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Re: Does anyone own a MISTer FPGA and how is it?

Posted on 2025-05-30, 12:07

in Console & Arcade Emulation

in Console & Arcade Emulation

It's a different architecture and you just can't do it on modern systems. Racing the beam is sending out what should be draw at the exact time it should be drawn so you are generating the video signal the display is receiving and actively drawing. Anything modern uses a frame buffer which stores …

Re: Does anyone own a MISTer FPGA and how is it?

Posted on 2025-05-30, 10:49

in Console & Arcade Emulation

in Console & Arcade Emulation

You can't race the beam, it's a frame buffers and multiple levels of extraction. Once Windows is out of the way, you still have display drivers themselves which are their own complete mini OSes. We have insane amounts of power at our finger tips, but we don't have direct access to it. You could …

Re: Does anyone own a MISTer FPGA and how is it?

Posted on 2025-05-29, 13:35

in Console & Arcade Emulation

in Console & Arcade Emulation

No, not yet even in practice. Triple buffering requires 2 frames lag to achieve smooth frame rate. So for an arcade game running 60 fps, the powerful PC and the display needs to run 180 frames. Why all this ? You do not require "triple buffering" at all if you treat the PC like the 1980s machine it …

Re: EtherDFS - a network drive for DOS

Posted on 2025-05-18, 14:20

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

In vboxsf , what I do is that long filenames are shortened to a 4 letter prefix, a ~, and a 3 letter hash of the long name , plus the extension. E.g. LONG~20B.TXT . This way you ensure that there are no file name conflicts (because it is unlikely that multiple long file names with the same prefix …

Re: Pocket 386, the brother of Hand386 and Book8088, the story so far ...

Posted on 2025-05-16, 23:14

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

So the same guy has now created an FPGA-based alternative to the pocket 386 and 8086, called the "OneChipBook" -- https://www.tindie.com/products/cycle/onechipbook-12-a-fpga-development-platform/ . I would have really liked to love this as a pocket386 successor -- 4:3, better screen (iPad leftovers …

Re: Pocket 386, the brother of Hand386 and Book8088, the story so far ...

Posted on 2025-04-19, 18:11

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The problem that was on the wiki is that freedos will install a lba/int13x boot sector on lba capable machines, but such bootsector fails miserably on the pocket386. This will likely be an issue precisely only when you use an emulator or VM to install it. See https://www.both.org/?p=5690

Re: SMR drives

Posted on 2025-04-12, 17:11

in Milliways

in Milliways

Enterprise IT software generally slowing down computers and actually reducing their useful lifetime so that enterprises have to shorten their IT renewal lifecycles? And all of it for no discernible benefit? Color me surprised.

Re: Pocket 386, the brother of Hand386 and Book8088, the story so far ...

Posted on 2025-04-11, 22:16

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I now get the OSD consistantly giving readings of 650 to 850mV when plugged in(Before when D8 was intermitent I was getting all sorts of readings as it switched the battery in and out of circuit...) & the 8051 code seems to recognise this as charging and displays battery % as 'CHG' Mine has always …

Re: SMR drives

Posted on 2025-04-11, 21:53

in Milliways

in Milliways

I disagree here, as SMR drives need long periods of being powered and spun up, without accesses happening, to reshingle. Otherwise data rots in the cmr cache area, and it never gets vacated to the smr area. I do not see why data would rot any faster on the CMR cache area (if any!). Is there any …

Re: FreeDOS in VirtualBox

Posted on 2025-03-30, 21:30

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

There is a client for VB Shared Folders for DOS : https://git.javispedro.com/cgit/vbados.git/about/ (Shameless plug...)

Re: Pocket 386, the brother of Hand386 and Book8088, the story so far ...

Posted on 2025-03-26, 13:19

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've been experiencing the same battery issues other have reported on here, a random message popping up saying that the battery is low (about 2400mV) when there is loads of charge in the battery & it keeps running for ages, but I cant see if others have had some conclusion to this? Is this …

Re: Will the Book 8088 be a future classic?

Posted on 2025-03-26, 13:07

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

mIV wrote on 2025-03-26, 09:17: since you can write the UMB bit to port, but it will be always 0 when reading. WTF, I didn't realize that . It is obvious in retrospect from the sch =) . Then it explains everything, since even software that is correctly written will destroy the contents of that reg. …

Re: Will the Book 8088 be a future classic?

Posted on 2025-03-25, 00:40

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I wonder if it's some problem with the CTC, timer 2 on i/o port 061. Since that handles the parity check on bit 7 and speaker out on bit 1 and gate control on bit 0... Also handles refresh. Anyway, electrical level trace bridge, electronic level part failure or incorrect pullups letting something …

Re: SMR drives

Posted on 2025-03-25, 00:27

in Milliways

in Milliways

To escape SMR HDDs by going into SSDs, isn't it like going from the frying pan into the ashes? I would have presume whatever problems one had with SMR 's "shingles" , you're also likely to have with SSD's large erase block sizes... In fact, I always thought SMR was a reaction to how little people …

Re: Software that actually works enabling Trim on Windows XP

Posted on 2025-03-25, 00:23

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Older SSDs may work more reliably sans trim. That is because TRIM appeared decades after SSDs did. Most of my flash-based do not support trim at all. It was the era when controllers would try to do intelligent/stupid things (included but not limited to seaching for FATs). In addition, older SSDs …

Re: Will the Book 8088 be a future classic?

Posted on 2025-03-23, 13:32

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I am a bit surprised that era-software would clobber port 61h, as it is has always been used by various random things and likely lead to very weird behavior on real hardware. E.g. orig PC manual says bit 3 is cassette motor control, and disconnected starting PS/2. Yet RBIL says "NMI I/O channel …

Re: SSD question

Posted on 2025-03-19, 16:31

in Milliways

in Milliways

Yet I have also read that plugging them in does not refresh the charges. Some SSD controllers are known to: A) Perform garbage collection in the background B) Rewrite pages when there are too many read errors for it C) Rewrite pages when there are too many reads since the last write (like many …

Re: DOS on a modern PC

Posted on 2025-03-06, 20:49

in DOS

in DOS

The damage it caused was deletion of a partition on an unselected hard drive. For the record that ("deletion of a partition" likely just involves the MBR) is trivially recoverable with some utilities such as testdisk ..... However the when MS's FDISK writes over random sectors, that is usually *NOT …

Re: DOS on a modern PC

Posted on 2025-03-06, 20:08

in DOS

in DOS

Just stay away from FreeDOS. Its fdisk utility is outright dangerous. It ended up deleting partition from wrong hard drive (with my full Windows XP installation I spent days setting up) despite the right hard drive being selected. It configured the 2nd hard drive as expected, but as a side effect …

Re: Pocket 386, the brother of Hand386 and Book8088, the story so far ...

Posted on 2025-03-03, 10:46

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Is there a volume control for the internal opl3? I've tried the headphone jack with two pairs of headphones I have and its so quiet it might as well be turned off. The two potentiometers hidden behind the cover at the bottom (in blue and marked "volume" in the PCB) control L & R volume.

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