Computer Cores

[tall grotto]

it's a board

big difference

That's a minimig

You can't expect the De10 nano to work the exact same

[worthy zealot]

Its not the exact same, but that does not stop it from being possible. It would take work of course, but no reason why it should be impossible

[tall grotto]

impossible, maybe not. achieving the same results? I say unlikely

I challenge someone to prove me wrong, but to be honest I expect neither of us know how to develop a core, so no amount of proving if it's worth it or not is going to get the core made

lol

[worthy zealot]

The GPIO on the MiSTer already works as a direct connection to the FPGA. I do agree there are bottlenecks to be taken into account, but overall I would think there would be less bottlenecks than the Minimig would have, since it is a more powerful FPGA. Problem is having those 8 pin signals handles on both the Pi and in the MiSTer core.

[tall grotto]

It's a community project. People make what they feel like making for the MiSTer. Demands don't really mean anything without someone interested in doing it

[worthy zealot]

That is always the case for anything

[tall grotto]

Well I guess we'll see if someone wants to attempt it

[worthy zealot]

From what I have heard, there has already been some interest in it, just not sure who might be working on it. Hmm, I think Sorg even had some interest in it, but given that was more than 6 months ago I heard that rumor, I guess his interest is now elsewhere.

With a Pi as an extension there, so much seems like it could probably be offloaded to it, PiMidi, AO486 CPU, 68k CPUs. But a lot of cores need that SD RAM, and it would be such a big change to how it works now, and Pis are not even readily in stock these days. I think that might have to be the first thing to change before we might see it happen.

[chilly rain]

If the bottleneck is imbalanced inherently and it would lead to a race condition, you need a fifo somewhere as well, and those aren't free, etc... It can cause more strain on meeting timing requirements. Not trying to be negative, just commenting on common challenges specific to FPGA dev

[tall grotto]

Yeah that's kind of what I was getting at. FPGA's require tight timings, something original hardware doesn't have to worry about because the original hardware is designed to work as intended

Original hardware can interface with pistorm because the cpu is the cpu. FPGA implementations of the cpu are not the same and will need adjustments to the core that would allow it to work with such a device, and based on how the device works, it would require a lot more work being done by the FPGA than the original hardware has to.

[stiff steeple]

a real cpu 1) needs more than 8 pins 2) would be completely useless

there's just no value in it whatsoever

the speed you can do things at will depend on trace lengths and things as you get into higher clocks, this is why the speed of mister's memory ultimately becomes limited, because it's got long and uneven traces

it's hooked up to gpio pins

very not ideal

[abstract condor]

Right. It might have been useful on a custom PCB.

[worthy zealot]

You can still connect a 68 pin 68000 CPU to the 40 pin GPIO on the MiSTer though using a custom interface board. Whether it will perform worse is hard to say without testing it, but it will probably not perform well at first. The PiStorm did not perform well in the beginning either, it required a lot of optimization. How specific the timings need to be in the core, while I am not an expert on FPGA development, that still ought to be something you can handle inside the FPGA, whether it will end up causing even more bottlenecks is hard to say, but in the end I think it mainly comes down to the bandwidth of the GPIO.

[worthy zealot]

Whether a real CPU would be useless... not if it would work. But it would have to be possible to connect something faster than a regular 68020 CPU at least. But even if you could only connect a 68000 and a 68020 CPU to it, then that would probably help make a cycle exactly implementation of an 020 CPU, and if you could connect a faster one that could probably also help gather data.

[stiff steeple]

it's not really a debate, it WOULD be useless

I dont really understand why you keep bringing it up either

if someone was going to make a 020 cpu they'd do it by other means than this

[lunar trellis]

Is this related to some sort of blocker to getting CD32 support in the Amiga core?

[worthy zealot]

Why would it be useless? Make a 020 CPU? They already exist. Ahh, you mean in FPGA. But for a faster CPU it would not be useless.

[stiff steeple]

im starting to suspect you're just trolling now

it kinda would. mister's cpu is already faster than real equivilents of each model

a pistorm would be faster if the pins and fpga could handle that clock speed, but it's pretty debateable of amiga even needs more speed, as the only stuff that really uses that is aftermarket crap

[worthy zealot]

The MiSTer is about as fast as a 25mhz 040 I think it is. So it would not take much of a CPU to be faster than that?

True... overall what the core really needs would be better CD32 and CDTV support and / or better floppy support

After that FPU and such, and that is where these solutions would be useful

[stiff steeple]

I dont know much about floppies for that system, but cd32 would be nice just for completeness

and there's ample space for someone to implement the fpu if some amiga enthusiast comes along with some time and coding skill

[worthy zealot]

IPF support or other advanced floppy image types, to have support for images with copy protection. That would be nice for completeness as well.

[stiff steeple]

sure, anyone is welcome to do that

[worthy zealot]

Someone is already working on CD32 support and he does sound open to also look into expanding on the floppy drive. He is already looking a bit into that to get this to work.

Well, I gtg.

[thick pendant]

3/4th speed of a 040/25

[tall grotto]

Ultimately, bringing up the idea over and over isn't really going to get it made. The request has been listed. If someone wants to do it, they will. But constantly requesting it isn't going to help people want to make it. It actually probably does the opposite

[void belfry]

Oh Bill, this never gets old 😄

[stiff steeple]

95 was kind of amazeballs when it came out

[vestal ginkgo]

and that marketing budget spent for it at the time 😲

[thick pendant]

Yeah, a friend of mine went to go to that launch event thing with Leno

with Balmer and Gates dancing

[gloomy bolt]

All I got was Jim Allchin and Smash Mouth for XP's launch. :/ And Smash Mouth wouldn't stop joking about getting a free computer.

95's launch was historic...that was when they were bringing world class (at the time) comedians in to do standup for the company meeting, too. Missed that, and early retirement, by about 6 years. :/

[thick pendant]

I saw Neville Brothers & Kathy Metaia at a MICROS~1 TechEd in New Orleans... back then were the good old days where work would pay for you go to trade shows...

[void belfry]

Netscape downloader install in progress 😄

[worthy zealot]

I have not constantly requested it though, just replied to comments that seemed to refute that it was even possible

[tall grotto]

Clearly you're not reading any of what we're saying if you claim we said it's impossible. Lol.

[thick pendant]

Once you have an Amiga with 060 CPU you love it.... I currently have a A1200 with Blizzard 1260 . I used to have a tower converted A1200 with Blizard PPC 603e2@240mhz/060@50mhz with with GREX PCI bus with Voodoo card and SandBlaster.

So I see the appeal of more speed

Would be real interesting to try and emulate the PPC with the ARM for that WarpOS thing...

but its so niche

maybe you could run Amiga OS 4.0 classic

[tall grotto]

I mean, kitrinx has explained there's room for improvement. Pistorm is just probably not optimal for the mister.

[thick pendant]

Yeah, the 68080 vampire thing proves it

Amiga community is very fragmented

AmigaOS 4.0, MorphOS, Vampire, etc

[stiff steeple]

niche is the right word for all that stuff

[woven lava]

Amiga accelerator cards are a niche within a niche

niche²

[worthy zealot]

Yeah, I have a Vampire 1200 v2, Vampire IceDrake, an Apollo 1260 and a ACA1221. I must say I like the MAPRom of the ACA1221 and its compatibility.

I also have the TC64 v1 and of course the MiSTer. And a CDTV and a CD32. Long have I tried making an all in one Amiga. So far if it really is to be all in one, it still is to be a PC using emulation, or at least a Raspberry Pi setup. I do hope we will soon see CD32 and CDTV support for the MiSTer. For a long time I have been working on improving emulation options, making it possible to play CD32 and CDTV games on the MiSTer core.

I think I finally found a way to make it a ROM that will boot, mount the shared folder on the SD or USB card and then let you mount a CD image using SimCD32. SimCD32 is official CD32 emulation, made for Commodore developers. With that one I have been able to run most CD32 games on the MiSTer core, but it does not support CDDA. I had hoped to find emulation that might support mounting CD images with CDDA, but it does not seem possible, because the advantage of a CDTV and CD32 is that the CDDA playback would not use up any CPU ressources. That has been the advantage of it on most systems that used it. So doing it through emulation would remove that advantage.

[worthy zealot]

I wrote "seemed".

[worthy zealot]

indeed. It should be possible to make the Amiga core much much faster, but the 080 core was developed by people who seeked to make profit from it, so it was several people working together probably full time. It sure would be nice if a Kickstarter or something could be made that would buy out the 080 source code making it open source. But I suspect they would want more than a million and while the Amiga community is pretty strong, I suspect that would be a problem. Even if I personally would probably not mind throwing 1000 or maybe even 2000 USD at such a project.

[woven lava]

@worthy zealot hello fellow TC64 v1 owner

haven't used mine in a while😅 Kung Fu Flash got more use on my c64

[worthy zealot]

The Minimig developer for the TC64 Minimig core is working on adding CDDA support, so I am hoping that will be released soon. Got me to try it out again recently. It has gotten quite a few more cores over the last year or two. Its just a bit annoying that it uses VGA as the video output. But it is nice to see how it can work with just one FPGA and no CPU to manage the cores... or maybe it has two FPGAs I am not completely certain. But it works with just having to go back to the menu core after launching each core. I do think it needs to have each core it can use flashed into it. So it only has a certain number of core slots it can use.

[woven lava]

its been a while, but I tbink you have to preinstall cores in flash memory?

so it has no CPU to handle core switches or QoL functions like MiST and MiSTer

the PC Engine core for example has its own "CPU" implemented inside the FPGA alongside the PC Engine

(it is a cpu, but I put it in quotes as in it not being a physical discrete component)

[opal void]

Bill Clinton 🥴

[void belfry]

https://tenor.com/view/name-star-wars-gif-13346781

[worthy zealot]

yup I think that is why there is a limit to how many cores it can have at once.

[woven lava]

yeah some other FPGA I have work like that

we're spoiled with MiSTer

[thick pendant]

From my understanding is that the 68080 (like the 68060) gets its performance increase from having a superscalar architecture meaning it can execute instructions in parallel and out of order...

[spice hound]

Can someone please paste a screenshot of a Mister-FPGA running apple //e core?

I am really am curious...please.

[woven lava]

https://youtu.be/dYUkFC5oIds

[gloomy bolt]

</s>

[worthy zealot]

yes, so that even though it might be running at the same hz as a much slower CPU, it ends up being much much faster. We would probably also get a much faster core if we had 030 or higher implemented on the MiSTer because they do more with each instruction or run more instructions just because they are more efficiently designed. But I suspect it would require quite a bit of work to make a MiSTer alternative to the 080 CPU they designed. They also made FPU for it as well that... seems faster than the original FPUs even. I think they have some benchmarks.

For along time I have looked for some FPGA implementation of FPU, but one big problem is the fact that different CPUs often have their own FPU implementation. ARM, 68k and x86 all have their own type of FPU.

[spice hound]

AHAHAH THANK YOU!!

[chilly rain]

you sound like just the person who should try and optimize ao486 for timing and logic space and then develop an fpu core for ao486. how soon can you get this completed? 😛

[thick pendant]

If I want to run Autodesk 3D studio on MiSTer I have to resort to DOSBox(on the HPS) for the FPU support. It's OK, but will be ideal once @worthy zealot completes the FPU for the ao486 core. Its ok if he needs to get rid of CMS (Game Blaster) support to free up FPGA fabric . I'd think it could be done pretty quickly...

one that is done, I could create a really good animated ao486 logo or something....

Obviously refactoring ao486 CPU for logic space to fit the FPU would ideal, but I'm just offering up getting rid of the Game Blaster (make it a compile time option) would be acceptable to me.

[chilly rain]

I would love to see crazy shit go further and further on ao486.

It's a beast of a core, but I'm sure some people are brave enough to wrestle with it.

[fast kraken]

someones working on an fpu? are they getting anywhere?

i thought they were comically impossible on fpga

[thick pendant]

The Vampire has one...

I'm not sure if its a subset of the 68882 or what

but I understand it has some MMX stuff thrown in

[surreal marsh]

I don't think a fpu fits in ao486. I'd just like to see someone fix the memory bug.

[worthy zealot]

I must say I am getting more and more interested in looking into how to develop FPGA cores. Its just that I am a software developer and it would be quite time consuming... but I do love to learn new things and I do have an itch to dig into these cores.

I do not think anyone is working on FPU. I guess as it is, the AO486 or the Minimig core will probably not benefit much from FPU given the CPU speeds they have. But would be nice to have either way if there is room for it anyway.

[void belfry]

If I'm not mistaken, some Unix/Linux might need FPU (at least for what I have tried on ao486). Probably the IDE controller is also in need of some changes, got some IDE related errors if I remember correctly from last time I tried making old Unix versions to work

[stiff steeple]

I don't think you can just say "an fpu" like they are all the same

it's like say "oh 486 needs a cpu, throw a 68000 in it"

[fast kraken]

last time i did any research most games wouldn't even use an fpu on a 486 anyway

[inner relic]

yeah, it was the next era with pentiums and 3d cards where the fpu started seeing real use

[fast kraken]

and the pentiums pipelining was a big part of that aswell

like an fpu doesn't get you quake, i don't think it even gets you better performance in duke3d

[inner relic]

early 3d cards relied on the fpu being there

[lunar trellis]

Sorry for the uninformed question, but what real world benefits would an FPU bring to the Amiga or 486 core? I know it is a maths processor, but I don't know what it all does in practice. Would it free up CPU resources allowing some games to run at a higher frame rate? Would it allow more things to run?

[coral coral]

On Amiga it would give pretty much nothing

[fast kraken]

petty much same on ao486

it'd let you install win98 without disabling the fpu check....

some spreadsheet apps or something might go faster

[coral coral]

I had a 50MHz one in my Amiga and used it for 3D rendering bitd, but now? Nope

[lunar trellis]

Ah, so no games make use of it?

[coral coral]

It’s a similar case for 486.. 3D Studio etc could use it to good effect.. and probably a few more simulation type 3D games than Amiga

[lunar trellis]

Got you, thanks chaps for explaining.

Seems like that feature would be a niche labour of love for someone

[coral coral]

A 030 with MMU implementation would be more useful, but also incredibly niche

[inner relic]

it's probably not worth the effort, especially when the Amiga core can run at a much faster speeds that real machines ever ran, fpu or not

[coral coral]

It would be pretty useless for Amiga, but you would be able to build some 90s workstation cores

[inner relic]

that's true

but then again, how useful is it really really run old workstation software 30 years later

[stiff steeple]

basically nothing of value, just some novelties nobody really has any good reason to use

so here's a question

why dont people just compile amiga OS for x64 machines with VM layer for older crap compatibility. Why this whole bizzare fpga fake 68k revision stuff?

I mean it's pointless enough to still be running amigas with some delusion that they are functional modern machines, but I dont get the invention of hardware to do it

[coral coral]

The Amiga scene is bizarre, that’s the whole gist of it

I think there were more modern AmigaOS-like things roughly like you describe, but that evolutionary branch may have ended on PowerPC based machines 🤪

Or actually, AROS exists for x86 and is open source. MorphOS was PPC-only and proprietary.

Anyway, I don’t know why people are into those things either

[hollow ice]

well, the 030 + MMU wouldn’t be completely useless on amiga, it would put us closer to being able to run amix

would also be useful for implementing the Atari Falcon and TT030

I think the definition of novelties varies from person to person though; I can say that I obviously don’t care enough about Amix/Atari computers enough to do work myself!

[stiff steeple]

what is amix? is that a game?

[hollow ice]

https://www.amigaunix.com/doku.php

[stiff steeple]

what is the purpose of this?

are there games that only work for this?

[hollow ice]

what is the purpose of anything? is the goal of mister just games or is it hardware preservation?

[stiff steeple]

I mean, many things have purposes

the purpose of super mario bros is to amuse you

the purpose of chrome is to browse the web

the purpose of that appears to be simply to exist

the goal of mister is games, yes

[hollow ice]

the purpose of amix was to be a workstation operating system for “commodity” amiga hardware. personally, it amuses me to play around with old flavors of Unix

[stiff steeple]

it's so you can play things

[hollow ice]

I can get the same dopamine hit getting an old version of bash to compile as completing a level of super mario

[abstract condor]

Hehe

[stiff steeple]

it's to make games comfortably accessible using modern hardware and peripherals, to be more concise

[abstract condor]

People use Mister for non-gaming too

[stiff steeple]

people use it to hold down paper or prop open doors too, im sure

it doesn't mean that's it's raison d'etre

[abstract condor]

Doesn't matter

Unless you're intent on blocking non-gaming use

[stiff steeple]

no

[abstract condor]

Then it matters

[stiff steeple]

but there's a difference between actively prohibiting something and developing with a goal in mind, so as to dodge the random sematic salad

[abstract condor]

Right

[hollow ice]

which is why I said novelty is different per person above, and also claimed that it wasn’t novel enough for me to put in the effort, so I am not expecting someone else to. I just mention that having the processor available does open up actual functionality that existed in the lifespan of the computers mentioned above.

[abstract condor]

Yep it's cool stuff

And I'm sure theres some terminal Tetris

[stiff steeple]

ascii tetris?

i'd not be surprised

[hollow ice]

I mean, in all seriousness, bsd hunt was some of my fondest memories of multiplayer gaming

the issue being it is multiplayer only, so having amix running it won’t do me much good

and I should also note, we ran it on a decstation, so amix wouldn’t even be period accurate for my nostalgia

[abstract condor]

Aha

[thick pendant]

Um, that is simply not true. the A4000/040 is faster and the Amiga Technologies A4000 Tower Quikpak 060 is MUCH faster...

not to mention GVP, Phase5, Apollo, CSA, DKB, DCE.... all made contemporary accelerator boards faster than the current MiniMig Core on the MiSTer...

PP&S, probably like another 6 i forgot

[worthy zealot]

Yeah, the primary purpose of MiSTer is gaming, hardware preservation is probably a bit more of a secondary goal. FPU would not do much for AO486 or the Minimig core at least without getting a faster CPU as well. Well, there might be use cases on AO486, a few games can use FPU like Duke Nukem 3D, but it would probably still end up having slowdowns. Quake would still not be able to run... well, it would run, but it would run like a slideshow at maybe 1 fps.

So adding FPU would mainly be for the hardware preservation. Even if it was added it might end up being removed if it took up too much space for other features, and I think the AO486 core is already pressed for space.

Pretty sure things that use FPU on the Amiga generally also want an 060 CPU, or 060 compatible like the 080 and yes, not all FPUs are equal. There are several different ones, even on x86 alone there exists at least 3 types of FPU I think. ARM has its own type of FPU and 68k has its own FPU. The Vampire core has its own FPU and I am pretty sure its also just compatible with the FPU in original Amiga CPUs the same with the 080 core is compatible, but not the same as the original hardware.

The MiSTer Minimig core runs at a very fast 020 Amiga, but its still slower than an 040 Amiga with a 25mhz CPU I think.

[woven lava]

probably ao486 could be rewritten to save space

since a lot of it was automatically generated

[undone anvil]

For sure if a 486 core were written based a standard IBM model(like PC XT), it would probably be a lot better, and driver compatibility wouldn't be an issue either.

[inner relic]

By the time the i486 CPU was released IBM models were irrelevant

And the biggest makers of clones were becoming household names

[abstract condor]

There were some branded 486es still

IBM Aptiva

[undone anvil]

or a PC Series 300

I guess whatever model has the most resources available to assist in making it into an FPGA core is what would be most relevant. I kinda assumed an IBM model would

[thick pendant]

Packard Bell 🙂

[north haven]

Would likely require re-architecting MiSTer, but there is probably enough power in the FPGA's HPS to emulate any of the 8, 16, and early 32-bit processors using C code and just implement the vintage peripherals and busses in the FPGA core -- interfacing with the CPU over AXI.

Or maybe it could be done now... The MCL86 is an x86 emulation running on a 7-instruction microsequencer running at 100 Mhz, but could easily be adapted to run on a very small process in the HPS which could use the exact same microcode as the FPGA version used in the PCXT core...

Or just run any other 8088 emulator written in C. Like the MCL86+ 🙂

[worthy zealot]

they already did rewrite... most the code I think... when they added the layer 1 and 2 CPU cache to the core. They had to because it was already out of space.

Whether there is more space that could be saved with leftover autogenerated stuff I do not know, but I suspect there might not be much left

[north haven]

or MCL65+, or MCL68, or MCL64, or MCLZ8

I only mention this because of the FPU discussion... If the CPU was already being emulated in the HPS, adding code for the FPU may not be that heavy of a lift. Implementing it in RTL is a very heavy lift...

[worthy zealot]

But still pretty sure starting over with a different basis would make for a more efficient core. Especially with what the core developers have learned since AO486 was released. If it is one of the ones with experience with the core that would make the new one.

But from what I hear x86 is very complex, so it might take much longer than f.ex. the PSX core to develop and the PSX core only got developed as fast as it did because the developer working on that was very dedicated. Seems like he must have worked on it full time or more. Or at least close to full time. I think he did do some work on the AO486 core though.

My impression though is that the developers that have worked on AO486 does not seem much benefit to be gained from starting over since AO486 already does cover most things.

So they generally seem to want to focus on other cores. Same with the Minimig core I guess... but I know at least one FPGA developer is working on the Minimig core now.

[fast kraken]

not really, robert deliberately implemented the caches outside the main cpu so he wouldn't have to even look at it

its all at the memory controller iirc

the reason no-ones started from scratch is it'd probably take years of effort to match the functionality we have now and after all that you might still not of even freed any resources

[worthy zealot]

Well, I know a lot of time was spent on cleaning up auto-generated code. Not sure who did, I think it was Sorg.

But yeah... they do not see much to be gained from starting from scratch. It might clear up the memory issues and such, but performance might stay the same, and the issues with the memory while annoying only seems to be a problem with very few apps if you just go with alternatives to DOS4GW like DOS32A.

[stiff steeple]

someone tried all that with amiga and tested it with x86 stuff, the HPS couldn't really provide any notable speed gains, it just isn't powerful enough to emulate more than the fpga can do natively

if you really want more from an x86 core we probably need a better fpga to work with, and then someone "just" needs to write the pentium chip

an fpu is just a waste of time and space for the era the core cover, no matter how you slice it

[storm maple]

just had a disc on the ao486 core run a univbe test that warned it could seriously damage defective monitors, I take it that has no bearing on hdmi out right? not that I'm running a defective monitor

[abstract condor]

It's for VGA screens that didn't guard against weird timings.

In other words, nothing to worry about if you're running on a flat panel.

Or possibly it's to do with the DDC pin but shouldn't matter to you

[storm maple]

perfect, thanks! Hadn't come across that before, not even back in the day on original hardware

[abstract condor]

I remember a DOS tool that let me tweak timings and VGA registers to create custom screen modes, and it had no failsafes whatsoever. I made my monitor make a lot of strange sounds

It spat out a list of registers to use in your app, so it allowed me to create some weird but useful modes

256x256 was one

[storm maple]

ha, that's wild

[abstract condor]

Yeah very useful, as one could access all of VRAM in one memory segment (this was 16 bit code)

[storm maple]

my early computer days, pretty much skipped over vga, had monochrome, cga, ega for the longest time then jumped to svga

[worthy zealot]

also if an FPGA was implemented, 486 FPUs were not the same as Pentium FPUs I think. It would overall be nice to see FPU implemented in FPGA in some way but mainly just to see how well it might work, its accuracy and such. Practically... I have an 060 expansion for my A1200 and the Vampire IceDrake and you only really seem to need FPU for demos and ports of games like Quake.

I guess some speed might be gained if a 486 CPU was implemented in MiSTer from scratch, but I would be surprised if it made it something like twice as fast, and that would still leave it like a 60mhz 486, which is less than half the speed of a Pentium 100mhz I think.

It will be interesting with the Replay 2, but they again plan on using closed sources. Which is just much less interesting to me.

[stiff steeple]

I doubt you'll see anyone design an x86 chip from scratch anytime soon. The chips are massive and complex. You just wait for the Replay2. I'm sure it'll be out one of these years.

[inner relic]

I think the approach the ao486 core currently uses could be cleaned up and improved and lead to better results

I'd like to see the bugs with real mode and IDE fixed first though

[thick pendant]

and DPMI

I never really encountered any real mode bugs

[stiff steeple]

I dont know what issue real mode has?

or IDE really

DPMI is the only major bug I know of

[hollow ice]

IDE has some issues for sure. An easy way to replicate is to use the openstep installer. At some point the BPS value gets reset to 0 (not sure if it is a race condition…I was never able to catch the problem when debugging) causing the OS to see the hard drive as zero size.

[stiff steeple]

using DMA based IDE would be nicer anyway

it seems pretty hacky and I hate that it needs a custom bios because of it

[hollow ice]

Agreed, but it does work well enough. It could also be the bios that is having the issue, which would explain why a custom bios will allow you to install nt4

I didn't see any issues with the code when debugging, just the reset of the, sorry i meant SPT value, not BPS

[stiff steeple]

I wouldn't say the IDE stuff is critical though

it seems rare to have HDD based blockers

mostly with odd late-era os's

[hollow ice]

Yeah, most things aren’t affected since most just care about the data, not restructuring the filesystem.

I was just interested because I saw two issues when playing with openstep- it also doesn’t like the special non standard iso format- I had to convert it to a chd.

The iso loader would choke on the header.

[stiff steeple]

huh

did it ever get redbook audio?

[hollow ice]

Nope

[stiff steeple]

that's another pretty big thing to get

[hollow ice]

Depending on implementation I don’t think it would be that bad. All the command stubs are there and from what I remember the loader knows about the different tracks. I was actually wondering if you could just use something like ffmpeg to play the data and mix it into the misters output.

I had planned to do a deep dive in IDE when I was looking into those problems, but both work and life swelled and I haven’t even spent more than half an hour playing games at any single point in time since

[lunar trellis]

Would it be possible to bring redbook audio across from one of the other cores that has it (PCE-CD, PSX, Mega CD)?

I know on Amiga it isn't straight forward to add

[hollow ice]

I haven’t looked at the others, but I would guess no— the ao486 core’s IDE implementation is “good enough”: half of it runs on the ARM side.

I would imagine those other implementations are completely fpga based so they have to be cycle accurate. I believe there are games that will break on pce-cd if the timing is too far out of spec

The way I was looking at doing it would in no way be cycle accurate— the arm side ide handling gets the ata command to seek/play/stop/etc and it just uses a static ffmpeg player to immediately decode the raw data on the iso and mix it in with the mister output

is that even doable? maybe not, I didn’t really get that far….it seems like such a simple solution that it would have already been done at this point

[lunar trellis]

It may just be nobody has really looked into it before

[stiff steeple]

you can do this but I don't suggest it as you can't control the volume or mixing levels

it will always feel like a half assed solution imho

[hollow ice]

I mean, the IDE solution is similar, so it would be “good enough” until someone built something better

I have exactly one use case for red book— super street fighter 2. I played that a lot on PC when I was younger. It finally made me less jealous of the amiga, and the remixed soundtrack was amazing.

And it would technically be in the spirit of the original CD implementations where CD audio just came off a quarter-inch jack on the bezel.

well, make that two…the mechanical man song from command and conquer was pretty great

[stiff steeple]

I mean, lets put it like this

I would strongly encourage you not to ever use mister's linux side audio playback. It's absolutely shitty, aliased, unfiltered audio with level problems

it would be better to have nothing than this, because nobody will ever fix it once it exists

[hollow ice]

Yeah, but the alternative is never for sure.

[stiff steeple]

when someone does get around to doing it, they should just do it right

that's all

otherwise it will just stay in a junky state forever

it's actually more motivational to not have it than have it kind of work

[hollow ice]

I only disagree because with the amount of free time I have in the foreseeable future, my contribution could only be the shortcut method.

Maybe I can be the creature from “it follows”- the vague knowledge that sometime, somewhere a horrible implementation of red book might drop 😆

And that in and of itself could be the motivation for someone else 😉

[worthy zealot]

yeah, I do not have much hope to see the Replay 2. The Replay 1 was sold out very fast and then nothing for years and years, and it was closed source, so its not a project I want to support unless there are results, which will probably be too late because at that point its sold out.

[stiff steeple]

I'd put my money on 486 core and just hope the speed improves to another generation whenever the next hardware iteration comes out

the scope of the mister platform as a whole is roughly 1995ish and before

the 486 core isn't really too far from that

that's about what the underlying hardware can do

[worthy zealot]

Yeah, I am pretty happy with the state the 486 core is in. The speed is what I would expect from this FPGA I think, what I hope to see is improved memory handling and support for CDDA.

[stiff steeple]

im surprised alexey didn't implement it

it's mostly just sending it over ext_bus

like all the other cd cores

[worthy zealot]

Already many things have improved. Pretty sure there are less mouse problems now f.ex.

I used to try to play C&C on this core and the mouse would begin to act up after a while, but pretty sure that is no longer the case

Yeah, if you know what you are doing it seems like CDDA should be pretty simple to implement. I know someone is trying to do it on the Minimig core, based on what is being done on the TC64 Minimig core, but the two cores have gone down different paths in their development.

[stiff steeple]

it needs just a hair more to cover all of DOS and I think that's the scope of it

it would probably be more accurately called a DOS core

the windows 95 to XP era is a whole different can of worms hardware wise

[worthy zealot]

I suspect the Windows stuff would at least run more stable if the memory stuff got improved? But it might also just be Win9x being Win9x, it was never very stable.

[stiff steeple]

on an fpga I'd only ever expect really just the fringe of windows gaming at best

[worthy zealot]

I do like how Windows 95 and 98 can be used to run Total Commander on the core

[stiff steeple]

you start needing more advanced audio, much more advanced video, more advanced bus, and etc

[worthy zealot]

But yeah, when it comes to games... its Minesweeper and such. It can run Starcraft and Diablo f.ex., but it will lag and such

[stiff steeple]

and an exponentially faster cpu and ram

[worthy zealot]

I made this a long time ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7T1UmpFHbM

[stiff steeple]

a tidy way to break it down is DOS, Windows 95-XP, and XP-present

[worthy zealot]

I am surprised at how well it does run Diablo and Starcraft given its practically a 33mhz 486. Someone even got Diablo 2 running on it. It was completely unplayable, but still impressive that it can run at all on it

66mhz 486 with FPU would help a lot I think when it comes to how many more games would be supported, but I do not think that can happen on the MiSTer.

[stiff steeple]

as i've said about 100 times, it doesn't match any real clock speed as you would have known it which is why characterizing it as that is so disingenuous

it's faster at some things and slower at others

[worthy zealot]

Sure, but 33mhz 486 seems the closest approximation and generally matches the performance we see for the games it can run

[stiff steeple]

and yet, it's still completely misleading

it will run most games somewhere between a 486-25 and a 486-66 level

[worthy zealot]

But generally not at the 66mhz level in my experience. I was surprised to see how well Descent runs on it, but then I looked it up and it does have 33mhz as the required CPU

So 33mhz seems like a good rule of thumb. It can perform a bit better, but not stable. I do not think any game performs above a 33mhz on average

[lunar trellis]

It had the same issues with C&C, I haven't checked in a year or so though

[void belfry]

@worthy zealot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mx2x5Zc-zo , also Fallout 1 run nice (some even better under Win NT actually)

[granite umbra]

I tried one time Fallout 1 on Win95 or Win98 it is slow but it is great if it is playable on WinNT

[void belfry]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZTJgbiP2IM

Fallout 2... not that much luck (as expected), becomes extremely laggy after Temple of trials/Aroyo quests :))))

[granite umbra]

We need to hope someday a new core with the capacity of playing those games.
In this case the real harware, VM or emulation are the good way to play them for the moment

[void belfry]

OS/2 is still a hard nut to crack lol , better video driver and/or slip/ppp not working, no matter what i've tried 😄

[thick pendant]

same

[thick pendant]

did you ever get around all but 2.0 needing the l2 disabled?

[vestal ginkgo]

you mad man. that took you a day from when we talked about it 😄

now have it fix DPMI from within the core

[thick pendant]

It did help that I had ChatGPT write some of the code...

I did get kinda spooked when I said "My cat's name is Lulu." and it responded saying Lulu was a grey and white tabby with green eyes... I'm like how did it know? freaky... it never said that again though...

[stiff steeple]

it didnt want to scare you away

[void belfry]

nope, all versions higher than that needs L1 disabled

[thick pendant]

oh, right L1 not 2

And no SLIP or PPP, so do you have some terminal software which you prefer?

I was thinking at the very least maybe you could use winsock on the OS/2 windows...

[void belfry]

by far I prefer Terminate 4.0 (made for DOS but it also has OS/2 support) as terminal

[thick pendant]

os/2 serial drivers are a lost magic though

[void belfry]

PMCOMM also works, with standard serial drivers installed

I think Terminate required to use SIO drivers , if I remember correctly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIO_(software)

[thick pendant]

I guess I remember just using my DOS term software under OS/2... That is an option too

I think I recall using the SIO drivers.

[void belfry]

from what I understood, default OS/2 serial drivers only supports speeds up to 57600 baud, SIO give you 115200

[thick pendant]

I had a "fancy" 16550 uarts back then and recall SIO

[void belfry]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_(software)

has quite a ton of features, and sadly there's no way (at least from my searches) to get a functioning 5.0 key for it.

v4.0 is doable though 🙂

[abstract condor]

Hm

I miss OS/2

[thick pendant]

I'll try those 🙂

[void belfry]

From all my searches, could not find a mean to contact the original programmer, Bo Bendtsen , there were other who tried as well to get a hold of a license key for public, as the software it seems long abandoned

[abstract condor]

His son seems to be a web developer in Copenhagen.

Hm, read a Swedish forum now and the rights to Terminate seem to be in... confusion

[void belfry]

yeap...

[abstract condor]

It was hijacked by/sold to some guy who renamed it TERMINATOR 2 etc

[void belfry]

but there still is a BBS (maybe more) out there who still has a very old and dear way to 🦜 v.4.0. just sayin' , not encouraging

[void belfry]

yeah, there are quite long threads about this story. That gets this beautiful piece of software in such a legal limbo, though in my honest opinion it should be considered abandonware.

@thick pendant speaking of SIO drivers (1.60D for example), they are registered and released for public use by Ray himself 🙂

[abstract basalt]

Maybe I'll have better luck here

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ZX-Spectrum_MISTer/blob/master/rtl/ym2149.sv#L115

[patent temple]

14: dout = ymreg[7][6] ? ymreg[14] & IOA_in : IOA_in;

[abstract basalt]

why when PSG is set to output on port A (or B), is the corresponding register ANDed with the input?

[sudden ice]

https://z-team.itch.io/maria-renards-revenge

Anyone tried it with Amiga core?

[granite umbra]

yes I tried it

for the release you need a hdd and unpack the lha file and click on launcher icon game

[thick pendant]

Neat! just bought it

[frosty compass]

Any core able to run this OS?

It's never used System 7

[thick pendant]

I the Mac+ core can run System some early versions of System 7, and the Minimig core can all System 7 releases (and 8.1) under ShapeShifter, and finally 7 & 8.1 can be run with BasiliskII on the HPS ARM, however that is not a core.

[waxen nymph]

https://www.bbcelite.com

[rough edge]

Has anyone tried the new C128 core?

[undone anvil]

hope that one handles IEC data storage within the core.. I really don't want to have to drop cash on adapters

[rough edge]

Data storage?

[gloomy bolt]

I tried it once back in August of last year, but haven't tried it since. I really wanted to play EotB on it with the secondary output if it is supported. I should check it out again.

[rough edge]

Iirc it still doesn't support two simultanious screens

[gloomy bolt]

Yeah, I just saw that. Maybe I'll throw some BBS software on it for funsies.

[undone anvil]

yeah like SD2IEC

Basically so you can have a more elaborate file system

[thick pendant]

https://youtu.be/V1AYvh7j_Eo

[undone anvil]

Wow.

[gloomy bolt]

We were deprived our dystopian retrofuture. So by god, the community will MAKE it! This is legitimately delightful. Thanks @thick pendant !

[thick pendant]

That is why I made the "thanks" the exit keyword to return to the modem emulation. I think its important to thank the AI, so that it won't eventually kill all humans...

[thick pendant]

You do know the (original anyway) Terminator ran 6502 code.... Bender from Futurama as well

[gloomy bolt]

I knew about both but forgot about the T-800, or at least don't think about it when I see 6502. Bender for sure though. The F-ray showed it pretty clear. Hehe.

[thick pendant]

I believe the code it showed in the original movie was 6502 code

I remember seeing the movie and identifying that... and I laughed

[granite umbra]

For the C128, ready to be released 🙂
https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=6186

[lunar trellis]

Oh nice

[undone anvil]

@twin scarab excellent work! can't wait to try it out!

[lunar trellis]

Does this need BIOS files added to the BIOS database so update all grabs them?

[undone anvil]

What I'm hoping for is C64OS in C64 mode without the use of an IEC2SNAC. perhaps using the secondary sdcard slot for storage, or a VHD

[fast kraken]

awesome! congrats wrong person 😄

@twin scarab awesome! congrats

[deep wharf]

I was messing with the wii mote as a gun, does anyone know if you can use it at a mouse? It would make point click adventures easy

[undone anvil]

Hey so to hook up the mt32pi, any USB cable will do? or does it need to be 3.0?

well, in my case, I installed a synthesizer on an iPad, which accepts midi inputs via USB, and I want to try out some midi sequencers on amiga/atariST

[lunar trellis]

The cable depends on which version you have, for the original one (not PiZero) it was a very specific cable you needed. Midi channel is probably a better place to ask, I can't recall the ins and ours off hand so don't want to give you half remembered advice

[undone anvil]

oh I forgot there was such a channel, thank you for reminding me

[inland gorge]

i'm loving playing with the ao486 core, thanks devs

I'm trying to get an old linux distro installed, I get that the IDE and FPU are hurdles, but I assume some distros work with patches

i tried Slackware 3.0, 3.2, 3.5 and 4.0 with various combinations of boot/root disks, and have built some custom kernels under qemu, but I can't get a combination that works

anyone had luck with an old 90's era distro on ao486?

[thick pendant]

The best person to ask about that is @void belfry

[inland gorge]

cool, if they don't chime in i'll DM later

[thick pendant]

I've gotten OS/2 and NT to work...

no Linux though

You do know there these is a LXDE environment for MiSTer... that is probably a better option if you wanted a usable Linux

[inland gorge]

I'm looking more for nostalgia, since Slackware was the first linux distro i used back in the mid-90's, i will check out LXDE though

[thick pendant]

I remember running Slackware, but the the Halloween RedHat came out and I never looked back.

[inland gorge]

Yeah, good stuff. I think I was team Mandrake

[surreal marsh]

Wouldn't Linux be likely to tickle the memory bugs in ao486?

[void belfry]

The only thing I found out to work for sure on ao486 (from Unix world) is ELKS/Minix variant - this works as well on PC-XT core. https://elks.sourceforge.net/FAQ-English.html

It can also be connected to internet via SLIP (there is a forum post where we debate that a bit) https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=5307

also, there is a terminal (microterm I think or smth like that) on ELKS which can get you connected to BBSes via modem

I am dabbling now with SCO Unix, trying to install it on PCEm and then hope to get it running on ao486 (so far not much luck)

As for Linuxes, think they complain about FPU (or even requiring Pentium CPUs) and yes, some IDE or memory errors as well as far as i remember from my tests

Managed to install SCO Unix V386 ver 4.2 release 3.2.4l on PCEM (some of other versions are either corrupted or just fail to install/boot), will see over the weekend how ao486 handles it

[tall grotto]

C128 WOOO!!

I legit was able to play around with a Commodore 128 before. Was very interesting...

looked gorgeous too

[vestal goblet]

A special Thank You to the person/people that added support for the Recreated Spectrum Bluetooth keyboard! I backed that project on Kickstarter several years ago, and was really happy with it even then. I had actually recorded a video testing the keyboard on my color e-Ink Boox device with the Recreated app just a few weeks ago!

[abstract condor]

The 128 runs CP/M too

[surreal marsh]

From what I read the extra features were mostly useless for games. And it came out when CP/M had ceased being a thing.

[inland gorge]

Thanks, I'll check out ELKS. I can bypass some FPU issues (for kernel at least) with 'no387', and I saw some YouTube videos about patching the kernel to stub out some IDE commands, but I haven't found a combo that works for me. This is good info though, at least I know it's not "just me" or some easy thing that I am missing

[hollow ice]

I would be interested in which IDE commands you would have to stub out

[fast kraken]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goovFvN1hns

[undone anvil]

I seriously hope C128 core will have internal IEC options

[spice hound]

How does one install mega65 core into mister fpga and is there a video showing the installation and running the mega65 core?

[granite umbra]

This core doesn't exist or it is not public if it exists

[hallow iris]

Is there an Atari ST core that can simulate the original st chipset (not ste) and where the wakestate is configurable?

[thick pendant]

There was a test ST core called FX-Cast by ijor in 2018 but it was never really released and the last test release used an ancient version of the MiSTer framework. Not sure if thats what you are referring to...

[fast kraken]

https://emabolo.itch.io/super-star-trek-25th

not sure if this will work on ao486

[hallow iris]

Yeah, saw that, sent a message to ijor, we’ll see

[void belfry]

nope

[fast kraken]

bummer

[crimson fulcrum]

reading through some of the comments, seem like this was made in Adventure Game Studio, so makes sense

the style is of older Windows game but the engine is new

[white siren]

are there plans for exodos converter to make mymenu friendly files? It took me a little bit of jumping through hoops to figure out how to add custom games directly to the top300

[thick pendant]

you really just need to copy the game onto the drive...

[white siren]

Yeah I did and I had to redo the bat files as it was looking at a different dir than I was expecting

[vestal ginkgo]

I really had to make some sacrifices to keep the Top 300 pack able to be updated and support MyMenu, hence the E:\Games\MyMenu\Long File Name folder setup that is there. Which you obviously figured out

but yes, eventually need to remove TDL and add MyMenu to the converter. Eventually I will get to it, the mister.py file needs to be changed

and the way the directories are converted can be removed. The converter can be seriously simplified now that MyMenu is the interface and Long Folder Names are supported.

[thick pendant]

Well, you can't add too many games without running out of space, so I'd suggest adding the games to a separate VHD.

[tacit loom]

That's what network shares are for.. theoretically endless storage for the Mister 🙂

[granite umbra]

An update for FM-Towns core
http://fpga8801.seesaa.net/article/498419020.html

[lunar trellis]

March 03, 2023
256 colors supported
At last I was able to boot DOS, so I could only use 16 colors. The Windows95 installer of TOWNS seems to use 640x480x256 colors, and there were various display problems, so I fixed them. For the time being, the installer started normally. For the time being, it seems to be able to go until the first reboot, but after that it seems to be stuck due to the unimplemented PCM relationship. Fix it again if you feel like it. Even TownsOS can't boot yet, but Windows 95 has progressed to some extent. . . release-TOWNS_221120.qar

[sweet scarab]

Nice to see Puu making progress. If only he would use github

[granite umbra]

the sources proposed on the blog post are the same as the previous post.
maybe he misses to upload the new ones

[thick pendant]

I mean separate (secondary) VHD file/hard disk as opposed to a single file/drive. Not talking about network vs local storage.

[tacit loom]

Ah that makes sense, like a D drive with all the games

Would make adding more game packs easier probably

Like could swap out VHDs with different game packs

[granite umbra]

the correct link for the sources and the RBF extracted (info from the forum)
https://fpga8801.up.seesaa.net/rtl/release-TOWNS_230303.qar

[meager mural]

Anyone hear anything about disk/tape image write functionality for the Coleco Adam core? Still can't use applications or games beyond one round due to inability to write to images... would love for it to be a fully-usable core.

[lunar trellis]

@waxen nymph may have some insight

[waxen nymph]

Spacexguy started working on write support but got busy with real life. It is on the roadmap

[meager mural]

@waxen nymph Thank you very much!

[granite umbra]

http://fpga8801.seesaa.net/article/498502300.html

[vestal goblet]

Kevin really has outdone himself with his latest Atari Archives Annex: https://youtu.be/_v3YGQiY02s

anyone who’s a fan of Jeremy Parish’s videos/books and hasn’t dived into Atari Archives, should do so. I am learning so much about the ins and outs of this era of gaming and computing I never knew (or had forgotten)

[wheat folio]

So MegaAGS has a new name? https://amiga.vision/

[pallid cradle]

Thanks!

[vestal goblet]

You’re welcome! I didn’t know you were on here, but it figures XD I’ve learned a lot from this video series, thanks for all the in-depth research and your holistic approach to calling the human, business, and technical context

[uncut void]

anyone knows how to get lemmins 1 to work without graphic error in AO486?

it always has this color palette switching issue

[fast kraken]

is that on the top300 pack?

disable L1 cache in the core OSD and launch it with the vga option:
lemmings vga

[vestal goblet]

some bank switching/cache timing issue, if I had to guess

[uncut void]

i will try

yes, I read it is some color palette switching issue..
This is from the 300 pack but I tried several disk downloads in dos 6.22, all the same.

nah, cache doesn't help... the only thing that works is not choosing "high performance pc"... it's playable then, but with less colors...

[pallid cradle]

Oh I’m not Jeremy Parish, I just have a similar approach

[warm flax]

Yeah I didn't know you were here either. Love the videos and am looking forward to the book!

[frosty compass]

Good times

A gaming sensation 🙃

[abstract condor]

Ah

[meager mural]

I cannot seem to get to the title screen of the C64 version of CastleVania. Is anyone else having this problem? This is the HTL+NEC version.

[fresh geyser]

Is that homebrew?

[woven lava]

no it was released in 1990

[opal void]

https://yeokhengmeng.com/2023/03/building-a-dos-chatgpt-client-in-2023/

who tried this on PCXT and AO486 yet 😄

[void belfry]

hmmm, it might actually work, maybe with a RasPi as https to http proxy (or other machine)

I've done in the past proxy/ssl offloading to a PI for Amiga core

[void belfry]

not to mention that mTCP suite works just fine under PC XT core (same config as for ao486 (https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/advanced/computer/#ppp-connection-in-ms-dos-on-ao486)

will give it a spin tonight/tomorrow, gotta dust off a RasPI lol

[karmic lynx]

I'm interested in this, if I can manage to hook it to my other DOS PC I can play LAN Command & Conquer like I used to many years ago

actually it definitely wasn't lan, I have no idea what protocol was used

[thick pendant]

https://youtu.be/V1AYvh7j_Eo

Also works with ao486 and Minimig & PCXT

[opal void]

wow awesome! 🙂

[thick pendant]

I made a forum post about it here: https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=6147

[karmic lynx]

any idea if games that support modem on DOS could make use of the networking mister offers?

[thick pendant]

https://youtu.be/TH1GDu2Da9A

https://youtu.be/u_zZQl7AWis

https://youtu.be/hDWlSjPu5p4

few examples there

[karmic lynx]

that's neat, are these two separate misters?

I don't see any info on how it's done

[thick pendant]

yes

[thick pendant]

You need to be familiar with how modems work...

[karmic lynx]

Unfortunately I'm not but if I need to I'll study them up

[thick pendant]

mostly you just use the "ATDT" command ATDT - Dial --> ATDT192.168.1.131:23 or ATDTBBS.DOMAIN.COM:31337 ( '*' can also be used in place of ':')

[karmic lynx]

neat, one day I'll do an old school serial modem lan party

[thick pendant]

generally modem playable games are only 2 player...

unless they are part of an online service or something.

[void belfry]

yes, but not using a tcp/ip stack (like mTCP or MiamiDeluxe/RoadShow etc)

[thick pendant]

that was not my goal. there are no reason those operating systems can't establish a https connection to a REST API endpoint...

[void belfry]

the obvious advantage of your method (to me at least) is that you're not gonna need an extra machine as a proxy/ssl offloader

[thick pendant]

you could load a proxy on the HPS if you wanted...

[void belfry]

yeah... but too much hassle

i am lucky to have some PIs around 😄

used before for things like this: https://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2019-04-00006-EN.html

[thick pendant]

that sslstrip thing is a Python 2.5 program, so it would be totally trivial to run that proxy daemon on the HPS

[void belfry]

i'll give it a try in weekend

[void belfry]

for sure the app works , no crash/mem issues/etc on ao486 at least (but since it's default/no proxy set up yet, ofc it won't connect)

[thick pendant]

I prefer using the modem as a proxy as I can get the TTS voice...

and that it works with C64 core

I really want to try to tweak the TTS so it sounds more retro or robotic

[tall grotto]

What you're doing is hilarious

[void belfry]

yeah, I like these kind of challenges lol :D)

[tall grotto]

https://tenor.com/view/but-why-wtf-wth-gif-18627417

[void belfry]

Network engineers are weird, i know 😛

i grew up with IPX, then TCP/IP LANs, plus slip/ppp for internet :D) via 14400 baud

was a bit late + unavailable BBSing or most of western computers/first networks in my time/area

[tall grotto]

lol

fair enough

I won't lie, I didn't have a computer of my own until I was about 12 or 13 which was around 2003

Parents didn't let me use the family computer so I was a gamer at first 😛

so BBS's, DOOM, and DOS and such escaped my childhood.

[void belfry]

mine was a 486 dx4 around '94 i think... I still have (and spinning lol) my first HDD, a 272 megs Seagate. with data intact (including savegames which I succesfully imported on MiSTer :D)

[tall grotto]

quite a feat that they're still going haha

[void belfry]

before, being comunist country, just had access to a very lousy Speccy clone and a same lousy Atari5200 clone

[tall grotto]

I see

[void belfry]

loved that DX4... 8 megs RAM, upgraded by myself to 12 megs, a cheap ESS SB clone and some 1 meg VRAM VLBUS card (don't quite remember the brand)

[thick pendant]

Well my first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 which is a ZX81 rebrand... then I got a TI994a so that lousy Speccy clone sounds good to me...

The Timex 1000 was truly awful

[void belfry]

lol

[thick pendant]

and the TI was arguably a little better, but the software sucked because it was all made by TI

I guess both were a little better than the ZX80 which could not record keypresses simultaneously with showing video output...

[void belfry]

yeah, but it sucks when you ONLY have that lousy clone (and trust me, it was extremely poorly made) :D) I mean, we never even had the chance to see C64/Amiga/MSX/Apple and all JP stuff etc etc in that time - other than smuggled magazines

so we kinda started (i mean modern IT so to speak) kinda directly with x86 MS + Unix/Linux based systems

[thick pendant]

I consider the C64 to be my first "real" computer... The Timex and TIs were just calculators in my opinion...

Did the Soviet Spectrum clone use vacuum tubes or something? What made it so bad?

[void belfry]

I remember that the CPU was some RU knockoff, the (already bad imho) excuse for a keyboard was brittle, most of times the power supply would cause issues, the boards themselves had missing traces and had manually being created with wires etc etc

[thick pendant]

I mean, not like anything made by Sinclair was the quintessential example of quality...

my 1000 with crash if you even breathed on the memory expansion.

[void belfry]

my best friend was lucky enough to get a real Speccy in that time (his uncle or smth had some relations). He recently donated me that machine (except for the keyboard membrane which had to be changed) everything worked as it was 30 years back

i would pretty much doubt that cheap crap clone would have resisted as much, and we are talking about very old machines lol

also i missed the 16 bit era until ofc software emulation and now fpga

[karmic lynx]

The earliest I remember of a computer was playing doom when I was 4, the command & conquer multiplayer side by side with my dad, all on DOS and I suppose through a serial connection.
Now I'm setting up both a mister and an old windows 98 computer and I absolutely loathe having to configure DOS, even Linux is not that annoying, no wonder I have dozens of floppy disks around labeled "config.sys autoexec.bat backup", the OS tended to become unbootable at the slightest provocation

After a few weeks of messing around with the physical windows 98 pc, trying to get dos mode to work properly, I tried ao486 and it was such a much more streamlined experience, I liked it a lot more

Also I'm tinkering with a Commodore 64 I got from a friend, the thing breaks down constantly and I'm sinking tons of money into peripherals and replacements, I don't even like the games but there's just something magical that attracts me about it

I tried the c64 core for for a bit and didn't manage to run a single game, I must be unlucky or something

Also I got tons of tapes for c64 (and some have zx sides) that I've been trying to dump unsuccessfully, I'm hoping I can get something running when the tape only module for the mister arrives, I'm curious about these zx tapes too

Also I want to try connecting to some BBS, both on c64 and 486, I completely missed on that culture

Actually my dad was into ham radio and at the time he was running a node for a BBS system that ran over radio antennas rather than the internet, it sounds absolutely incredible hearing of it today, it was a whole parallel network back when internet was expensive to connect to and it did pretty much the same thing, I don't think that survived until today but I still have a node server (ran on MS DOS) and dozens of floppy disks with the software

[thick pendant]

I'm definitely not the person to question about this, but HAM radio and computers definitely had a cross-over. Like you could view an image sent over HAM radio...

[karmic lynx]

Yeah but this went deeper, they had "packet radio", which I understand means sending data packets over radio

It seems that to get on packet radio you'd just need a box with presumably a serial connection and an antenna cable

And the client didn't even need much more than an antenna on the balcony and the box to encode and decide the packets

I swear I once saw internet explorer load a webpage thorough it on windows 95

We had the packet radio BBS node at home and I'd get on it and look at the interface, having no idea how to do anything except open some kind of chat with a friend of my dad, they convinced me it was actually the computer talking to me so I'd talk to this guy thinking he was an ai or something

In 1997 or something

I mostly asked for cheat codes for computer games

[woven lava]

I remembet a friend telling me about radio packet in the late 90s. He had setup an antenna to see what he could get, but a lot was encrypted so he only ever got one boring image. At least at the time

I figure that's how WiFi got started

[thick pendant]

I don't doubt that you could achieve ridiculously slow connections over HAM radio using old modems....

You can still apparently connect to the ISS space station via data over radio...

https://www.ariss.org/contact-the-iss.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJVU1stPPlQ

[karmic lynx]

It's probably something like that

The cool part was that they had an extensive network of nodes placed on top of mountains to get it to work

(kind of how cellular networks work)

It's like web 3.0 before even web 1.0

I could definitely set this up on a mister but then it would be useless without the nodes

They were decommissioned

I'll do the next best thing and make a Commodore 64 BBS and connect to it from the real Commodore 64

[void belfry]

aaanyway 😄 DOS client of ChatGPT that @opal void posted above is confirmed to work on ao486 core, and for sure (will probably test in the evening) will work as well on PC-XT

because I am very lazy until I'll turn my eye on the HPS, I am using a Raspberry PI with GO 1.13.4 for ARM6 for HTTP to HTTPS proxy calls

for simplicity with a PI , same can be done for other architectures: get GO for ARM from here : https://go.dev/dl/ - I tried multiple versions, apparently 1.13.4 worked best (go1.13.4.linux-armv6l.tar.gz) , move it to /usr/local , unarchive it there

get https://github.com/yeokm1/http-to-https-proxy GO script and put it in a folder of choice

as sudo issue: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

then just run the script as: go run http-to-https-proxy.go

on core side, edit the doscgpt.ini with your key, IP address of PI/other machine

load mTCP and have fun with DOS client

apparently I didn't pay any subscription, so yeah, the AI won't talk to me yet 😄 but from a network/program/core all seems fine

[opal void]

Too bad I'm very occupied with work nowadays to try it out 😦

[void belfry]

I am sure GO can be ran on HPS so it can be done all on MiSTer, but it complains also about GCC and didn't had the time/will to research more on this - i mean for the proxy side of things

[void belfry]

I got lucky today, with lots of useless meetings in which I didn't have to say/do anything :D))

[opal void]

Too bad I have to talk a lot during meetings

Usually I have to do live troubleshooting and demonstration

Sessions, workshops etc

[karmic lynx]

I don't really feel like running chatgpt on DOS

but I should experiment with telnet and BBS

[burnt timber]

I was able to figure out how to adapt the nfggames bootable X68000V4 HDS to an HDF for the X68000 core, though unfortunately the max size on an HDF is around 40mb so games have to be hand picked to fit in the size limit..

[thick pendant]

https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

[karmic lynx]

thank you

[wheat folio]

It’s kinda annoying how many bbses don’t work with vintage clients.

[thick pendant]

some BBS now require SSL connection

[burnt timber]

That statement comes off as very.. anachronistic to me.

[thick pendant]

Well, whatever that mean, the truth is that there are more BBSs on Telnet BBS Guide that use SSH then POTs

[burnt timber]

I was just commenting on how weird it was to see those two technologies related to one another in one sentence. I guess BBS has changed a lot.

[wheat folio]

Modern bbses typically use telnet but people got paranoid that their confidential bbs chatter was getting snooped on so they have been moving to ssh

Like people do more than make a handful of “I’m on a bbs” posts and play LORD once before never coming back

Source: I ran a telnet bbs for a couple years

[sweet scarab]

???

[burnt timber]

?

[burnt timber]

Thank you for explaining. I've been out of the BBS loop for a long time

[thick pendant]

¿

[thick pendant]

I should look at adding SSL support to the TCP modem emulation anyway (for completeness), but I agree that its almost comical ppl would be worried about someone sniffing their correspondence with a retro BBS.

[karmic lynx]

so I finally got on a BBS and I'm surprised by the massive amount of questions I was asked about who I am

I didn't expect to be thoroughly profiled on a BBS

[karmic lynx]

one of the BBS I tried yesterday literally had a disclaimer saying "don't expect any of your conversations with anyone on this BBS to be private"

also a thing I found odd is that on both of the ones I registered to one of the questions was "are you an IMAGE BBS SysOp?", I have no idea why everyone asks that

[void belfry]

hehe, BBSes were/are small communities, so all kinds of questions were asked on registration. With the last question, maybe they are looking for a co-SysOP , wh knows 😄

[karmic lynx]

I thought BBSes were more impersonal, although now that I learned they had mail system it makes a little more sense for having to ask people to register, since manually verifying people was the only way to do it and there was no global email, no captcha, no 2 factor, etc

[wheat folio]

You also had time limits to keep people from hogging up the physical line. Didn’t want people creating more accounts to get around it.

[copper slate]

Sounds like something a fed would say

[woven lava]

we had programs to download our email, and DOS clients to reply offline

all before gmail etc

I used them in Europe where you paid per minute (no free local calls) so everybody kept their connections as short as possible

[karmic lynx]

I too had email long before gmail was a thing but after the bbs

[meager mural]

@fresh geyser Can anyone get C64 CastleVania past the trainer screens? I really want to play this game.

[void belfry]

have you pressed Y when asked about unlimited lives ?

[wheat folio]

BlueWave for the win

[karmic lynx]

my dad used eudora and kept using it long after it became so outdated it kept messing up incoming emails

[meager mural]

@void belfry I think I tried both Y and N. With both, it left the trainer menu but didn't load the proper CastleVania title screen.

[woven lava]

I cant remember if I used bluewave or something else. I just recall that it looked like the Borland IDEs of the time with blue background and yellow text

[burnt timber]

Got a few games running on the PC98 core. Definitely needs some work but it's nice to see it somewhat implemented.

[burnt timber]

Had better luck with PC88, Snatcher and Silpheed will not run but a lot of other good games will.

[gloomy bolt]

The sword being 'me' in popful mail is really cute.

[burnt timber]

Star Trader is a pretty interesting game. An adventure game/shmup hybrid by Falcom. The X68000 version cut out all the adventure game elements and its just a shmup

https://youtu.be/rLpj7uHEQwk

[crimson fulcrum]

Falcom really made a lot of different things back then.

[void belfry]

weird.. the only thing I can think of is that I don't use the standard C64 ROMs, but a loadable Masterom one. I'll try to check in the evening if it also loads correctly when using JiffyDOS/DolphinDOS ones

[karmic lynx]

There's a pc98 core? I need to get touhou on it ASAP

[crimson fulcrum]

the touhou games are a tall order for PC98 in general, they're made for the later models that were running the 386 and later cpus.

[karmic lynx]

Right, they barely run on software emulation on consoles

But we can run 486 on mister so it has to be possible eventually

[burnt timber]

It's a "beta" core still being worked on by puu, you can find it on the mister fpga forums

[karmic lynx]

Actively worked on?

[burnt timber]

Ehh.. I guess.

Maybe itll get updated, maybe not 😛

[opal void]

NEC computers don't get much love 😦

[burnt timber]

It is what it is, I guess. Not my prerogative to make any changes to all that

[lunar trellis]

If I recall he switched a good while back to FM Towns, partly because the development of an FM Towns core would make it easier to go back to PC-98. They perhaps share parts?

I wrote this the other day on the subject of where we are with older Japanese PCs:

Off hand I think this is where we are at with the Japanese PCs that are part done:
Basic Master Jnr - Pierco has it loading but needs cassette loading so can load something
Sharp X1 - Jason has it booting but again needs cassette loading
PC-6001 - some code for something else allowed a start but very early on
PC-8001 - same boat as 6001 but Jason made a bit of progress
Famicom BASIC - can load BASIC and keyboard but no tape loading, hopefully Rysha will add that
Sega SG 3000 - need BIOS loading, BASIC cart support, keyboard and cassette loading added to SMS core

For ones we have, RX-78 needs cassette loading and I don't think PC-88 has cassette loading but may be wrong. Not sure about Sharp MZ

[burnt timber]

Famicom BASIC sounds interesting. There have been a lot of efforts as of late on Famicomworld to preserve BASIC programs from magazines and such.

[lunar trellis]

Yeah, a number from Microm Basic have been typed out by the Gaming Alexandria community too, the core "just" needs cassette loading so they can be played.

[burnt timber]

The rabbit hole goes ever deeper!

[lunar trellis]

There seems to be an increasing swell of interest in typing out these old games for old Japanese systems, so hopefully we can support them on MiSTer

Still hoping 2023 will be the year we see really comprehensive coverage of the older Japanese PCs on MiSTer with cassette file loading. A lot of cores are almost there already but need some love/help to get over the finish line

I was wondering if the new open AIs could be used to feed scans of the code from magazines into and have them spit out decent code. Copying and pasting gives a load of typos, syntax and formatting errors, so they have to be done by hand currently.

Could be a good use of these AIs if someone can get it working well

[burnt timber]

I'd like to see that

[lunar trellis]

Need someone who knows what they are doing to give it a try

[karmic lynx]

I found old trs-80 tapes in the garage and I'm sad the core doesn't have tape input

[burnt timber]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGYNHn-i_fw

For all you Falcom fans out there \m/

[opal void]

I have a friend who already started doing that using Google lens

[lunar trellis]

Is it working?

[karmic lynx]

I'll now proceed to use this ancient cassette player to try and load zx tapes

[opal void]

Oh yeah, spectacularly

He's using it to convert a lot of pc-6001 related basic and assembly code to actual text from IO magazine

[lunar trellis]

Oh wow, that's ace. Do you know what his workflow is?

[opal void]

Not really tbh, I asked him if he can document and archive his efforts

That dude is so hardcore

He's rewriting the nbasic interpreter in Lua just for kicks

[lunar trellis]

No nonsense stuff

Is this English, Arabic or Japanese text do you know?

[opal void]

Do you mean the text in the I/O magazine?

[lunar trellis]

The text in the code being scanned, assuming there is non-code text in there (i.e. Microm Basic games in the magazines have Japanese characters which cause issues)

[opal void]

Hmmm i would say English

@lunar trellis checkout some of his work: https://zenithsal.com/pages/pc6002

he is also using Lens to translate technical reference

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/556991154067996674/1085373903934849155/Screenshot_20230313-032359.jpg?width=312&height=676

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/556991154067996674/1085374228301353040/Screenshot_20230313-035649.jpg?width=312&height=676

[lunar trellis]

Very cool!

[opal void]

https://zenithsal.com/tags.html#pc-6001-ref

he wrote more stuff about it before

but he is busy nowadays with his indie gamedev projects

[burnt timber]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSdgpcpj_Kk

[karmic lynx]

Maybe I should try to run this on ao486

[burnt timber]

Mm.. maybe go for 2.0 🙂

[karmic lynx]

That's the one I have

Aww no disks, just a massive manual and a ram chip

If anything it's a good decoration for the living room

I forgot, can ao486 use usb floppy disk drives?

Although all my disks are in various states of degradation so I better back then up anyway and then just load the img

[burnt timber]

Anyone having trouble building the Commodore 128 core boot roms, PM me

[lunar trellis]

The boot rom(s) should really be added to the bios database, so everyone using update all just has them

[burnt timber]

It's not fun to build them, but its doable. Just takes a bunch of copy /b commands

[lunar trellis]

I keep meaning to put some tickets on GitHub as there are a few cores that bios getter isn't grabbing the boot ROMs for, and would make life a lot easier for people

[burnt timber]

What other cores don't get BIOS?

[karmic lynx]

Tell me your favorite games for computer cores

I want to check out other people's favorites

[burnt timber]

I like adventure games for Amiga like Dark Seed, Waxworks, Elvira, etc. Thre might be DOS ports of those as well.

[karmic lynx]

Never heard of these, it'll be a novel experience

Ao486 maps menu to windows + f12 but the period accurate keyboard I'm using doesn't have the windows button, what a sad story

Oh wait mister has an osd button

[burnt timber]

ICOM's adventure games are fun too, ported across many platforms including NES

[lunar trellis]

Offhand:
C128
PCXT
Ti99
Also Pokémon Mini is using an open source one baked in to the core, but no reason not to have the script grab the official one

Anyone know of any more?

[burnt timber]

Oh yeah, forgot I had to get a BIOS for PC XT

[stiff steeple]

does amiga get kickstarts?

[lunar trellis]

No, doesn't grab any Amiga files

Here is the json

https://github.com/theypsilon/BiosDB_MiSTer/blob/main/bios_definitions.json

None of the Atari's need BIOS files?

[burnt timber]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyMVvawmjjg

Just going to leave this here.. Tim and Geoff Follin are legends

[thick pendant]

My MiSTer A1200 build does not have an F12 key, but the UK A1200 KB has a blank key near the Amiga(windows) key, so I was able to remap the key (inside the MiSTer menu core) by connecting a USB keyboard that did have an F12.

[karmic lynx]

sounds complex

I can just reach to the OSD button without keeping a controller plugged in

[thick pendant]

not complicated at all...

You say key you want to remap, it asks you to press a key, then the one you want to reassign it to...

Then you can unplug the modern keyboard

But maybe you have an Inspector Gadget arm or something 🙂

[burnt timber]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz94zqCrzyk

[wheat folio]

Are any of the Valis actually any good?

[burnt timber]

That's subjective. I think the 16 bit ones are, but that's me.

[wheat folio]

I played one on Genesis that apparently had a long unskippable intro every time you booted it so I never tried it again.

[burnt timber]

The "tecmo theater" is part of the charm

Personally I love the Sega CD and PC Engine CD games with the large animated sprites for cutscenes, especially if it has voice acting

[undone anvil]

I really enjoyed the SNES one. quite a bit of nostalgia for it. I remember the music being awesome

[carmine thunder]

Can anyone point me in the direction of what I need to do to get text looking right in DOS on the ao468 core. Sending to a VGA monitor via the analogue I/O board. Doesn’t seem to matter what resolution / video_mode i try it always looks not quite right

[karmic lynx]

I have that covered

let me grab my config

This is how you should configure audio and video in the core, one moment and I'll tell you settings for mister.ini

forced_scandoubler=1
vscale_mode=4
video_mode=800,600,60,cvt
vsync_adjust=2```

these are the magic settings that work for me

resolution can't below than 800x600, the core will adjust the resolution based on the game and then scale accordingly

even if your monitor (like mine) supports resolutions as low as 640x480 it should still be 800x600 otherwise you'll go out of range when the core tries to display very low resolutions like 320x240 or the aspect ratio will just be messed up

[carmine thunder]

Oh awesome, thanks for that! Looks great. getting late here now so will give it a try tomorrow

Yeah monitor does 640x480 to 1280x1024. Had tried 800x600 but maybe not with that cvt setting

[karmic lynx]

it's vsync adjust that does the magic

along with variable vsync in core

[carmine thunder]

Ah ok , got it

[void belfry]

No surprise, that MS-DOS ChatGPT client works perfect on PC XT core as well (same "recipe")

[south stirrup]

setting that vsync switch to variable was a godsend for me

using a mitsubishi diamond pro crt and it made it a little bit darker but it seems like the text is scaling correctly now

discovered it by accident

[karmic lynx]

yesterday I wanted to play games but I found an amazing new bug in misterfs that breaks folders when copying them over from the shared folder

[void belfry]

Yeey, BBS-ing from Apple II core 😄

[wheat folio]

Captain’s Quarters FTW

[summer dragon]

Trying to play Tyrian in the Top 300 Pack on the ao486 core and having a couple issues:

1. No sound. I have it set to FM Sound for Music and SoundBlaster for sound effects

2. The game keeps speeding up and slowing down

Is this to be expected or are there some optimal settings I’m missing? I just went with HIRAM in the startup menu

also set game detail to normal

[carmine thunder]

Seems I'm having issues with vscale_mode=4. Once I set that the monitor looks like its all out of sync. The rest seem to work ok though. So not sure what i need to do to get that going with my monitor

This seems best I can get it , but still seems vertically squashed

[hollow ice]

I mean, is it something as simple as setting the geometry on the monitor?

[carmine thunder]

hmm dont think so. The mister menu isnt squashed

and looks fine / is full screen on the mister main menu and when in games themselves / other cores etc

[junior hemlock]

One game I could never get to work on ao486 is Monuments of Mars, a fun little 2d platform game that I played a lot as a kid. It uses EGA, so maybe it might work on the pc XT core?

Also a pc-98 core would be awesome. Besides the Touhou series, there’s also Farland Story, the precursor to Evo for the the snes and Metal Jacket, which is like Front Mission

[burnt timber]

There is one now, it's just incomplete. I've gotten a few games running on it OK tho.

puu has it up on the MiSTer FPGA forum to play with

[junior hemlock]

Cool!

[burnt timber]

Uramander and ULife Force Work partially. Rude Breaker won't boot, Rusty might work, I got it through the intro but it threw an error after trying to start the game.

[thick pendant]

At one point the game did run perfect on ao486, but now I run into the same issue as you.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_zZQl7AWis&t=277s

actually, i can still hear some issues there

maybe try an disable L2

because that video was before L2

[burnt timber]

Man that game has amazing FM music

[thick pendant]

i did not hear it before as much but its obvious the sound has tempo issues

[thick pendant]

PCXT has pcJR/Tandy GFX which is similar in capability to EGA but not EGA

[thick pendant]

I really need to try ChatGPT on the Apple II core. You ran over your quota? I've not managed to do that yet with all my stupid cat questions...

[summer dragon]

Tried that and no dice, unfortunately

[thick pendant]

I don't know what changed with the core, but do you agree it had better tempo (also considering modem play) than we experience now?

[void belfry]

Neah, just didn't signed up for any billing plans to use those APIs. Didn't had any motivation until now to do that :))

Anyway, from my search for Apple IIe terminal programs, I found the following two working best. Will update the MkDocs later:

ACT - Apple Conference Terminal v3.0.3 - stable at 1200 baud, theoretically possible 19200 - not stable at those speeds
Easy/intuitive to use GUI

Apple II_Comm_Program a.k.a. Practical Peripherals Communication Program for Apple II v1.01 - max 2400 baud, stable at 1200
ESC 8 for 80 cols, ESC Q to return to menu etc
Serial card slot 2 default works, word length 8, stop bits 1 parity none

[void belfry]

When I say "not stable for speeds above 1200" I mean there will be sometimes missing characters like, usually a screen redraw fixes most of them

[carmine thunder]

anyone know how to tame misterfs, i'm trying to copy over that chatgpt exe to dos. Seems I had to rename it for it to appear, but anytime I try and copy it , it reckons it cant see the file. Comes up ok in a 'dir' listing, but even if I do copy * it only finds '.' and '..'

[void belfry]

Make sure it is the latest version of misterfs (think it was some issue a while ago).

doschgpt.exe and doschgpt.ini should be ok to transfer (they respect 8.3 format and they are the only files you need), I used misterfs myself to copy them over

#help message -- see my discussion with LuckyNES, think you have the same issue

[summer dragon]

I only watched a little of that video, but yeah, the tempo of the music definitely seemed better albeit not perfect

[carmine thunder]

It was weird, had to rename to doschgp.exe to copy ..

ended up getting misterfs to work under a freedos image

rather than the msdos 7 image I was using...

now struggling with getting mTCP to get to the outside world hah.

pings just timeout

[void belfry]

Have you modifies mtcp.cfg file to suit your network ?

[lunar trellis]

Are any of our Commodore cores backwards compatible with the MAX or would we need a bespoke core to run MAX software?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_MAX_Machine

[karmic lynx]

it has to be broken, even latest version is giving me problems, I just gave up on using it and I just mount the vhd

[carmine thunder]

Yeah, all looks ok…

[carmine thunder]

Which vhd are you referring to ?

[karmic lynx]

the one I run the OS in

I mount it on another computer and add the files

shared folder just never works

btw I haven't figured out how to mount an extra vhd as secondary hard drive, it doesn't appear

[carmine thunder]

Ah ok

I was able to get misterfs working by booting into a freedos floppy (bottom of first page https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=843&start=25) and then copying the files to my mounted vhd c: drive

[karmic lynx]

sounds more annoying to do than just mounting the vhd

[carmine thunder]

Depends if you have easy access to the vhd

[karmic lynx]

I have yet to try if it works through smb

[carmine thunder]

and how big it is etc. I’m just working over ftp

Have to take my case apart to get to the sd hah

[karmic lynx]

I have the acrylic one but I need tweezers to take it out because they didn't account for fingers not being able to grip the card when taking it out

[carmine thunder]

Yeah micro sds are always painful ha

[void belfry]

https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/advanced/computer/#ppp-connection-in-ms-dos-on-ao486 - just to make sure, it should work in most cases

rare cases, when the router itself has .254 as local IP address (which is usually the one assigned to the core) might also be the problem

[thick pendant]

MAX cartridges should work on a Commodore 64...

[void belfry]

Browsing the web with MS-DOS Arachne browser :))

[karmic lynx]

I need to try that

my dad told me about arachne

and seeing the screenshot is awakening some long forgotten core memories of having seen it

[void belfry]

http://www.glennmcc.org/arachne/

[burnt timber]

Clearly I need to setup FreeDOS and some BBS-ing software

[void belfry]

doing a comparison between 286 and the normal one

ofc, don't expect https sites to work 🙂

[karmic lynx]

Basically the whole internet except for that specific site

[void belfry]

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/sites-that-are-still-able-to-be-accessed-by-older-browsers.54771/

and ofc, might be a lot more of those 🙂

[karmic lynx]

but what about https://msfn.org/board/topic/182432-arachne-web-browser-community-edition-for-dos-with-tls-13-hack/

[void belfry]

but yeah.. no more AltaVista.. and sooo many other sites lo

[karmic lynx]

altavista was my favorite homepage

then one day in early 2000s I started using this "less known google" to do special searches to keep altavista clean

little did I know...

[burnt timber]

geocities and tripod though

[void belfry]

haha, yeah.. those too. Lycos

[void belfry]

Anyway, all you have to do (after getting mTCP started), when you first run the installer , when you get to Arachne TCP/IP Setup , go for Manual Setup, Resident packet driver (that would be the epppd loaded before) and enter manually the core's IP address (usually .254), Gateway, DNS, subnet mask etc

[karmic lynx]

I need to take notes

I don't know if I'll do it, it's a lot of work to just browse a few sites, BBS feel more worthwile

and I don't really need an emulator to do it, I could browse them from my main pc

[junior hemlock]

If you've heard of Gopher sites, those are still around

[karmic lynx]

I heard of gopher protocol but have no idea what that was

[junior hemlock]

Pre-dates the web and is basically text only

[undone anvil]

did gopher at least support hyperlinks?

[karmic lynx]

like a BBS?

[junior hemlock]

But lots of people from sites like SDF use it

Gopher does support hyperlinks

[karmic lynx]

my dad had a minitel

we still do but the transformer is broken and it's hard to find schematics with precise voltages for a replacement

but it seems there were minitel emulators for DOS

[junior hemlock]

I mean, basically Gopher(and the successor protocol Gemini) should be supported by Arachne I think? If not, there's always Links/Lynx I think?

[karmic lynx]

and I do have floppies of it

[junior hemlock]

Oh wait, Gemini isn't supported by Arachne, sorry

[karmic lynx]

if there's any minitel servers up at all they are all probably in french

[junior hemlock]

Would love to do some BBSing in DOS tho. I have several BBS accounts lol

[karmic lynx]

Arachne supports multiple image formats including JPEG, PNG, BMP and animated GIF. It supports a subset of the HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0 standards, including full support for tables and frames.[6] Supported protocols include FTP, NNTP for USENET forums, POP3, SMTP and Gopher. Arachne includes a full-fledged TCP/IP connection suite, which has support for some dial-up and Ethernet connections. However, Arachne has no support for JavaScript,[2] Java[2] or SSL. Arachne can be expanded with the use of add-ons for such tasks as watching DivX movies, playing MP3 files, IRC chat, RSS and viewing PDF documents. Arachne also supports DOS Gateway Interface (DGI), a unique feature similar to Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripting on the client.

[junior hemlock]

Aww

[karmic lynx]

I tried a BBS on a commodore 64 the other day

it was confusing

[junior hemlock]

You get used to it over time imho

[karmic lynx]

we need to find these arachne addons

maybe there's one for BBS

[wheat folio]

I use ProTERM on my real Apple II along with telnet65 for my bbsing.

[junior hemlock]

BBS(Old ones) use Telnet

Or straight up dialup lol

Some more modern ones use SSH

[karmic lynx]

I know

[wheat folio]

I have a WiModem232 connected to my super serial card. It let's me "dial" ip addresses in ProTERM and basically tunnels the serial connection over telnet. telnet65 just plain uses my Uthernet II network card to connect.

[karmic lynx]

but if there's an arachne plugin then it may be worthwile to install

and have an all-in-one solution

[junior hemlock]

I agree, that would be sweet

[void belfry]

It is on my list to try 🙂 thank you.

[wheat folio]

ProTERM will expect a serial card and to be "dialing" in some way. telnet65 expects a network card (Uthernet, Uthernet II) but I had to edit the executable because the slot is hardcoded.

I've spent way too much time and money upgrading and toying with my IIe.

[void belfry]

mTCP's telnet client works ok imho

[junior hemlock]

Ah I see, thanks!

[karmic lynx]

[56k warning]

[wheat folio]

https://imgur.com/gallery/PNLs9FS

[void belfry]

now, if you go the other way (using Modem, not PPP), my fave DOS terminal prog is Terminate 😄

[karmic lynx]

I need to try again to get on a BBS on the C64 now that I have a sidekick, which supports georam and all the fun memory expansion stuff

and 80 columns mode

I can't find any of these fabled arachne plugins

google, as usual, is beyond useless

[junior hemlock]

Oof

Maybe archive dot org?

[karmic lynx]

nothing

just the browser itself

[void belfry]

speaking of decrypting SSL, I would say chances are low for present cores (without an external helper)

[karmic lynx]

is it really that intensive?

what about leveraging the arm cpu?

[void belfry]

I am doing some research on that (mostly because of that ChatGPT DOS client). And combined with previous SSL stripping for Amiga iBrowse. In theory, it could be possible (depending ofc also on the program itself to accept smth like proxyes) to offload the SSL from core to ARM (kinda Man In the Middle lol)

[karmic lynx]

oh right we could just MitM it out

[void belfry]

if for example Arachne does not support proxy functions (I just started meddling with it), this won't help at all

[karmic lynx]

or proxy

oof

[void belfry]

no

[karmic lynx]

doesn't theoldnet.com have a proxy?

like not a proxy proxy but you just input where you want to go and does the loading for you

[void belfry]

but it would make more sense/security wise as well, to run it on ARM, no other exposure/device/etc

[karmic lynx]

yeah what if you infect your DOS with a virus

speaking of viruses, I got a bunch of virus floppy disks

backed up through linux

[void belfry]

probablly, but it already translates the page for your old browser in plain http.

[void belfry]

lmao, do a VHD backup after fresh install 😄

[karmic lynx]

even if you can get around https then most sites still can't be rendered

[void belfry]

yes, ofc 🙂 NT/W95/98 is also in the cards

[void belfry]

haha, yeah, I saw a pic earlier lol

[karmic lynx]

I managed to install firefox 10 on my windows 98 but it's slooooooow

[void belfry]

still have some ASM virii on my first HDD :D) backed up, still working beast

[karmic lynx]

what's the difference between this page https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/advanced/computer/#serial-connection-on-apple-iie

and this page? https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki/Internet-and-console-connection-from-supported-cores

or rather, the first one has up to date c64 instructions but the github one doesn't, are they managed by different entities?

[void belfry]

maybe some day, when I'll get extremely out of any other meaningful ideas, would try to compile those on MiSTer

yes, Mk_Docs is more up to date

[karmic lynx]

is that in general?

[void belfry]

yes imho 🙂

@wheat folio 😛

[wheat folio]

I use … whatever the latest version is?

[void belfry]

I have no idea :D) I am a complete noob on Apple computers

[wheat folio]

3.1 I believe. https://www.apple.asimov.net/images/communications/proterm/

[void belfry]

that crashes directly to * prompt

[wheat folio]

3.1 requires a iie enhanced - that could be the issue.

[void belfry]

the only one I find "working" is 1.9P

[wheat folio]

Yeah - looks like the core is based on a II+

Have you tried TotalReplay on it?

[void belfry]

nope 🙂

[karmic lynx]

Comfy

It's just not the same without screeching modem noises

[void belfry]

anyway, can't figure how to use it, it looks like it doesn't save its config or smth. As I said, noob on this system

[wheat folio]

I think the core doesn’t support writing to disks. I should dig into it later, might be able to mount it as a prodos hard drive which it might be able to write to

[void belfry]

that would explain it 🙂

I didn't messed yet with HDV and that kind of stuff for Apple 2e

[karmic lynx]

I found apple 2e cartridges in the garage

completely useless since I don't have the computer

[void belfry]

Another "curios" thing, is that when I tried (when terminal program permitted ofc), perfect speed to use seemed to be 1200 baud, the more increase of it, the more missed characters for example.

This is what I've tried against this core and serial connection (some ofc are mistakes, like progs supporting other cards that SuperSerial)

[wheat folio]

Cartridges? Pic? They had cassettes but no cartridges I know of.

[karmic lynx]

Huh

Ok not cartridges, they were cards

And I'm being told it was a clone, not the apple 2

[wheat folio]

Like expansion cards?

Might be worth something.

[void belfry]

A 3rd working terminal would be Agate (A Graphical Terminal) v0.89. From brief tests, 1200 baud works perfect, 2400 baud looses characters but surprisingly 4800 works fine as well so far

In theory, it should go up to 14.400, will see how stable would be that

[wheat folio]

I think Agate supports color ANSI but is slow as a result

[carmine thunder]

Ok cheers. In a twist no one saw coming, it ended up being user error.. I'd set the ip in the network.cfg to what I thought a free one would be on the network, rather than realising its allocated that .254 one from mister's os

[copper slate]

Amiga Vision got updated 👀

[gloomy bolt]

Get it while there's still an Archive.org!

[uneven cliff]

Was just about to ask if anyone has tried Amiga Vision yet

Mine is downloading, very excited

[tall grotto]

omg it has Directory Opus included

YES

[coral coral]

Since MegaAGS is my creation I’ll note that this is the last “classic MegaAGS” release, and I won’t spend time on it any more.

Future updates will likely include some quite big changes, but it’s in good hands

[fast kraken]

thanks optiroc, without it i'd probably never of enjoyed the amiga core realistically

[void belfry]

yes, it should always be left .254 (the other octets modified to fit your network). Rare cases where router itself has that IP address would need you to make an additional modification in ppp_options file

[copper slate]

Thank you so much for you work! I wouldn’t have ever enjoyed the Amiga without MegaAGS. For classic computer platforms, packs like you made are equally as important as a core!

[opal void]

What's mega ags

[coral coral]

A hd image for Amiga with nice launcher and configurations: https://amiga.vision

[earnest lynx]

Has anyone ever attempted to get a lan game of Warcraft 2 going on ao486?

[karmic lynx]

oh boy it's time to finally check amiga out

[karmic lynx]

no but I'd like to know how it is done, for any sort of multiplayer

[earnest lynx]

I know little about how to do it, but I feel going through windows 95 with its tcp/ip or networking drivers would be the best bet, if only we could safely expose the DE-10 nano's Ethernet port to it.

Again, I plead ignorance.

Any thoughts on this @vestal ginkgo ?

[karmic lynx]

oh for starters it probably would use the same prerequisite for arachne on DOS

[earnest lynx]

Actually, let me break it down...

What EXACTLY is WC2 looking for?

A specific protocol? Or just something that gives it what it wants?

[void belfry]

if it is TCP/IP, I would assume it would actually work using mTCP

[earnest lynx]

I actually don't understand dos networking at al

[earnest lynx]

mTCP?

[void belfry]

simple terms: you have a COM2 virtual modem up to 115200. You will use a packed driver for it, provided by mTCP (Brutman's mTCP)

which will open a ppp connection with MiSTer's ARM side IP. Core usually gets the .254

[void belfry]

https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/advanced/computer/#ppp-connection-in-ms-dos-on-ao486

in a scenario that you have 2 MiSTer boxes, one would need a different IP (both in ppp_options and in mTCP configuration)

That way, and again I am just assuming, Warcraft 2 might see each other

no such luck

[still wren]

There is nothing in the current mister main build that facilitates pvp

[void belfry]

buut i think it might be used with "modem" option

[still wren]

As far as I know ..

Would be dope af though

[earnest lynx]

Drat... I hoped I wasn't beating my head against a brick wall...

[void belfry]

maybe ?

[earnest lynx]

Fingers crossed

You have two MiSTers?

[void belfry]

no 🙂

[earnest lynx]

And here I though actual research was occuring...

😆

[void belfry]

send me a free MiSTer and will test the crap out of their networking games 😛

[earnest lynx]

I didn't mean it like that.

[void belfry]

getting back to seriousness, I don't think (might be also wrong) IPX would work, be viable/possible to transport over mTCP then into what LAN we have etc

could be possible, but think overly complicated

[void belfry]

relax, was kidding 🙂

[earnest lynx]

All good. Wanna try fiddling with it ov pms?

[void belfry]

sure

[still wren]

Same

[karmic lynx]

do you really need two misters? what about a mister and a computer?

[void belfry]

again depends: if TCP/IP, yeah, I think you can do it easy with another PC

[karmic lynx]

serial is going to be a problem isn't it

[void belfry]

not impossible, I can think also to some virtual modems, or even getting some PI/linux based stuff in equation

and for IPX based games.. that is another hassle entirely (though again it can be overcome)

for sure games supporting serial connection work (BinaryBond007 has some vids on games like that)

[karmic lynx]

neat

[void belfry]

https://www.youtube.com/@binarybond007/videos

[karmic lynx]

commodore cat

[thick pendant]

That Warcraft II setup screen looks like you could connect 2 MiSTers either using the TCP/modem or UDP

I've never tried Warcraft II on the ao486 core... does it run OK?

[void belfry]

yeah, it runs fine

[void belfry]

yup, same thought

Maybe IPX can be wrapped after all in the PPP/TCP used by mTCP packet driver, will give it some more read/test in weekend

[thick pendant]

probably more stable to use TCP/modem

[void belfry]

probably :)) I can't test anyway

[thick pendant]

IPX was always a nightmare

because the drivers ate up all your conventional ram

[void belfry]

had at some point a Novel IPX network, foggy memories from high-school

[thick pendant]

When I started in computers I worked with Netware servers, but eventually those were all changed over to WFWG 3.11

[junior hemlock]

I think the only IPX games I ever played were Descent and Duke Nukem 3D with friends. Great deathmatch games, but it was a nightmare to get connected.

[burnt timber]

I remember playing ROTT over dial up back in the day

[void belfry]

Organized a Doom 2 inter high-schools tournament at some point :)) fun memories lol

[junior hemlock]

LAN parties ❤️

[thick pendant]

I worked for this ISP that had a driver/server package for doom called APCiDOOM

[junior hemlock]

I think my cousin got ROTT shareware from a BBS, I think it took like an hour to download. Fun game, especially since it was a quasi-sequel to Wolf3D. Shooting Nazis never gets old!

Ooh sweet, APCiDOOM sounds awesome

[burnt timber]

Could I setup some kind of network translation layer to make IPX work over standard TCP/IP and play games over the internet on ao486?

[thick pendant]

I still have one of the special null-modem cables that linked multiple machines together...

kinda cool cable because it has both db25 and db9... like a universal null modem

[junior hemlock]

Oh wow

[burnt timber]

Is that the same cable used for interfacing with an A500 to write floppy disks? I cant recall