Re: "Fat Face" Compaq Presario: why?

Posted on 2019-10-02, 03:16

by

by krcroft

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Filename main-qimg-60150d361ed0d1d62ad4930fff55967c.jpeg File size 138.05 KiB Views 1447 views Meet Seth Orangston. As a senior design consultant, he led Compaq to take bold risks in the otherwise conservative area of PC case design. Badscrew wrote: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48820122183_ …

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Re: PowerPC Dynamic Recompiler (patch)

Posted on 2019-10-02, 01:24

by

by krcroft

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

Good news from PowerMac G4 land; both the dynrec and drive sector-size patches are working well. The dynamic core lets DOSBox operate at roughly 4600 cycles before this machine's CPU maxes out and starts dropping audio chunks, where as the normal core only allows up to 2400 cycles. Very nice work on …

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Re: AUDIO Patch supporting FLAC, Opus, and MP3 audio tracks

Posted on 2019-10-01, 02:37

by

by krcroft

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

Kisai, I transcode 39 GB of uncompressed BIN/CUE images to 2.7 GB using Ogg Opus at varying data rates, which I play on my Raspberry Pi. At the time, I paid close to $1/GB for SanDisk's highest-spec'd 128GB card and it was one of the largest available, so I have a very real interest in maximizing …

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Re: Retro OSes for retro computers

Posted on 2019-09-28, 00:45

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by krcroft

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Some old Dos disks I found today searching through my 5.25" floppy stash. 20190928_122114[1].jpg Thanks for the great pictures! Back in the day I only hand Microsoft's DOS floppies and Falcon 4's floppies in person; first time I've glimpsed Doctor DOS and Falcon 3.1. Also.. I can tell that sleeve …

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Re: Suspending and resuming a Game in Dosbox

Posted on 2019-09-27, 19:16

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by krcroft

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

Application checkpoint and restore (shortened to c/r or CR) is a kernel-level feature with user-space tools that let you save the running state of an application to disk and restore it at a later time, such as across reboots. It's like a mini suspend-resume; it captures a single process-space …

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Re: How did MS-DOS decide that two seconds was the amount of time to keep the floppy disk cache valid?

Posted on 2019-09-26, 20:45

by

by krcroft

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

FDDs have a "disk change" or "disk ready" signal. Why don't keep the cache valid until the status changed? See OP.. IBM saved money by not implementing the hardware signal, so MSDOS was programmed assuming it could not trust the content on floppies beyond 2 seconds.. (the maximum humanly-possible …

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Re: How did MS-DOS decide that two seconds was the amount of time to keep the floppy disk cache valid?

Posted on 2019-09-26, 19:29

by

by krcroft

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Crazy.. that's really unfortunate they couldn't programmatically invalidate (or trust) the state of the floppy drive; and thus has to invalidate prior reads once they aged past 2-seconds. Then again, at roughly 120KB/s peak read speed from a 1.44MB floppy drive, two seconds of data would need about …

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Re: PowerPC Dynamic Recompiler (patch)

Posted on 2019-09-25, 14:57

by

by krcroft

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

I'm cross compiling for OS X PPC on a OS X 10.14 (yes that works if you have all the tools from way back :)) Ahh, right on Dominus! With you covering OSX, I'll go with Debian to give coverage for those trying to use a modern Linux. Edit: I might be sticking with Gentoo; Debian dropped PPC support …

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Re: PowerPC Dynamic Recompiler (patch)

Posted on 2019-09-25, 04:52

by

by krcroft

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

Dominus, What kind of PPC machine and OS are you using? I'd like to chip in some help here too; I have a Power Mac G4 'Sawtooth' collecting dust that I previously ran Gentoo on back in the day. I'd start fresh with whatever OS jmarsh, QBix, or yourself feel is the best target (I realize on Linux it …

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Re: Retro OSes for retro computers

Posted on 2019-09-20, 06:00

by

by krcroft

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I think I'm going to try to build LFS on my 486 DX2 this weekend. Haha and it may take all weekend to compile... if it even will. I bet you didn't even try ;P I bet it's still compiling. That's the truth! Ran Gentoo on a dual Applebred setup in 2003, and periodically had to rebuild 'world' (a …

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Re: AUDIO Patch supporting FLAC, Opus, and MP3 audio tracks

Posted on 2019-09-19, 18:22

by

by krcroft

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

Dreamer_, all sounds good! I'm also Linux-based, so that's really handy if Microsoft's thrown in free Windows-based CI into GitHub (the more people who stay on Windows, the better for them I guess..) Regarding the CUE file, yes - you've nailed the issue regarding the incorrect INDEX values. The …

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Re: AUDIO Patch supporting FLAC, Opus, and MP3 audio tracks

Posted on 2019-09-19, 13:53

by

by krcroft

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

Yesterplay80 wrote: And starting with r4259 it's included in DOSBox ECE as well! Thanks, krcroft! Good stuff Yesterplay! 😀

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Re: AUDIO Patch supporting FLAC, Opus, and MP3 audio tracks

Posted on 2019-09-19, 13:51

by

by krcroft

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

Hm, I couldn't make it to compile on Linux with GCC 9.2 (it was an error in dr_flac 0.12.0, which seems to be an unreleased version?) - but patch v9 applied cleanly on top of trunk@4258, so I am using it for the time being. Overall I think I found a small bug related to Track field in .cue …

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Re: AUDIO Patch supporting FLAC, Opus, and MP3 audio tracks

Posted on 2019-09-19, 13:29

by

by krcroft

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

I figured you might be interested in cooperating on it, so it might be more productive than importing your patches manually. Excellent! I will be happy to progress this patch on a branch. I work in git and use gitlab, but happy to push to github. Besides the usual push - pull model, does github …

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Re: Any others given up on the hobby?

Posted on 2019-09-17, 21:22

by

by krcroft

in Milliways

in Milliways

It's interesting; the two camps we have at vogons - hardware focussed versus game/software focussed. Lots of people in both too. I always found hardware finicky and was happy to upgrade and leave the old stuff behind. Much of my enjoyment comes from configuring the OS, maximizing performance, and …

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Re: Any others given up on the hobby?

Posted on 2019-09-17, 00:41

by

by krcroft

in Milliways

in Milliways

Sometimes I give myself a hard time when the desire to tinker fades.. I chalk it up to my age and health; but when I look back to my time in the 80s and 90s, there was always something new on the horizon that would solve some annoyance or make a great leap in performance. Those were exiciting times …

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Re: AUDIO Patch supporting FLAC, Opus, and MP3 audio tracks

Posted on 2019-09-16, 23:51

by

by krcroft

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

Version 11 of the patch is now attached to the original post. It passes all build and functional tests on Linux, but I no longer have my Windows VMs to test with (need to rebuild them). Yesterplay80, DosFreak, if you have time to give it a whirl on Windows, I would greatly appreciate your feedback! …

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Re: Boxed Original AdLib

Posted on 2019-09-15, 05:02

by

by krcroft

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

There exists a spectrum between those who value "authenticity and vintage" (above all else) versus those who value "form, fit, and function" equivalents (and could care less about vintage or authenticity). In the first category, you have collectors of original pieces of art, the first Babe Ruth …

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Re: Emulation on pre 2000 x86 hardware.

Posted on 2019-09-10, 04:48

by

by krcroft

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Nesticle, Genecyst, ZSNES, and Bleem. Had lots of fun with those starting on my pentium 90 in the mid 90s. Bleem! was great on my Celeron 266 (OC'd to 400) starting with a Voodoo2 then TNT2.

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Re: Vogons Video Announcement Thread

Posted on 2019-09-08, 20:29

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by krcroft

in Milliways

in Milliways

Kiteless wrote: Unboxing and part 1 of my Monotech PC NuXT build. Wow; that's some beautiful hardware - and seeing the GNU license in the BIOS boot text was very satisfying! Really enjoyed the video, and have subscribed.

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