superfury wrote on 2026-08-20, 20:31:

Cycle-accurate Adlib too (at real 49kHz, like with my emulator)? Last I checked nuked wasn't?

I don't know and frankly I don't really care. It works and sounds okay.

Working on cassette interface emulation. I'm not sure that anyone was exactly clamoring for this, but it checks the last box for complete IBM 5150 emulation.

It's got a fun pixel-art tape visualization with accurate tape spindle simulation.

GloriousCow wrote on 2026-08-27, 20:09:

Working on cassette interface emulation. I'm not sure that anyone was exactly clamoring for this, but it checks the last box for complete IBM 5150 emulation.

It's got a fun pixel-art tape visualization with accurate tape spindle simulation.

The attachment martypc_cassette_01.png is no longer available

Isn't tape just controlled just like a floppy, using the FDC?

Edit: https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/ibm- … oppy-controller

Thats interesting, one of the distinctions I always draw in my mind between x86 machines and other early computers is the transition from cassette storage to floppy drive storage but I guess there were exceptions.

superfury wrote on 2026-08-28, 06:16:

Isn't tape just controlled just like a floppy, using the FDC?

Edit: https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/ibm- … oppy-controller

Different tape systems.

The original IBM 5150 had an cassette interface port right next to the keyboard port with an identical DIN connector. The PCjr had its weird berg strip and they sold you a cassette adapter cable.
The cassettes used were ordinary audio cassettes. The cassette interface worked with decks that had motor control inputs, and were compatible with the decks for other 8-bit home systems. I use a tape deck originally for the TRS-80.

BinaryDemon wrote on 2026-08-28, 10:37:

Thats interesting, one of the distinctions I always draw in my mind between x86 machines and other early computers is the transition from cassette storage to floppy drive storage but I guess there were exceptions.

You're not entirely wrong. The IBM PC tape interface was dead on arrival - the only two software titles known to exist for it are two versions of IBM Diagnostics. There is some indication IBM Typing Tutor was released on cassette but nobody has seen an actual cassette of it. There was no real use for the tape drive other than saving your ROM BASIC programs.

I have a Sony TC-100 (https://www.thevintageknob.org/sony-TC-100.html) and have successfully used it to store and retrieve BASIC programs with my IBM 5150.

Always interesting doing a cassette tape emulation.

If you really want to get down in the mud, you could encode and decode audio streams via a sound interface - a whole lot of work for something few people will care that much about.

If you're "lucky" the tape interface will present as some sort of digital data at the software end.

The only tape interface I actually implemented was for my H8 emulator of the Heathkit H8 system.

Fortunately the H8-5 card (Serial/Cassette tape interface) just had tone generators and decoders on it so that the software just sees a serial data stream.

Implementing this in the emulator was pretty easy - just redirect reads/writes to the serial tape interface to a file.

I provided many of the common "tapes" that had been available from Heath as .H8T files, which you could mount and read the same way you would have read a physical tape on the H8.
Writing to tape was also supported to make/write a .H8T file.

This works well for "recreating the experience" but I never implemented actual encoding/decoding to/from audio to make it work with actual physical tapes.

DaveDDS wrote on 2026-08-28, 19:00:

Always interesting doing a cassette tape emulation.

If you really want to get down in the mud, you could encode and decode audio streams via a sound interface - a whole lot of work for something few people will care that much about.

Should be fairly straightforward to pull audio from a recording input, although i might have to have some kind of control to adjust the volume. But as you said, there's already not a ton of interest in this as a feature and if you have a cassette deck hooked to a computer you can already just record a WAV with something. Hooking up the UI bits for selecting audio inputs and polishing that is already more than i care to do

Hi. Thanks for all of your hard work on this amazing sounding project. I've just been checking it out locally, and I'm pleased to say that the game port I've been working on seems to work fine on it (I've been testing on a Pocket 8086 laptop up to now - with 4.77Mhz AMD 8088 CPU).

I have a couple of questions. Sorry if these are covered above, but there's a lot of history in this thread!

1) It seems the latest version is not available for download, so I'd have to build from source if I want that. Is this correct? (I am using 0.4.0)
2) I've chosen the template for a IBM PC with 64Kb memory, but it seems to me that this machine has 640k:

3) Also the chosen graphics card was CGA, but it seems my game port is still able to display VGA modes?

In my testing my Pocket 8086 (With 8088 CPU @4.77Mhz) is about 5% faster than MartyPC, which is about what I was expecting given that my machine has RAM without wait states, and probably other hardware differences that result in increased performance over the original IBM PC.

Are the issues above fixed in the latest version?