First post, by Muz
Why are these weird characters showing up when booting up DOS in Pentium MMX?
Why are these weird characters showing up when booting up DOS in Pentium MMX?
What's in the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys?
Casio BE-300 Advancement Society alumni
Are you sure there is no virus?
"Confkgwrction" - the nature of those "typos" suggests that something (may be a virus or faulty video memory) is randomly setting bit 1 therefore increasing the value of characters by 2 (so a becomes c, i becomes k etc.
Space becomes ".
BUT faulty video memory would probably also cause some random colors to appear..
It looks like one of the things it's doing is trying to initialize the sound card. Perhaps the startup files listed in the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys are infected.
Casio BE-300 Advancement Society alumni
Nothing to see here, as it states...
Confkgwrction "ks"correctly finksjed!!
🤣 🤣 🤣
The I and U are messed up, h is not far away either, is it coincidence they're near each other on the keyboard, what's the common bit in the scan code or ascii, maybe that's stuck.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
It does look like a stuck bit. E.g. <space> is 20 (0010 0000) and " is 22 (0010 0010), so a lot of space is filled with ". Also \ is 5C 0101 1100 but ^ is 5E 0101 1110, so as Azarien said, bit 1 stuck high.
Slightly odd thing is that by the end it can print spaces again, and the prompt is C:\> when it starts out as C:^>
Intermittent contact somewhere?
I had similar issues with ISA video card not making good contact in the slot. Reseating the card or moving it to other slot usually fixed this.