Hello!

I think you are right. And I am, law-abiding, I've already removed SIMCGA 4.2 AND Magic Key.

1 But to be fair, a lot of ROM BIOS dumped from PC machines and uploaded in Vogons must also be removed because there is not any express permission given by the authors. Also, any link to other sites that have commercial software, and is for free downloand, should be removed as well. (There are some links to Vetusware)

Otherwise. Why I should give proof of any permission when the other Vogons members do not?. The same rules must be applied to everybody! Or the entire argument may sound biased.

2 Another point is CGA emulators for the Hercules cards are very hard to find. And when found most of them does not include any documentation to know for sure if they are freeware, shareware or commercial. So I cannot provide any proof. And I think the same applies to the ROMs since each one may be the property of EPSON, IBM, SAMSUNG, etc. Depending of the manufacturer of the machines where these BIOS were extracted.

This is terrible....we are the ones that are keeping the records alive here for future generations and we are being prosecuted as criminals.
Shame on whoever invented all this bullshit.

We are scholars here not criminals. What the fuck is wrong with the world.
Please don't try to calm me down, I don't want to.

Go hunting on a bunch of nostalgic bastards whose only wish is to fucking launch Bubble Bobble in Hercules Graphics Adapter...
Shame on you law, shame on you copyright, shame on you SIMCGA.

Cheers.

No one is stopping you from creating your own homepage or forum and put these things there on your own responsibility

It should be obvious that the forum policy exists to avoid unwanted legal exposure, not to deprive anyone of their scholarly pursuits. Also, as noted in the forum's Terms of use:

Donate commercially unavailable copyrighted works of historical interest to the Internet Archive or to a local library or museum.

@solraeck & Fenix77 - gentlemen, I know your intentions are good and indeed parts of the copyright system don't make sense, especially in the context of fast changes in IT world. Personally, I regret a little bit that this interferes with our efforts here, but I am not too surprised.

However, we need to remember that we live in a system where copyrights are part of the law and the first liable and easiest to chase are the owners of the site/forum. So even if it makes things a bit more complicated for us, let's keep in mind that it keeps ripsaw8080, Dominus and others out of trouble. And we wouldn't Vogons to disappear, the accumulated mass of knowledge is too precious.

.. also hosting providers get nervous easily and can drop sites if they get bothered by many copyright claims. We don't want Vogons kicked out by the landlord, so play by house rules or have the wild parties at your own place.

OldCat wrote on 2021-08-30, 15:08:

@solraeck & Fenix77 - gentlemen, I know your intentions are good and indeed parts of the copyright system don't make sense, especially in the context of fast changes in IT world. Personally, I regret a little bit that this interferes with our efforts here, but I am not too surprised.

However, we need to remember that we live in a system where copyrights are part of the law and the first liable and easiest to chase are the owners of the site/forum. So even if it makes things a bit more complicated for us, let's keep in mind that it keeps ripsaw8080, Dominus and others out of trouble. And we wouldn't Vogons to disappear, the accumulated mass of knowledge is too precious.

Yes, totally agree. Just saying goodbye to that magicCGA emulator that I will never have the chance to try...

This house comes first. Before any other craving desire.

Longlive Vogons!

Calm down!

If anyone is interested send me a PM, and I send the software by e-mail. The files are, just, a few kilobytes in size.

PD: MagicKey 3 is already uploaded on archive.org. Just type "MagicKey" on the search box.

I'll try to upload there the collection of different versions of SIMCGA, MONO and three versions of CGA. I have other CGA emulators, but they are not properly sorted.

If I'd known it was commercial, I wouldn't have asked publicly 😅
So these will all be removed from the pack going forward.

But I'll leave the menu items,you just have to add them yourself.

@Fenix77:
That' s a crazy collection mate, I've been sorting through it all day 😁
Corrected some time stamps, removed some unwanted compression and conversions.
Finally added all new stuff to the emulation menu.

I'm working on a simple menu system , but its going to take some time.
But to give you a poor mans drawing concept:

solraeck wrote on 2021-08-30, 14:04:

This is terrible....we are the ones that are keeping the records alive here for future generations and we are being prosecuted a […]
Show full quote

This is terrible....we are the ones that are keeping the records alive here for future generations and we are being prosecuted as criminals.
Shame on whoever invented all this bullshit.

We are scholars here not criminals. What the fuck is wrong with the world.
Please don't try to calm me down, I don't want to.

Go hunting on a bunch of nostalgic bastards whose only wish is to fucking launch Bubble Bobble in Hercules Graphics Adapter...
Shame on you law, shame on you copyright, shame on you SIMCGA.

Cheers.

That's the quickest way to a mental institute/heart attack/grave.

Yes vogons is great but there are other websites that deal with older kit. Also plenty of online forum and irc channels that deal with this stuff.

More interesting will be the results.

Some interesting things I want to add:

Simcga 4.2 is compatible with EGA monochrome monitors. I’ve never seen one, but they are the same type as the used with Hercules cards. The main drawback is almost no game supported it natively. Is not compatible with anything except EGA monochrome modes like 640x350 2 colors.
Is not compatible with Hercules, color EGA modes or even CGA.

Another program that provides emulation is athena.sys driver. It’s mentioned in the HGCIBM documentation, but I’ never seen a copy of this. It is loaded in the CONFIG.SYS file and according the documentation works as a video BIOS replacement. The interesting thing is this program can change from native Hercules or EGA monochrome modes to CGA emulated modes on the fly, without the need to load/unload the TSRs.

Other interesting things

a. Regarding the emulators I found that 975 bytes mono.com file is the only that works with the game Qix.
b. Mono2.com from my disk has the same size as BBSIMCGA. I suspect BBSIMCGA is a renamed MONO.COM both works with Bubble Bobble.
c. EMU.EXE and EMU0.EXE are different. EMU0 uses interlaced graphics and EMU.EXE does not.
d. The game Outrun can run on Hercules without the interlacing lines if EMU.EXE is used and the option "1.CGA 4 colors" is selected. But I only tested it on 86box not on real hardware.

Also, I’m not sure if HERCBIOS emulates the EGA 90x43 text mode, using the Hercules graphics mode, rather that CGA graphics.

btw both MagicKey and a sorted collection of simcga, mono and CGA are available on archive.org just type "magickey" or "simcga" on the searchbox.

Fenix77 wrote on 2021-08-30, 22:15:

Simcga 4.2 is compatible with EGA monochrome monitors. I’ve never seen one, but they are the same type as the used with Hercules cards. The main drawback is almost no game supported it natively. Is not compatible with anything except EGA monochrome modes like 640x350 2 colors.
Is not compatible with Hercules, color EGA modes or even CGA.

Just to make sure it's clear. You are right that "EGA monochrome monitors are the same type as used with Hercules cards". These again are the same type as monitors used with MDA cards. There is no specific EGA monochrome monitor type! On the other hand, everything else you write is also true, but it is about the EGA card. The EGA card in monochrome mode does not support Hercules, CGA or color EGA modes. IBM did this on purpose, so you could install an EGA card alongside a CGA card in the same system, as an enhanced drop-in replacement for an MDA card. This would enhance the capabilities of the MDA by providing 8 instead of 1 page of text mode memory, and providing the graphics mode you mentioned without requiring you to buy a new monitor, but still allow to have CGA text and graphics modes displayed on the CGA card.

Probably you meant to say that "Simcga 4.2 is compatible with EGA cards connected to monochrome monitors", and supports running CGA color and EGA color modes on a EGA card with a monochrome monitor. So you don't need to see a specific EGA monochrome monitor to test this feature of Simcga 4.2, you just need to get an MDA/Hercules monitor and an EGA card (or clone), and set the dip switches on the EGA card for monochrome mode.

So, uhm, has anybody reached out to the current copyright owners of SIMCGA and Magic Key to ask them if they would be prepared to release these tools as freeware, and perhaps even release the source code? Since there is no commercial value anymore, they might not object if you ask them nicely. Heck, the reason why they haven't yet done so could be because they have simply forgotten about them, or didn't think there would still be a community of enthusiasts out there that would be interested in this software.

It never hurts to ask, right? 🙂

I'd think these days there's enough amassed knowledge to write some open source SIMCGA clone so there's less of that legal problem. The only problem is that it'd piss off the "human readable modern code" general FOSS dev public who won't get the concept or why it'd require an old (possibly non-Free) assembler. 😀

The author of SIMCGA is still around on the VCFED forums, but IIRC neither he nor Sydex hold the copyright any longer, so while I might be wrong I doubt he could help. Same story as with Teledisk/Anadisk.

Also I see no theoretical reason why this couldn't be done using a modern free assembler like nasm/fasm. Or why assembly code couldn't be made human readable for that matter... although the price to pay for that can get steep (see e.g. the subroutine naming standard in the XTIDE Universal BIOS sources). 😉

leileilol wrote on 2021-09-02, 22:15:

I'd think these days there's enough amassed knowledge to write some open source SIMCGA clone so there's less of that legal problem. The only problem is that it'd piss off the "human readable modern code" general FOSS dev public who won't get the concept or why it'd require an old (possibly non-Free) assembler. 😀

I could contribute some code for that.
My currently unpublished TSR driver named HGCGA only does hardware CGA emulation using 200 of the 300 lines of a 640x300 pixel Hercules mode, but can certainly be expanded.

btw. CGA Emulation on MCE Adapter set to HerculesMode does not work for me. Don't know what the problem is.
I am therefore thinking about a rs232 switchbox and connect my MM12 (HerculesMonitor) and on the other port my Nec71vm with MCE Adapter switched to CGA-Mode.

Benedikt wrote on 2021-09-03, 12:28:

I could contribute some code for that.
My currently unpublished TSR driver named HGCGA only does hardware CGA emulation using 200 of the 300 lines of a 640x300 pixel Hercules mode, but can certainly be expanded.

That's basically how all the standard emulators did it the old days, too. Optionally, you can add a timer tick interrupt that copies the second field into the third field. This will suppress the black lines, but will create a delay until the third field is updated when motion is present.

There were some emulators that (optionally) used different timings, but as I know little is known about their details. You could run them in DOSBOX and trace their access to the 6845 CRTC ports, which should be legal according to German copyright law at least (reverse engineering using a disassembler is forbidden, but treating a program as block box and monitoring behaviour is allowed without consent of the author). I have no idea whether you might run into "trade secret" stuff, though, although I highly doubt it.

mkarcher wrote on 2021-09-03, 13:46:

There were some emulators that (optionally) used different timings, but as I know little is known about their details.

It is not hard to figure out, though, because there are really only three timing variants that make sense, namely the 640x300 mode, the maximally compatible 720x348 mode and a mode that permits 640x400 pixels via interlacing.
The third one would need some kind of CRTC auto-detection, because different CRTC types handle interlacing differently or not at all.