I thought I'd quickly today make a new feature to my personal QuickBASIC 4.5 based retro cave manager program, which I've been doing in collusion with generative ai models for a few months now. It was getting there, and after a few back and forth rounds, the 486 I was compiling and testing this on finally gave up and crashed really good - like properly messed itself up. I think the CF card is broken. Data is all kinds of mangled up, dir listings show weird artefacts with parts of the QB45 code where C:\DOS filenames used to be, and all in all the filesystem is all kinds of messed up. Scandisk tried and gave up, said it's out of memory but I know it was really out of hope of fixing anything. It had acted up a few times before, but this is full catastrophic failure of the whole CF. Nothing works, can't read files, I can only boot with floppy, and all attempts to save anything end up in errors reading sectors.

Well, luckily the only important thing there - the retro cave manager's database - is backed up to another retro PC, plus a couple floppies, and the binaries can always be recompiled. But now I'm scratching my head about what am I going to do with regards to the failed CF card - I guess I don't want to pay 100 euros plus shipping for new industrial grade CF card, and I don't want to try my luck with another consumer grade used card, which that one was. Any recommendations, what's the most reliable IDE replacement, should I not try to save money and just go for a new expensive industrial CF card? I'm sure this topic is been discussed to death but I'm too beat up to find it now.

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 14:54:

Valid. I wouldn't really consider it "bypassing" DRM when you're ignoring read errors to make backups for personal use, though. It's still there.

Agreed, but the whole reason DRM even exists is that far too many would "make backups" to give to friends or sell (by various methods).

My approach was always to take good care of my discs - kept them in sleaves or jewel cases. Almost never needed a replacement, and on the very rare case when you do, it's like any other "unrepairable" product .. you decide if it's worth buying another one.

Don't get me wrong - I'd have loved it if it were possible/easy to make backups - but over the years, having lost quite a number of sales to "pirates"- (It's "interesting" when you get support calls from "customers" who actually "bought" your product - but from somewhere that's not one of you distributors, doesn't have a valid produce ID serial number, and sometimes has a "slightly modified" edition of your product) - I completely "get" why DRM exists and have never openly supported invalidating it!

Software has always been a grey area where development costs tend to be unusually high and unit production costs are very low.
A lot of people tend to thing "it's just a copy of digital data - easy/cheap to produce" and don't really understand what that "data" represents.
- But this is getting into a wholly different topic.

DaveDDS wrote on 2026-09-02, 18:04:

Agreed, but the whole reason DRM even exists is that far too many would "make backups" to give to friends or sell (by various […]
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RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 14:54:

Valid. I wouldn't really consider it "bypassing" DRM when you're ignoring read errors to make backups for personal use, though. It's still there.

Agreed, but the whole reason DRM even exists is that far too many would "make backups" to give to friends or sell (by various methods).

My approach was always to take good care of my discs - kept them in sleaves or jewel cases. Almost never needed a replacement, and on the very rare case when you do, it's like any other "unrepairable" product .. you decide if it's worth buying another one.

Don't get me wrong - I'd have loved it if it were possible/easy to make backups - but over the years, having lost quite a number of sales to "pirates"- (It's "interesting" when you get support calls from "customers" who actually "bought" your product - but from somewhere that's not one of you distributors, doesn't have a valid produce ID serial number, and sometimes has a "slightly modified" edition of your product) - I completely "get" why DRM exists and have never openly supported invalidating it!

Software has always been a grey area where development costs tend to be unusually high and unit production costs are very low.
A lot of people tend to thing "it's just a copy of digital data - easy/cheap to produce" and don't really understand what that "data" represents.
- But this is getting into a wholly different topic.

On the other hand, there's a lot of software out there that's both hard to find and no longer made. The registered copy of Heretic (pre-SOTSR) is one such example.

MrFiveThumbs wrote on 2026-09-02, 15:02:

I thought I'd quickly today make a new feature to my personal QuickBASIC 4.5 based retro cave manager program, which I've been doing in collusion with generative ai models for a few months now. It was getting there, and after a few back and forth rounds, the 486 I was compiling and testing this on finally gave up and crashed really good - like properly messed itself up. I think the CF card is broken. Data is all kinds of mangled up, dir listings show weird artefacts with parts of the QB45 code where C:\DOS filenames used to be, and all in all the filesystem is all kinds of messed up. Scandisk tried and gave up, said it's out of memory but I know it was really out of hope of fixing anything. It had acted up a few times before, but this is full catastrophic failure of the whole CF. Nothing works, can't read files, I can only boot with floppy, and all attempts to save anything end up in errors reading sectors.

Well, luckily the only important thing there - the retro cave manager's database - is backed up to another retro PC, plus a couple floppies, and the binaries can always be recompiled. But now I'm scratching my head about what am I going to do with regards to the failed CF card - I guess I don't want to pay 100 euros plus shipping for new industrial grade CF card, and I don't want to try my luck with another consumer grade used card, which that one was. Any recommendations, what's the most reliable IDE replacement, should I not try to save money and just go for a new expensive industrial CF card? I'm sure this topic is been discussed to death but I'm too beat up to find it now.

Ouch, I've experienced the same and it's a huge spanner in the works when a CF card goes in that way. It does seem that resets, power cycling or powering off at the wrong time can cause as many problems for CF cards as you'd see with hard drives before their heads could auto park. What kind of card was it?
Mine was a consumer grade 256MB CF card meant for digital cameras. These days I tend to use ex-Cisco labelled CF cards since I've got them in bulk for cheap multiple times now. I've had good luck with Transcend and Sandisk cards along with Swissbit. The ones with datasheets tend to do far better than the no-name ones for digital cameras of the era.

The last day or so, I've been messing around with my two Acer Aspire One netbooks, the A150 hard drive model and A110 SSD model. The hard drive one with XP on it turned out to be perfect for an application I need a small portable computer for. But having a spinning hard drive bashing about, in something I need to move around a lot makes me nervous.
The Acer Aspire One A110 with its 8GB 'SSD' should be great but it's an awful IDE based 1st generation thinger with terrible caching and performance, it was always too slow to run XP or Win 7 on it so I decided to look into it more. But it's the one I want to use because the case is a little nicer without the HDD bump and I've always wanted to do this mod.

There are the pads for the SATA port on the A110 motherboard but the casing won't fit a regular hard drive. I pulled the SATA connector off of some optical bay IDE > SATA adapter I'm never gonna use and started trying to clear the holes to install the SATA connector. Which was *not* easy, it took:

• low melt solder
• solder braid
• two vacuum desoldering tools
• 0.4mm carbide drill bit

The ground plane sucked enough heat away that the vacuum tools were only good for the data lines, low melt and solder braid cleared a couple of the SATA voltage rails though they messed up the solder mask a bit. Getting the ground plane cleared though eventually required removing enough solder that there was a 'cup' to drill into by hand and physically cut away the solder. The 0.5mm got too close to the edges for comfort and somehow I didn't break the carbide bit this time, hooray!
Once all the holes were cleared, the SATA port's pins need grinding down to be little pins to fit into those tiny holes. And there were pads for a 0-ohm resistor and capacitors that weren't installed from the factory because they're for the SATA port's power. Soldered a bit of wire where the 0-ohm resistor went and the port is now powered.

Magically, the port worked first try so the sacrifice of the adapter was not in vain and the board wasn't damaged. Then I started fitting an M-PCIe SATA adapter PCB that's been sitting un-used for a long time. Lots of posts in the plastic case needed to be cut off and one screw standoff was hot-glued into place to screw the adapter PCB into the casing to stop it shaking loose:

Taking the motherboard out now is not fun and the SATA port connector keeps getting pulled up at the wrong angle if things aren't removed in the right order, those pins won't hold up against that too many times.

Now it's all back together:

The SSD in it already had Win98 on it which wouldn't load because this little netbook has 1.5GB of RAM, I know that can be fixed with some DLL change but I haven't done that yet. Instead I loaded Windows 7 on it and it's so nice to see Windows 7 again, the last OS I can turn off ClearType in I think and has the audio features I need for my software.
I was hoping to dual boot Windows 7 and Windows 98 but they won't play nicely and I think I need some extra bootloader software for it so that can wait, I have many far better options for playing DOS games on. Now my Acer One A110 has the SATA SSD upgrade I always wished it could have. Still in IDE mode rather than AHCI but that's fine for now 😀

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 18:11:

On the other hand, there's a lot of software out there that's both hard to find and no longer made. The registered copy of Heretic (pre-SOTSR) is one such example.

It would be ideal if the makers of such discontinued software would release it without DRM when they stop offering it.
Otherwise we get into even grayer areas about the legality of "abandonware" and what rights the original producers still hold.

Personally, when I came back after dying (story on my site: "2019") - I wasn't going to be working anymore, and after I had recovered enough to "do stuff" again, I've been working away at making everything I ever created (that I hold rights to - which is most of it) freely available , including source code (incl, stuff I never published).

I feel that to do anything else is just diminishing the industry as things "disappear".

DaveDDS wrote on 2026-09-02, 21:11:

It would be ideal if the makers of such discontinued software would release it without DRM when they stop offering it. Otherwise […]
Show full quote

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 18:11:

On the other hand, there's a lot of software out there that's both hard to find and no longer made. The registered copy of Heretic (pre-SOTSR) is one such example.

It would be ideal if the makers of such discontinued software would release it without DRM when they stop offering it.
Otherwise we get into even grayer areas about the legality of "abandonware" and what rights the original producers still hold.

Personally, when I came back after dying (story on my site: "2019") - I wasn't going to be working anymore, and after I had recovered enough to "do stuff" again, I've been working away at making everything I ever created (that I hold rights to - which is most of it) freely available , including source code (incl, stuff I never published).

I feel that to do anything else is just diminishing the industry as things "disappear".

I feel like Spore is a great example of this. I have the original discs, and the cd-keys to go with them, but I can't play them on XP or older Macs without having a connection. It really sucks.

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 21:20:

I feel like Spore is a great example of this. I have the original discs, and the cd-keys to go with them, but I can't play them on XP or older Macs without having a connection. It really sucks.

Yeah, things like that - where you've paid for the software and the DRM is just there to inconvenience is one case where I completely agree with hacking it!

DaveDDS wrote on 2026-09-02, 22:13:

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 21:20:

I feel like Spore is a great example of this. I have the original discs, and the cd-keys to go with them, but I can't play them on XP or older Macs without having a connection. It really sucks.

Yeah, things like that - where you've paid for the software and the DRM is just there to inconvenience is one case where I completely agree with hacking it!

I'll have to find something that will work.

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 21:20:

I feel like Spore is a great example of this. I have the original discs, and the cd-keys to go with them, but I can't play them on XP or older Macs without having a connection. It really sucks.

I think from what I remember for Spore, on XP at least since I'm not sure if the patch executable was archived for the MacOS version, Patch 5.1 should fix this? (at least for Galactic Adventures on Windows. not sure if there's an archive of the patch for Macs, or if you can just somehow run the exe for it under the WINE fork that MacOS uses)

Thankfully Spore is a game that has a GOG release though (in addition to the not as good Steam and very not as good EA Desktop versions) & it does install on XP, though I wasn't able to actually test running it since the machine I was using then didn't have a compatible GPU. It was able to execute enough to show an error message complaining about the GPU, one that required the game to initialise its config systems too.
(and now that that machine does have a somewhat compatible card, okay a 5700LE isn't technically compatible but it's the best I've got (maybe I could check if that 6200A in a nonfunctional AMD system I also have would work), that machine's running Vista instead of XP since I just... prefer Vista and have more nostalgia for it. GOG Spore does run under Vista though)

Darkspore feels like a better example to me. It had always-online DRM and relied heavily on its servers to the point where, post server shutdown, you just can't even launch the game let alone get into its editors. let alone actually play even just singleplayer.

VanillaFairy wrote on 2026-09-02, 22:29:

I think from what I remember for Spore, on XP at least since I'm not sure if the patch executable was archived for the MacOS ver […]
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RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 21:20:

I feel like Spore is a great example of this. I have the original discs, and the cd-keys to go with them, but I can't play them on XP or older Macs without having a connection. It really sucks.

I think from what I remember for Spore, on XP at least since I'm not sure if the patch executable was archived for the MacOS version, Patch 5.1 should fix this? (at least for Galactic Adventures on Windows. not sure if there's an archive of the patch for Macs, or if you can just somehow run the exe for it under the WINE fork that MacOS uses)

Thankfully Spore is a game that has a GOG release though (in addition to the not as good Steam and very not as good EA Desktop versions) & it does install on XP, though I wasn't able to actually test running it since the machine I was using then didn't have a compatible GPU. It was able to execute enough to show an error message complaining about the GPU, one that required the game to initialise its config systems too.
(and now that that machine does have a somewhat compatible card, okay a 5700LE isn't technically compatible but it's the best I've got (maybe I could check if that 6200A in a nonfunctional AMD system I also have would work), that machine's running Vista instead of XP since I just... prefer Vista and have more nostalgia for it. GOG Spore does run under Vista though)

Darkspore feels like a better example to me. It had always-online DRM and relied heavily on its servers to the point where, post server shutdown, you just can't even launch the game let alone get into its editors. let alone actually play even just singleplayer.

I remember getting an email about Darkspore back when it was new. Shame I never played it.

The GOG version is compatible with Windows XP?

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 22:33:

I remember getting an email about Darkspore back when it was new. Shame I never played it.

I always wish I had the chance to play it, to be honest. by the time I knew of it, the servers were already down.

The GOG version is compatible with Windows XP?

It should be from what I understand. I know for a fact it installs and can run far enough to detect an incompatible GPU (so it initialises its database and config systems), so I think it should work.

VanillaFairy wrote on 2026-09-02, 22:42:

I always wish I had the chance to play it, to be honest. by the time I knew of it, the servers were already down. […]
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RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-02, 22:33:

I remember getting an email about Darkspore back when it was new. Shame I never played it.

I always wish I had the chance to play it, to be honest. by the time I knew of it, the servers were already down.

The GOG version is compatible with Windows XP?

It should be from what I understand. I know for a fact it installs and can run far enough to detect an incompatible GPU (so it initialises its database and config systems), so I think it should work.

Huh. Maybe I'll give it a try sometime.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2026-09-02, 19:47:

...
Mine was a consumer grade 256MB CF card meant for digital cameras. These days I tend to use ex-Cisco labelled CF cards since I've got them in bulk for cheap multiple times now. I've had good luck with Transcend and Sandisk cards along with Swissbit. The ones with datasheets tend to do far better than the no-name ones for digital cameras of the era.
...

This was Sandisk 8 GB Extreme IV, which I picked up with a bunch of other similar cards. I tried to look for Swissbit or other enterprise grade cards new, but they cost from around 100 euros up for 4 GB card (which would be fine). I guess I'll try a 1 GB card, I saw one that was only around 40 + shipping. Swissbit in particular I can't even find in stock in Finland for the smaller sizes. It could be that I'm just too stupid to find them, these industrial component selling sites are tripping me up.

Unless you have also tip where to look for

I tried eBay but those are all highly sus Chinese sellers or way more expensive

MrFiveThumbs wrote on Yesterday, 15:34:

This was Sandisk 8 GB Extreme IV, which I picked up with a bunch of other similar cards. I tried to look for Swissbit or other e […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2026-09-02, 19:47:

...
Mine was a consumer grade 256MB CF card meant for digital cameras. These days I tend to use ex-Cisco labelled CF cards since I've got them in bulk for cheap multiple times now. I've had good luck with Transcend and Sandisk cards along with Swissbit. The ones with datasheets tend to do far better than the no-name ones for digital cameras of the era.
...

This was Sandisk 8 GB Extreme IV, which I picked up with a bunch of other similar cards. I tried to look for Swissbit or other enterprise grade cards new, but they cost from around 100 euros up for 4 GB card (which would be fine). I guess I'll try a 1 GB card, I saw one that was only around 40 + shipping. Swissbit in particular I can't even find in stock in Finland for the smaller sizes. It could be that I'm just too stupid to find them, these industrial component selling sites are tripping me up.

Unless you have also tip where to look for

I tried eBay but those are all highly sus Chinese sellers or way more expensive

They do pop up cheap now and then, however they often won't be listed as swissbit or industrial CF cards because the branding is often blanked or replaced on these cards and you can instead go by the part code, so SFC1024H1BK1TO, SFC4096H1B02T0 and SFC8192H4BK4SA for some part code examples. Searching for 'SFC4096 card' and 'SFC8192 card' may yield good results.
STEC are another one to look at, I have an SLCF16GM4TUI or two
Avoid getting stuff from china, I've been able to find local examples each time for much less when people recycle / decommission industrial PCs and equipment, then sell off the parts. Simply searching for 4GB or 8GB CF cards and seeing what's available can often bring up interesting items. When people sell off industrial CF cards, they'll usually sell a bunch of them at once either as a job lot or an item with multiple quantity.

That's a real shame that a Sandisk card had problems like that, I thought their CF cards were always pretty good although older ones are often very slow. Wait a sec, you said "Sandisk 8 GB Extreme IV", does it have a little "ESP Technology" circled just under the Extreme text? If it does, that one's seriously vintage - I got one of these in a lot and I can only use it for a PCMCIA > CompactFlash adapter to ferry files around my laptops, it's too slow to run an OS. It's very compatible at least.
Aim for one that's got DMA or lists its MB/s speed on the card. Those later Sandisk cards are pretty great I think.

Mixing AI slop and DOS development. To create a DOS bridge to dev and deploy from my Windows 11 machine using FPC in my case ( or TP7 directly on the dos box ) and/or using Claude Code to work and write code, test, and document.
Working on removing on two mTCP dependencies ( probably a bad idea... mTCP works very well .. so reinventing the wheel here .... )
Also to test my mTCP removal and bench mark performance, find issues in the new process, have Claude create a Ray casting demo and optimize over and over until I am happy with the results on my V30 CPU.
First build worked decent.... asked it to optimize it further and got a nice increase.... 8fps to 12fps... and looks like more left on the table to do.
Did this because I was fighting freeze up issues in the loop on the dos box and/or with UDP traffic.
Got a Shelly Gen4 smart plug, and now Claude can just turn the system off... wait a bit.. and turn back on... the system itself if hard lock and get back to working 😀
So far it working pretty well..

Can see my mess of AI slop results...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfuJ10fgMY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEu3jnpDtfI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zCfU7UTB9g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL4DhkVjp_s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4G8IgyH30A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s59O3P47iLc

Got an Extron coming .. use with the VGA splitter box I just got. So I can do two things
1) Record better videos with a USB>HDMI capture device
2) While tools were generated to generate ascii outputs , graphic snapshots, graphics to ascii snapshots, I can then give claude live eyes to a stream of what is going on even better... ( well thats the hope )

This was all for fun and stuff... some people may not like it.. but whatever. I have enjoyed it!