Re: Anyone use an old linux OS on an old PC?

Posted on 2015-10-25, 00:33

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by Malvineous

in Milliways

in Milliways

My first home Linux server was a Pentium 100 I used to share my dial-up Internet connection between the PCs in my house. It was also using Slackware and worked perfectly well. Only drawbacks about doing that these days is that it uses more power compared to a modern alternative (such a Linux-powered …

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Re: Advantages of WinME over Win98SE?

Posted on 2015-10-24, 23:44

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The system asked me for drivers for each separate device, so I needed to tell the computer where the drivers where, and after that, insert the Win98 CD I still don't know why, just to copy some 'needed files' again and again, which is reeeeeally annoying. Whenever that happens, you can usually say …

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Re: Random items... what do you think

Posted on 2015-10-23, 22:43

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Most of those floppy+card readers connect everything by USB, even the floppy drive, so if you don't have USB then you'll be out of luck! It looks like that one uses an actual floppy interface, but it will only be for the drive. You'll need USB for the card reader. The 5.25" drawer is of course only …

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Re: How to make my x86 interpreting CPU emulation faster?

Posted on 2015-10-21, 22:12

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by Malvineous

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

I haven't looked at it in detail as it doesn't look like I'd be able to compile it on my Linux machine anyway, but here are a couple of suggestions. Function calls can be expensive, so have you tried inlining all the functions for each instruction? If the compiler respects that, you could avoid a …

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Re: VIA ITX DOS system?

Posted on 2015-10-20, 22:39

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Sounds like a good idea - I have a couple of EPIA boards I thought about doing the same with. Not sure whether your board would be similar, but the PCI slot on this one is a bit finicky, so I don't know whether it would support all the IRQ/DMA/etc. needed by a sound card. Also the video output on …

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Re: DOSBox in VirtualBox

Posted on 2015-10-20, 22:15

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by Malvineous

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

Have you tried turning off VirtualBox's mouse integration? Normally it installs drivers in the guest OS so you can seamlessly transition between the host OS and the guest OS by just moving the mouse into the VirtualBox window, but I suspect it does this by emulating a tablet (i.e. by reporting the …

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Re: Help identifying 286 board

Posted on 2015-10-20, 12:39

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Is that 12MHz jumper supposed to be for a turbo switch then?

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Re: Determining I/O ports, IRQ, addresses, etc in DOS

Posted on 2015-10-20, 12:33

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There's probably not many programs that can do this, otherwise it wouldn't have been such a pain at the time to solve the types of problems you're having. You can't "probe" an IRQ to know what device is using it, you can only identify a device and then via some proprietary mechanism (maybe) figure …

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2015-10-17, 12:34

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Wow what a treasure trove! I think the "too large thingy" might be a large plotter, that's almost worth it because they are hard to find and if you ever need to print a massive drawing... Maybe your local hardware store or service station can rent you a cheap trailer for the day?

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Re: Savage Warriors: DosBox blocks system when using music

Posted on 2015-10-16, 21:42

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by Malvineous

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

It sounds to me like it's a problem with your PC rather than DOSBox. For instance you might have DOSBox set to use a real MIDI device, but due to a bug in your drivers, using MIDI causes applications to freeze. (I'm not saying this is the problem, just an example.) Perhaps you can try changing some …

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2015-10-16, 13:14

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I contacted a few Apple shops and IT places that deal in servers and found ONE place in town that had a cord with that connector ... which they would have happily sold me for $49. NO THANKS. Isn't this a standard IEC C19 connector? Equipment typically uses them when the current gets close to or …

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Re: Sil3114 SATARaid and Win 98

Posted on 2015-10-15, 12:30

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Does it need special drivers? Does it work if you install 98 onto a working IDE drive then try to access the SSD as drive D: or similar?

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Re: How difficult is it to write an emulator?

Posted on 2015-10-15, 12:27

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by Malvineous

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

I think it depends largely on two factors. One is at what level you want to emulate. Do you require cycle-exact emulation so you get *exactly* what you would on real hardware (and can you live with the low performance of this type of emulation), or can you live with approximations that give you a " …

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Re: Big(ish) Test of AGP Cards

Posted on 2015-10-14, 21:19

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I agree, this would be very useful. If you're going to the trouble of testing all this, it would be great to see some tests done in pure DOS as well. For example, do the cards have VESA 2.0 BIOS or is the BIOS only VESA 1.2? Do they support all the VGA registers or are there features missing? Is …

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Re: Flying saucer game from the 1980's

Posted on 2015-10-14, 11:18

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by Malvineous

in Milliways

in Milliways

Probably not Sky Runner then, but that's the only DOS game I know of where you pilot a flying saucer. Looks like there was a Spectrum port too.

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Re: 5.25in DD disks, reading in DD drive after writing in HD drive?

Posted on 2015-10-14, 07:04

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Interesting! I think the key is a continually changing field, so if you move the magnet too slowly it may be less effective, or you might have to do it a few times to get the effect you need. If you do copy files via serial port, make sure you have used MODE or similar to set both serial ports to …

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Re: 5.25in DD disks, reading in DD drive after writing in HD drive?

Posted on 2015-10-14, 02:30

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Can you get hold of a degaussing wand for demagnetising CRTs? I've heard if you use those they can reset the disk to a "neutral" state, which in theory will at least remove the crosstalk from the other half of the track. The only method I'm aware of to write the same track twice is by using a …

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Re: Netrunner (BBS door game): Tricking it into thinking I'm dialed in

Posted on 2015-10-14, 02:18

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by Malvineous

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

If it's not writing to the modem port, perhaps it's checking for the carrier detect signal line? I guess if you could configure an emulated port to have that signal set, then the game would assume the modem is connected and keep running, perhaps.

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Re: Bootable ROM loader floppy

Posted on 2015-10-12, 12:17

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Are you loading the option ROM into the same address space? It's not something like it has to be loaded at x000 rather than xD00 as in the screenshot above? Is there any way you can skip the disk detection and finish the boot process with the ROM loaded into RAM, so you can dump the memory with …

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Re: Bootable ROM loader floppy

Posted on 2015-10-11, 22:23

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by Malvineous

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

IIRC when IDE was introduced, the primary master channel used the same ports as the old MFM/RLL interface. This would normally not be a problem, since most people (then) would be unlikely to have both controller types in the same system. What hardware are you emulating? Is there an MFM/RLL or IDE …

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