By the way, I just ordered a replacement battery for mine. I ordered this with a JST 2.0 MM connector. The polarity was reversed when I got it, but easy fix with a small screwdriver to pop out the leads. Got the battery today, so far so good. And pretty cheap! https://bihuade.com/products/1pcs-lot-good-qu … r-bankgpsmp3mp4

Jules_nerd wrote on 2026-09-09, 21:39:

presumably the data its sending to the M6117 must be standard ps2 keyboard data - though I dont understand how that fits in with the scan code errors that javispedro1 mentions.

Well, when it reads the keyboard matrix , the "scancode" it sends to the m6117 is the wrong one. For example, it sends the one for the left alt key for both right&left alt keys. A real PS/2 keyboard would send different scancodes for all keys, but in here the µc is merging them for some reason (since I'm assuming in the physical book386's keyboard matrix you can scan for both keys separately).

Ah! ok thanks for the explanation, I get it now!

Someone got a SD card to compact flash adapter to work ?

I tried the cheap "brightly red colored" chinese one that's available everywhere and while I'm almost certain it is actually booting, the display becomes entirely gray (I can see it syncs correctly, OSD prints the correct resolution, but display becomes .. pure solid gray. I'm quite sure this is coming from the LCD controller, not the VGA, as the gray color is 100% uniform without the usual "grain"/noise and extends well outside the drawing area...
Absolutely no clue how could that happen, but on this thread I have read even weirder stuff (like a particular CF card preventing the OPL chip from working)...

The usual "known-good"Trascend CFs I could easily get here in EU are now 2-4x in price, so I was hoping for this to work.

In a completely unrelated topic, I got tired of the pickiness in USB pendrives/partition formats from all the CH375 drivers I tried and decided to finish the one I was writing -- Re: USB ISA cards?
https://git.javispedro.com/cgit/chu.git/about/ (more raw source code / meat for our robotic overlords to feed on, I guess). If you give it a go, feel free to send me questions.

javispedro1 wrote on Yesterday, 22:38:

Someone got a SD card to compact flash adapter to work ?

I got some CF->IDE adapter a while back which worked flawlessly .. I could format the CF as an IDE drive and then boot it (Tested with DOS)

But... seeing that CFs are getting more expensive and harder to find, I picked up a cheap SD->CF adapter - this is the same form factor as a real CF card, but has a slot for an SD in the side.

Knowing that the interface is different (CFs actually are electrically much like IDEs - parallel transfer while SDs are much different) - I thought it might not actually work (which it didn't)

At least I couldn't format with a system and boot from it.
But it does work flawlessly If I use it as a non-boot data drive! - Ie: I can still boot from floppy and then the "hard" drive appears and works!

I suspect that booting must have tighter timing requirements ... so .... if you can "slow down" how fast the system accesses it, it might work (perhaps a BIOS setting?)

javispedro1 wrote on Yesterday, 22:38:

I'm almost certain it is actually booting ...

Do you have a system where you can format it as a DOS boot?

Bare Dos shouldn't change the screen from BIOS... and if you still don't see a prompt, it's pretty easy to tell if DOS is running without having to see it.

If you have a floppy, type: DIR A:<enter>
and you should see floppy activity.

If no floppy, try: echo <control-G><enter>
This should make it beep!

I would be curious if the SD to CF adapter just blocks bootblock write access and if you make a bootable SD with a different interface, USB or what have you, whether it would then boot in the CF adapter.

BitWrangler wrote on 32 minutes ago:

I would be curious if the SD to CF adapter just blocks bootblock write access and if you make a bootable SD with a different interface, USB or what have you, whether it would then boot in the CF adapter.

Do bootblocks get written on an HD? I know booting write protected DOS floppies has always worked just fine....