted on 2023-12-14, 17:37

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Very impressive! I'm wondering if it's faster than the CGA Wolfenstein 3D port on the same hardware? Sounds like it would come out to the same number of bytes for the display with your method, but simpler than having 4 pixels per byte on CGA. Thanks! It should be faster than CGA, as with VGA it is …

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Re: Will the Book 8088 be a future classic?

Posted on 2023-12-13, 11:28

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I recently ordered a Book 8088 V2 in the Black Friday sale and just received it. I've been experimenting with making a build of Wolfenstein 3D targeting the V20 CPU instead of a 286. To speed up rendering I've reduced horizontal resolution by 1/4 which reduces the number of rays required for …

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Re: WolfensteinCGA

Posted on 2023-02-02, 08:17

by

by jhhoward

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

I've actually be experimenting with the Tandy 320x200 mode. Here is a sneak peek from a capture I did in DOSBox: https://youtu.be/2OjxCX75tJ0

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Re: WolfensteinCGA

Posted on 2023-01-23, 12:14

by

by jhhoward

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Absolutely awesome! Just wanted to say that it is so great to see the 16-color CGA composite artifact video mode to see some love. That makes me curious, how did you design the color mapping mode/support for the composite artifact mode? Conceptually, do you map pairs of two horizontal pixels in the …

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Re: WolfensteinCGA

Posted on 2023-01-22, 10:25

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by jhhoward

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Hi author of the project here! Someone pointed me to this thread so thought I'd chime in. I hadn't seen the wolfmidi project before, it certainly looks like an interesting mod. A couple of people have asked if Tandy 3 voice sound could be supported, since I supported the 160x200 16 colour Tandy mode …

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Re: *The DOS HP Palmtop discussion topic for users of HP 95LX, 100LX, 200LX and 1000CX Palmtops*

Posted on 2022-06-05, 18:58

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Anecdotally speaking, I've had some issues with the newer OpenWatcom forks so I stick to 1.9. The main advantage of using OpenWatcom over Borland is that you can cross compile from a modern OS to develop your DOS application.

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Re: *The DOS HP Palmtop discussion topic for users of HP 95LX, 100LX, 200LX and 1000CX Palmtops*

Posted on 2022-06-03, 08:04

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

radiance32 wrote on 2022-06-03, 07:39: I have a 2nd Netgear FA-411 10/100Mbits card I can sell you if you want a NIC for your 100 or 200LX. I don't have permissions to send PMs on the forum but I've sent an email to the address you have listed on your Youtube channel.

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Re: *The DOS HP Palmtop discussion topic for users of HP 95LX, 100LX, 200LX and 1000CX Palmtops*

Posted on 2022-06-03, 06:47

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Good to hear that there are few options when it comes to getting HP palmtops online. I haven't been able to find a suitable card yet but am on the lookout for one! I had a look at potentially running an SSH client before but I believe the modern encryption may be too much for the slow processor? I …

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Re: CGA composite colour driver for Space Quest 3 (and other Sierra SCI games)

Posted on 2021-04-26, 20:32

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by jhhoward

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Just for reference I've attached the dither versions from my last post: CGACOMPO.DRV - Mostly the same as the previous version except that dark grey is emulated with a dither pattern CGADITH.DRV - Dither patterns to simulate EGA colours CGASCAN.DRV - Scanline patterns to simulate EGA colours

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Re: CGA composite colour driver for Space Quest 3 (and other Sierra SCI games)

Posted on 2021-04-07, 12:25

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I was experimenting with dithering - specifically for creating a dark grey as it is missing from the CGA composite palette. I also experimented using dithering and scanlines to more closely match the EGA palette, although the result is very noisy! I wonder how they would actually look on a real CRT …

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Re: CGA composite colour driver for Space Quest 3 (and other Sierra SCI games)

Posted on 2021-04-05, 20:18

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

That is a jump instruction to the dispatch routine. Execution starts right at the beginning of the file. Ah yeah that actually makes a lot of sense now that I look at it! I ended up patching the newer CGA driver and now it works with the later SCI games since it has the scroll function …

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Re: CGA composite colour driver for Space Quest 3 (and other Sierra SCI games)

Posted on 2021-04-01, 12:28

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

That can be patched in. The newer version has an additional function, i.e. the scroll function, and a matching additional entry right at the end of its jump table. If that additional entry is missing, but the game expects it to be there, funny things happen. I had a go at trying to patch it in but …

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Re: CGA composite colour driver for Space Quest 3 (and other Sierra SCI games)

Posted on 2021-03-31, 19:21

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Took another look at the palette mapping and think I have generally improved it. New version is attached to this post Here are some comparison screenshots of original EGA version vs composite CGA version: https://i.imgur.com/bugB13q.png https://i.imgur.com/kaoFgQR.png https://i.imgur.com/pqhAyGM.png …

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Re: CGA composite colour driver for Space Quest 3 (and other Sierra SCI games)

Posted on 2021-03-31, 17:41

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Does the driver not show up in the installer? I think it should, provided that you modified the strings in the file header. Yes it should show up in the installer as 'CGA with composite color output'. I mentioned the instructions about editing the config file directly because the modern re-releases …

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CGA composite colour driver for Space Quest 3 (and other Sierra SCI games)

Posted on 2021-03-31, 14:14

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

This is something that I hacked together by modding the existing 2 colour CGA driver - it enables the colour burst bit and has a modified look up table for colour translation. I have only tested this in DosBox-X as I don't actually have a CGA machine with composite output. The CGA composite colours …

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Re: *The DOS HP Palmtop discussion topic for users of HP 95LX, 100LX, 200LX and 1000CX Palmtops*

Posted on 2021-02-26, 11:26

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Your ESP8266 in a PCMCIA card sounds interesting! Do you have any further details or posts about this? How easy would it be to replicate? It sounds like you were also able to run the microcontroller from just the palmtop power which is a plus. The ESP chips are pretty powerful so you could probably …

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Re: *The DOS HP Palmtop discussion topic for users of HP 95LX, 100LX, 200LX and 1000CX Palmtops*

Posted on 2021-02-25, 22:17

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I found these on eBay: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/392406978951?ul_noapp=true One thing that isn't ideal is that the connector isn't deep enough but you could stack two together and it is about right.

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Re: *The DOS HP Palmtop discussion topic for users of HP 95LX, 100LX, 200LX and 1000CX Palmtops*

Posted on 2021-02-25, 12:34

by

by jhhoward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've got an HP 100LX and I've always thought it would be neat to have a sort of super PCMCIA card which can do storage, network and sound all in one. I wouldn't really know where to start with hardware design but I'll be following your development on your sidecar project as it sounds really …

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Re: Faux86 - an 8086 emulator for Raspberry Pi that runs bare metal

Posted on 2020-11-03, 10:53

by

by jhhoward

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Hey, cool. Fake86 was my old PC emulator. The code is awful though. It might be worth redoing this with my new emulator, XTulator. It's basically Fake86 2.0. The CPU code is still mostly the same (for now) but most of the rest is rewritten to be cleaner and better. There are some improvements (EGA/ …

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