Re: What does your significant other think of your retro pc hobby?

Posted on Yesterday, 10:42

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I am the ultimate nerd, in that I have never had a significant other, and do not desire one. However, the few times I have had a cat, they seemed to be rather jealous of my computer time, and kept biting the edges of my laptop screen... Sadly, I never found a way to stop them doing that. 😜

---

Re: Is There Any Way I Can Get 1999 Edition of JumpStart Preschool to Work With Touchscreens? Purchased From Zoom Platfo

Posted on Yesterday, 10:30

by

by wierd_w

in Windows

in Windows

What are the min specs for it? You might consider using winlator on a tablet. It is able to emulate an approximately early 2000s era pentium 3, with a single core, and without 3D acceleration. For a 2D title, this should be fine. It simulates the mouse using the tablet/phone touch screen.

---

Re: B: on the same channel?

Posted on 2025-01-11, 06:26

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If you've got systems, which were mostly post-2000, that only had a single device cable, then check you can actually select a B drive in CMOS Setup, because some of them, managed to cripple things somehow so that only a single A drive works. Though how crippled is variable, sometimes they don't …

---

Re: SBEMU: Sound Blaster emulation on AC97

Posted on 2025-01-09, 16:08

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

No, like Sauron, Windows does not share power. It wants to be the only EMM running, and it wants to be the ONLY DPMI server running. You'd need to hack the windows DPMI server to accept the port trapping we need, and need to either bamboozle windows into thinking JEMMEX is EMM386, OR-- Hack EMM386 …

---

Re: Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness on Mac help please

Posted on 2025-01-08, 21:41

by

by wierd_w

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

Well... on linux boxes, it would be something like /dev/sr0 Let me dig out my external dvd writer, and have a go at making dosbox talk to it on linux. I'll get back with you.

---

Re: Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness on Mac help please

Posted on 2025-01-08, 18:02

by

by wierd_w

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

Modern MacOS is Unix-like underneath. Find the actual block device of your optical drive, and feed THAT to Dosbox with the appropriate switches. You only need read, since its an optical drive. MSCDEX should be smart enough to only deal with the ISO9660 portion of the disc. (But this, "But the HFS …

---

Re: Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness on Mac help please

Posted on 2025-01-08, 16:46

by

by wierd_w

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

One thing to keep in mind is that this will be limited to the MIDI music score, since the disc image handler wont / cant do CDAudio tracks, which are present on the War2 retail disc. :P Not a deal breaker; Especially with the built in MT32 emulation options in DosBox, but yeah. It's a minor quibble …

---

Re: Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness on Mac help please

Posted on 2025-01-08, 16:33

by

by wierd_w

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

You are on the wrong volume. You are on Drive C, and the CD is on drive E. Try this: E: dir (I want to see if the iso you created is actually valid/useful. Sometimes mac tools simply stop what they are doing when they find an HFS volume, and only dump that. This is an issue with hybrid CDs like War2 …

---

Re: Help concerning VBE/VESA in DOS

Posted on 2025-01-07, 10:35

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

that... makes no sense. Direct3D is a software API linked with hardware acceleration. What you are really asking is if it is possible to disable the card using hardware acceleration-- which it should not be doing in the first place without something pulling those strings. DOS knows nothing at all …

---

Re: I bricked my XT-IDE card

Posted on 2025-01-07, 00:04

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Just a reminder that when properly configured, the xtide xub does not care which IDE controller your drive is sitting on. This is not the case with Promise IDE controller bios. It is this feature which makes an old nic with a bootrom socket an acceptable means of adding the xub to an arbitrary …

---

Re: Help concerning VBE/VESA in DOS

Posted on 2025-01-04, 16:37

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

VBE is a software interface, that relies on a hardware-specific bit of low level code to drive the video hardware. As such, a software VBE driver needs to be able to work with/know about the video chipset of your video card, in order to do these low level operations, when asked to do things through …

---

Re: Help concerning VBE/VESA in DOS

Posted on 2025-01-04, 16:09

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

With anything VBE related, I need to know what video chipset this is. Concerning the mouse, this sounds like an issue with "Hardware Cursor" use, but I cannot be sure. I think the TNT has support in the vintage Scitech Display Doctor community release. Let me check. edit: Said community release, on …

---

Re: Neomagic 256XL+ (NM2380) Windows 3.1 driver question and Windows 9x functionality

Posted on 2025-01-04, 14:54

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Sadly, DGVOODOO 2 targets directx 11 api. Maybe older versions of it might target DX9. It might be possible (but silly?) to chain DGVoodoo2 with Swiftshader DX9. EDIT: The VERY FIRST VERSION of DGVoodoo2 with DX 5, 6, and 7 support only provides the D3DIMM and DDRAW libraries, and appears to depend …

---

Re: Neomagic 256XL+ (NM2380) Windows 3.1 driver question and Windows 9x functionality

Posted on 2025-01-03, 13:06

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Indeed. I can attest to having been hampered by this. The best you can do is fake it with something like swiftshader, as a fully CPU based Direct3D renderer. (I say this, as many CLEARLY 2D games use Direct3D APIs, and cannot otherwise be played.) Software rendering on a vintage CPU is going to be …

---

Re: No space for EMS page frame with PCMCIA drivers

Posted on 2025-01-02, 12:39

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Wont that clobber the VGA rom?

---

Re: No space for EMS page frame with PCMCIA drivers

Posted on 2025-01-02, 12:12

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

The issue is that there is not a contiguous 64kb chunk to put the pageframe into. There is some strange stuff going on in the adapter region with the PCMCIA controller active. Not surprising, the area is INTENDED for memory-mapped IO shenanigans. EMM386 checks to see if the memory is write protected …

---

Re: No space for EMS page frame with PCMCIA drivers

Posted on 2025-01-02, 11:20

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Does FRAME=NONE work? (For the few games you have that need it, that is)

---

Re: No space for EMS page frame with PCMCIA drivers

Posted on 2025-01-02, 10:33

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

msdosdrv.txt says that the EMS page frame can live at the very top of dos memory. (8000-9000h) Mx Specifies the address of the page frame. Valid values for x are in the range 1 through 14. The following list shows each value and its associated base address in hexadecimal format: 1 => C000h 8 => …

---

Re: DOS 6.22 - 4GB CF Card - 2 primary partitions?

Posted on 2025-01-01, 12:20

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Full pedant: FDISK will only let you create a single primary dos partition, up to 2gb. All others must be inside an extended partition. HOWEVER 3rd party tools like PQ magic will allow you to make up to 4 primary dos partitions, if you want. Only one can be set 'active'. (Bootable). Dos will assign …

---

Re: Easiest/cheapest way to test MIDI interfaces?

Posted on 2024-12-31, 14:14

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I'd still suggest one of the RPi kits for running munt, like this one from serdashop. https://www.serdashop.com/MP32L The actual softsynth run on it is not constrained. It could be fluidsynth, timidity++, MUNT, or any other synth you can find sourcecode for. There's already baked software stacks for …

---