Computer Cores

[split trail]

hey all - running into problems with the Amiga core. I'd been using MiniMig but replaced with Amiga Vision. I can boot into the GUI, but keep getting this error when I try loading up a game (Cannon Fodder, in this case): "DOS-ERROR #235 (bad loadfile hunk) on loading "CannonFodder.Slave"" Any idea of what I might be doing wrong?

[summer dragon]

@split trail minimig is the core and amigavision is just the preconfigured hard drive image. It’s still running on the Minimig core. To me, that sounds like maybe a corrupted download? It might be worth just redownloading Amiga.vision and replacing the files

[upper holly]

@void belfry I set up my other MiSTer - actually a BliSTer - from scratch this morning. As suspected, there were no glitches when starting games like Heart of China. But when I played around a little further, I noticed small red dots appearing and disappearing on the intro screen of "Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers". And those also disappear when using the nightly.

I also noticed small white dots in the loading animation of 7th guest, though the red dots in GK are much more noticeable.

[void belfry]

the plot thickens 🙂

Thoroughbred/OS seems to boot from the floppy on the XT core (and ao486, but not that important) and actually decreases the counter each time as it doesn't find that serial dongle 😄 afterwards it seems to freeze of some sorts, maybe will have a better chance to make a 10 meg VHD with it on an emulator. Hopefully with at least 5 uses remaining on it (as setup would require some reboots)

[mortal trench]

found some old Atari ST floppies in the shed, not sure how i'd be able to read them (would a regular 3.5inch drive work?)

still have 4 year old me's handwriting on them, i remember playing these (donald duck's playground, centipede, pacman)

[void belfry]

think you need a Greaseweazle or similar adapter to image them. not an expert, but saw ppl archiving floppies with that (or kryoflux, but think is more expensive)

https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

[mortal trench]

hm, might look into that, im not sure they're even still readable but will see if i can

a lot of these contain stuff from my dad's old job, database apps and word processors and stuff like that

[void belfry]

if stored properly, old floppies are surprisingly good (until think mid 90s, then all went to sh1t)

[mortal trench]

well at least theyre sealed in a bag

[void belfry]

good luck restoring them and maybe trying them out on MiSTer 😛 I imaged my old 272 megs HDD from 486 i had and could pick up game saves where I left them 25+ years ago

@upper holly no surprise, Gabriel Knight intro is working fine for me..

[upper holly]

Didn’t mean the intro just. The initial menu screen… but suspect the result will be the same anyway…

[void belfry]

yeah, i played it a few mins after intro, no red dots

[upper holly]

And just did a test with a Mistercade. Same dots.

That’s 3 different MiSTer setups, two different monitors. All connected via HDMI.

Is there any value into looking more into that? Given that the nightly apparently fixes the issue?

[void belfry]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[upper holly]

Okay. One final observation: tried a third monitor and it seems as if there are fewer red dots…

[void belfry]

weird lol

[woven lava]

I found some HDL to add disk drive sounds to the Apple II, so I ported it into the core to try it out

the sound is a bit muffled, but at the sound levels I usually run the core it's there but discreet, which is OK

[thick pendant]

I think Atari ST disks can be read with a USB floppy as they use the same encoding as DOS

[thick pendant]

I updated and get artifacts too...

it only seems noticable with certain color combos

that is on VGA

[spice hound]

Wait - grin - Are you telling me I could go to Apple // core and on MisterFPGA on Apple // core I can code an entire game from scratch thus MisterFPGA can be a developing machines for multiple platforms?

[copper slate]

what is a wait grin

[woven lava]

of course. I mean any computer core that can write to disk would work for that

[spice hound]

soo cool!!

[upper holly]

Can you say a few words about your hardware configuration? Just curious…

[thick pendant]

My hardware configuration is a really, really great hardware configuration. The best. Really terrific. Just fantastic. Other MiSTer hardware configurations are for losers. A total disaster. Everyone agrees. Believe me...

🙂 Analog IO board with Dell™️ SR2320L monitor using VGA cable.

[undone anvil]

anyone know if its possible to do custom video modes on the NT4 vhd for ao486? I was hoping to at least get 720x480 so its closer to 16:9. I tried using powerstrip 2.78 but it seems limited in what you can adjust.

[undone anvil]

I was originally using NT4 to revisit nostalgic times, installed office 2k.. and now I have outlook 2k with all my tasks, notes, and some of my calendar populated. 640x480, stretched to 16:9 via RT4K with some tasty scanlines.

Still kinda weird that I'm using the MiSTer for productivity 😆

[hollow ice]

Haha, except when you remember how snappy things used to be.

Maybe not on a 486 though 😆

[undone anvil]

Haha true.. and on NT4 sometimes applications crash, but I haven't had a BSOD yet.

[void belfry]

From all Windoze variants running on ao486, I like NT4 the most when it comes for stability. Sure, not quite a gaming machine (although very few games work better than on any other W9x) but still surprising

Also note key differences between NT and W95/98 (besides OSes architecture themselves) are the different IDE driver (UNIATA for NT compared to whatever W9x has) and video one (VBEMP NT versus the MISTERFB one) we use for ao486

[vestal goblet]

NT 4.0 hit a sweet spot of stability around SP4

if you do SP6a and then the hotfix rollup, you basically have all the major fixes from win2k's first year or two

[split fable]

I'm trying to make the PC-88 core working but I'm stuck compiling the boot.rom. I followed the instructions but my file doesn't seem to be recognized. Is there a way to find a working one?

[undone anvil]

Yeah it's convenient to get clean NT4 install, then install office 2k, and with that you can access windowsupdaterestored.com with IE5 that comes with office 2k and get all your updates that way

[void belfry]

PicoBSD v031 - a FreeBSD 2.2.5 modified to fit on a floppy image, running fine on ao486. Apparently it also has PPP support, so high chances to also get it online (Source: https://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/old/picobsd.html --- download links are dead, but use the WayBack Machine to get them). You would want the D(ialup) ones, rename them from .bin (v041) or .flp (v031) to .img. Latest version 041 based on FreeBSD 3.0 doesn't seem to work, gets stuck at some point, so get older 2.2.5 ones from same page.

[copper slate]

AmigaVision has been updated!

• https://amiga.vision

Updates include Sensible World of Soccer Fixes, Castlevania & Turrican.

[vivid seal]

Can it run space cadet pinball with sound effects enabled without hiccups?

[void belfry]

I didn't test this game myself, but saw it running in alexoughton's forum posts.

[vivid seal]

It runs fine on win95 unless you turn sound effects on, which will make it stutter when a sound effect is played

The problem is that the sound effects on that game is just a must haha

[void belfry]

Had similar experiences with Panzer General 2, in NT worked fine while W95/98 sound effects stuttered

[void belfry]

holy crap, Heroes of Might and Magic 2 (OG for now, will test expansion later) works beautifully under NT !! Not only that the game seems bit more fluid than in DOS, but the main thing is that the CD Audio is working fine (from my 5-10 mins tests so far)

Didn't bother to test it under W95/98, as I experienced it as well only in DOS back in the 90's

Decided on a whim to do it on NT, thinking it will fail for sure lol

HOMM2 audio tracks are awesome, now being able to hear them again without issues on MiSTer is pure joy and a real throwback in the past (MIDI with an MT32 is good too, no doubt, but can't compare)

one minor thing though, when exiting the game, CD audio playback will continue, but can be stopped with Windows CD Player

[void belfry]

https://tenor.com/view/thorin-never-been-so-wrong-hobbit-hug-richard-armitage-gif-9754192

HOMM 2 Expansion (Price of Loyalty) seems to have some issues though...

[elder basin]

hey guys, developer for the OPL3 core in ao486 here. Just discovered this discord

[void belfry]

glad to have you here, hope it will make testing much more fluid 🙂

[elder basin]

yes! Please let me know of any audible differences between the real thing. Things are looking pretty good right now AFAIK

I still have a couple more months of unemployment so now's the time

heh

[vivid seal]

Hey, welcome! Thanks for what you’re doing! ❤️

[woven lava]

welcome! speaking of soundcard chips, are you aware of any SC-02 / SSI-263 FPGA implementation?

two were used for the Apple II Mockingboard for speech synthesis

[twilit sparrow]

I have a question regarding the AO486 DOS core, for the game Test Drive III: The Passion, there was an add on disk for another track and cars. Does that have to be made into a separate VHD to run?

[undone anvil]

I also have a question about the ao486 core. There are very specific resolutions available, and I was wondering if the core itself could signal to the OS to allow resolutions of non 4:3 aspect ratios. I'm not sure if the core has its own monitor hardware built-in with its own EDID. But it would be really nice to have options in 16:9, 16:10, and 5:4 resolutions

[void belfry]

I assume you are talking about 0MHz collection. In that case, it depends on how much space is left on that particular image. If it has enough (by addon disk I presume we're talking about a floppy, so 1.44 megs) you can install it , otherwise create a bigger game VHD with the full game + addons

[twilit sparrow]

It's not specific to the 0MHz collection because I don't believe TD3 is part of it. It was more a general DOS game question (not sure if VHD's are specific to that collection or if all DOS games are VHD)

[void belfry]

Then you should just install it on your TD3 folder with ease, just mount the floppy and see what files are there. It can be from an .exe packing the updates to just the files to be copied over to game install folder. Might be also some readme files detailing the update process

In simpler terms , think of VHD files as HDDs. They are raw files partitioned/formatted with whatever OS is supported on ao486 (in this case MS-DOS) plus whatever games/apps. Would help to start reading https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer then on the https://misterfpga.org/viewforum.php?f=13 forum there are a lot of topics/links to check

[twilit sparrow]

Thank you for the information!!!!

[vestal goblet]

I may have told this story in here before, if so I apologize: I moved to San Francisco in 1997, and was flat broke. I ended up showing up to IRC nerd parties really early just to have food to eat (and usually a floor/sofa to sleep on after). I think it was around October 1997, I showed up to one of these parties and was chatting with someone who had a fancy camera (non-digital in that era). He as a wedding photographer, traveled the world photographing weddings, etc. Eventually he tells me he originally worked in technology -- specifically in hardware reverse engineering. It turns out he did the wafer shaving and reverse engineering toe the original Sound Blaster so that clones like the Thunderboard could be produced.

Thunderboard was the first sound card we got, so I was totally gobsmacked.

click subscribe for more tales of silicon valley random legend run-ins

[opal void]

Has your financial situation improved since then?

[vestal goblet]

Yes.

[void belfry]

Hmm, after getting DirectX 5 on NT 4, HOMM2 runs smooth, no errors during 1-2 hrs of maps/campaign play. Will see if adding Price of Loyalty has anymore issues (as it did on std DX3)

That's a bit curious, as I don't think HOMM 2 uses directx, but WinG32

[opal void]

finally! a happy ending ❤️

[waxen brook]

Thanks for your work improving the core!

Haven't had a chance to try it yet but very much looking forward to checking it out and comparing to some of my recordings of the previous implementation.

[elder basin]

No problem, was fun stuff. Yeah let me know how it goes. Be sure to use the latest unstable release; I've made updates through yesterday plus the latest stable release, 20240528, has graphical issues

[vivid seal]

I’m back to 1999 and this was my regular job dev environment setup. This time travel full of nostalgia is a courtesy of MiSTer FPGA and the AO486 core!

[void belfry]

Precisely why I re-created my '90s setup, with most of apps/compilers/other stuff (including getting old game saves like Betrayal at Krondor from my old HDD and continuing where I left off lots of years ago). Giggled a bit seeing my old asm/c/pascal sources as well. Hiew (hex editor) and DOS Navigator in the screenshot are actually recovered from that very old HDD lol.

[void belfry]

P.S. Wonder who will get what the hiew screenshot is for 😄

[vivid seal]

Smells like some Quake hackery 🤔

[void belfry]

nope. but as a hint, it helps Quake "run" on AO486

[vivid seal]

Oh, you’re disabling the FPU?

[void belfry]

still no, you gone too far 😄

I am disabling smth to enable smth else, but this is not on any Quake related files. But still it is helping Quake "run"

another hint is in some older posts of mine regarding that "helper"

https://tenor.com/view/saw22-saw-jigsaw-look-gif-5975392338676516100

[hollow ice]

Hmm, what happens if I bypass this license check?

[void belfry]

https://tenor.com/view/unlimited-power-star-wars-gif-10270127

or uses, whatever comes first 😄

you're no longer bound to the dreadful 15 mins limit

[hollow ice]

I really need to boot up that core again, it has been way too long. I still have to try out qnx.

[void belfry]

I need to revisit QNX too, still didn't make progress with better video mode

plus getting net-dialup package installed in Gentoo, I already compiled the kernel with PPP/SLiP support

[void belfry]

also opportunity to make perfect timed screenshots in 1-2 FPS (besides some games really working lol)

[vivid seal]

I can mount a CD ISO with the AO486 core and Windows NT seems to recognize it. But Windows 95 doesn't see the CD. Any pointers?

[void belfry]

yeah, for Win95 you need to load DOS cdrom drivers in config.sys and mscdex in autoexec.bat

it will not work with w95 embedded ones

if any

[vivid seal]

Hmmm

Is there any tutorial on that?

[void belfry]

https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2021/03/13/mister-ao486-core-part-5-cd-rom-support/ --- I use xcdrom or vide-sys drivers instead of oakcdrom and shsucd instead of mscdex, but to each its own. Not sure if oakcdrom driver or the NEC one had issues though

but in the essence it's just adding a line in the config.sys and another in autoexec.bat, one for driver, one for extension program

not ideal, as it won't play nice with LFN

[vivid seal]

Will play around with it! Thanks!

[void belfry]

and some (very few) Win games, mostly from later period, do have lfn

NT uses another driver, hence it is capable to see lfn files without issues

changing CDs in NT is sometimes bit iffy, found out it is better to also "Eject" the CD from Explorer after unmounting from OSD then mounting the new image

not really an issue, as you won't do that much of CD changing on this OS anyway

the DirectX 5 (beta) came as a surprise, but it is a hit or miss, Curse of Monkey Island for example won't recognize it (think it needs a slightly better one). Was curious if it's the same slideshow as on W95/98

and earlier Windoze games I saw are using Wing32 anyway, some predecessor of DX.. so yeah, mileage will greatly vary

[thick pendant]

Same here... Delphi and C++ Builder were great...

[hollow ice]

I was a big fan of CodeWarrior from that timeframe.

[tulip atlas]

I agree. I used C++ Builder a lot when I was a student, and it was so much easier to understand and use compared to VisualStudio. My only little complaint was that I had to use the coff2omf.exe tool on some external libraries, otherwise they wouldn't link correctly.

The most unintuitive and horrible IDE I ever used is definitely XCode. Some things in the interface designer in XCode can ONLY be done via drag and drop. It is super confusing and not discoverable. You have to go through the tutorial to understand how to do it, and even then it makes zero sense.

[thick pendant]

I never liked objective-c. The function/method parameter calling convention & lack of overloading just annoy me.

[turbid swallow]

If anyone else was bothered by mouse axis movement in Doom engine games (you can't disable it in-game, nor in setup.exe) you can get this utility Novert to fix it: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/utils/misc/novert You just have to open the VHD for the game you want, put novert.com and novert.txt in the main game folder, edit RUNGAME.bat in a text editor and add "novert.com" without quotes in the line before DOOM, or HERETIC, or HEXEN, etc.

[fast kraken]

or run fastdoom where its already sorted out

[void belfry]

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=8035 🙂 hope you'll enjoy/find useful the mini-series I am starting

[robust ibex]

Found an Acorn Archimedes pack that i wanted to try out, but the game folders that update_all pulled down only have AcornAtom and AcornElectron. Are either of those aliases for Archimedes or am i missing a folder?

[hazy tree]

is it under archie or anything like that?

[robust ibex]

Hm, i have an ARCHIE folder but idk what it corresponds to, maybe youre right

Was that a nickname for it?

[karmic fog]

yes, Archie is the games folder for the Acorn Archimedes core https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Archie_MiSTer

[hazy tree]

I don’t remember anyone calling them Archies back in the day but i wasn’t into the scene, but it seems like something that might have been used

[elder basin]

But fastdoom has messed up opl3 music

[inland sinew]

Hmm, are there any downsides to using Windows 95 instead of DOS or Windows 3.1 on AO486? I know using Windows 95 is probably pushing the hardware a bit.

[summer dragon]

@inland sinew I think it really depends what you’re doing. There’s plenty of games that run better in dos/3.1 than they do in 95.

[inland sinew]

@summer dragon You seem to be the resident retrocomputing expert. Mind if I DM you if I have questions in the future?

[summer dragon]

@inland sinew you can definitely DM me…that said, I wouldn’t say I’m anywhere close to the resident expert 😅

but I know some things I suppose

[inland sinew]

Is there any problem with using Windows 3.1 over DOS either?

[opal void]

why not just ask here?

so everyone can share the knowledge

https://tenor.com/view/knowledge-tai-lopez-lamborghini-gif-19251888

[summer dragon]

oh my god, I forgot all about that guy 😂

[summer dragon]

same answer as before really. In building the 0MHz packs, some of us found that certain games worked properly using Win 3.1, but were glitchy with DOS. Some things will run better with DOS than they do with 3.1. It really just depends what software you’re running. It’s not necessarily going to be a one OS fits all solution. That’s why I think it’s a good idea to just have multiple VHDs around with different OSes for the different things you want to run

[opal void]

naaaa-lidge

[opal void]

which games are these? 😮

[summer dragon]

@opal void ones that come to mind are Rusty, it’s sequel Tosugeki Mix and the first Skyroads game, Kosmonaut. All of those run well in Win 3.1, but have problems or don’t run at all in DOS

[opal void]

that's so strange... never imagined that Win3.1 would be a better env. for running MS-DOS games

is this AO486 specifc?

[copper slate]

Probably

[opal void]

thought so... still very absurd..

[copper slate]

yah it’s wacky, haha

[opal void]

https://tenor.com/view/wack-thatswack-hannibal-burress-ericandreshow-gif-20565184

[summer dragon]

yeah it’s definitely weird, but hey, at least there’s workarounds for some of these previously non-working games

[copper slate]

Yeah, really smart that y’all figured it out. Thank you!

[ruby bramble]

You’re welcome 😛

I'm uploading my last handful of games before I take a big long summer vacation from game uploads. Did 200, need to do something else lol. 71 of those titles were korean imports that you should check out! I will still be optimizing and doing bug fixes etc. Thank you all, it's been fun!

[inland sinew]

Does the Apple II core require a similar kind of setup as Windows 3.1 on ao486, or is it easier?

[copper slate]

I have a question if you don’t mind. I think the Korean games you do are badass. I have a Korean friend whose mind you blew because he thought he’d never see them again. It’s such a unique niche, are those old Korean PC games personal to you?

[languid sparrow]

Is there a way to get the Amiga core to display on a 1600x1200 DVI display (from HDMI) ? I get out of range when it launches from the main Menu.

[fallow topaz]

try video_mode=1600,1200,60,ctvrb together with dvi_mode=0. I have a HP2065 connected via DVI, this setting even works for the 70Hz handhelds.

depending on the monitor, you might want to check vsync_adjust and test whether 1 or 2 works better

[languid sparrow]

Thanks! I'll give that a shot

Out of range signal. I'll post back if I find something that works on Amiga.

[fallow topaz]

what display are you using?

it is weird that only the amiga core would not work

maybe you have some PAL or NTSC specific video modes in your ini file?

or maybe some core-specific section with a wrong video mode at the end of the ini?

one more idea: your display cannot do 50Hz modes. Try switching a working console core like NES to PAL and check if your display can manage 50Hz

[languid sparrow]

I'm using a Dell 2007fpb

[fallow topaz]

should work in my opinion. Never found one of these, but got three of the HP ones for small change...

can you post your ini?

[languid sparrow]

I'm using HDMI output to a DVI converter if that helps

[fallow topaz]

you should use dvi_mode=1. My setup gives me trouble if I do not do that.

[languid sparrow]

Will try that now

[fallow topaz]

hdmi_game_mode=1 could also be a source of problems. Try =0 for that

[languid sparrow]

That's trying just the dvi_mode=1

I'll try hdmi_game-Mode next

darn. still no joy.

[fallow topaz]

also vrr_mode=1 should be =0. The poor Dell cannot do VRR

[languid sparrow]

trying now

[fallow topaz]

found it: [Amiga +Amiga500 +Amiga500HD +Amiga600HD] video_mode_ntsc=8 video_mode_pal=9 vscale_mode=0 vsync_adjust=1 custom_aspect_ratio_1=40:27 bootscreen=0

disable the ntsc and pal modes please

[languid sparrow]

good thinking - will try that

[fallow topaz]

that is what I meant with "core-specific setup"

but I checked the Dell manual

it says that in 1600x1200 it can only do 60Hz

https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_electronics/esuprt_display/dell-2007fp_user's guide_de-de.pdf

[languid sparrow]

Looks like clearing out that Amiga section worked to show me some text as it booted up, but it then went back to out of range

[fallow topaz]

(german version of the manual)

try vsync_adjust=0 for the amiga section

that will force the use of the 60Hz mode

[languid sparrow]

That did it!

I can now get to the OSD

thanks a lot! 🍻

[fallow topaz]

from the english manual

that is some weird restrictions

get an HP LP2065 if you can find one locally for <20€ 🙂

[languid sparrow]

I'll keep an eye out 🙂

[fallow topaz]

it accepts 1600x1200@50 or @70 no problem

[languid sparrow]

wow, that's quite a bit of difference in the refresh rate

[fallow topaz]

you can run the Dell at 50Hz, just not at 1600x1200

but that would compromise image quality

[ruby bramble]

Nope, I just like playing/tracking down imports, Im glad he’s enjoying them so much 😀

[rocky sedge]

I am searching what Specs the FPGA Core Archie does - RAM/CPU/Clock/Other Hardware

[spice hound]

I have one minimig question.

Will they ever implement FPU support in the core?

[woven lava]

we can only hope

[void belfry]

Because why not, creating .D64 images for C64/C128 using VICE emulator under QNX 4.25 on ao486 😄

Well, it throws some errors and didn't try much else to run it (the full emu), just needed the c1541 utility to make floppy images and copy things around

[elfin oxide]

A cycle accurate 68020 and accurate AGA chipset will be useful too

[spice hound]

Look like there is more improvement for minimig it seems

[woven lava]

an FPU would be nice for ao486 as well - but it might not fit the FPGA so it may need to drop off other features

(assuming there is somebody willing to do it in the first place)

[surreal marsh]

68020 also gets you a Mac II.

[waxen brook]

Korean Imports never released in USA?

If so, got a list of the names or something to search by?

[ruby bramble]

On archive just search 0mhz dos collection Korea

The vast majority of majority were never released in English, only like 4 of them maybe

[void belfry]

some more attention on IDE implementation would be nice too (more related to Unix/Linux variants that have issues with it)

[woven lava]

oh wow... I just checked and there's so much stuff

just search "0Mhz collection Korea"

they even have a very good one, check out this: Eojjeonji Joheun Il I Saenggil Geot Gateun Jeonyeok

pretty decent SoR-inspired brawler

[ruby bramble]

That’s a good one. Some of my other favorites might be Astro counter of the crescents, zyclunt, ant man, iron blood, still hunt, morbid. So much good stuff, most of it is fairly derivative of existing games while still being pretty high quality.

[elfin oxide]

Its had 20 years of development so far but the MiSTer core is held back by open source modules like the TG68k for 020

[spice hound]

How come not changed ?

[thick pendant]

Because the faster CPU core(Vampire) is not open-source

[spice hound]

no no no.. I am not talking about vampire

I already vamperized Amiga 500

I will use that for modern stuff, minimig is perfect for whdload stuff and perfect for a specific game called total chaos

that one need fpu to run

so for my a500 I will use it to watch movies, play mp3, and play rtg games and stuff

I am just wondering why for the past 20 years of development they did not perfect aga timing and got fpu working?

[woven lava]

probably because it's a lot of work - it will take one dedicated passionated dev to tackle in open source (for free)

[fallow topaz]

and that passion needs a reason to exist - I would take a guess that there are very few use cases for FPU and very little software that does not run properly on AGA

[elfin oxide]

Yeah AGA was never that popular even back in the day in comparison with OCS/ECS and like stated there are very few cases for a FPU. The Amiga was a games machine and the Minimig core serves this function well

[opal void]

are you chickpeas falafel or flava beans falafel?

[thick pendant]

It was a lot more than just a "games machine"

[elfin oxide]

Not really even devs from back in the day stated a lot of the hardware was useless for anything but gaming.

That is not taking anything away from the Amiga, Hi-Toro created the biggest leap we ever saw in home computing.

[elfin oxide]

I go both ways

[void belfry]

https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-pips-the-pc-for-mission-critical-computing-at-nasa/ 😄 Babylon 5 also comes to mind

[thick pendant]

How about all the video production stuff (Video Toaster)? If you ever went to an Amiga conference it was much less about games and more about video production and multimedia.

[void belfry]

All on our core. Sure, I can see the advantages of also having FPU (and MMU) and probably overall a better CPU (030/040) to get more advanced stuff like even Unix (Amix I think ? ) /BSD (not sure about last, maybe I am confusing it with the X68000 version), but for what it is now, I am overall satisfied with the experience (can't much compare it with real H/W except what I saw at friends/YT/etc)

[hollow ice]

Yeah, I would love to be able to run amix on the core, but need 030 with fpu and mmu as well as a scsi controller

granted, from the ao486 issue tracker, even sorg is looking at hybrid fpga/emulation for more advanced cpus when a new base fpga board is available….so for the next mister hardware, it might not even be an issue given that good 030/040/060 emulations exist

on a different topic, does anyone know off hand how much fpga io is left unused in the ao486 core or is everything accounted for?

[copper grail]

Indeed. The Amiga's video sync signal could be genlocked to that of a TV studio, which made it great for doing live television graphics.
I designed, drew (in DPaint) and programmed (in assembly) the real-time graphics for a popular TV quiz (Lingo), back in the nineties as an intern. I was studying to become a 3D animator at an art school and all students had Amiga 2000s (later some 3000s and 4000s), with 68030/68882 cards and harddrives, for 3D rendering. The school itself had lots of Amigas (also used for 2D animation using DPaint) and a couple of Silicon Graphics machines running Wavefront and Electro GIG 3D.
The Amiga was also used a lot for cable news channels, mostly running Scala.

[ruby bramble]

Just a heads up, I uploaded 11th hour without config files included. So anybody who played it would have had the colors all messed up. I just reuploaded it and included the config files

[opal void]

what's Amix? Amiga Unix? 😮

[hollow ice]

Yes — https://www.amigaunix.com/doku.php/installation

[opal void]

https://tenor.com/view/impress-based-american-psycho-very-based-impressive-very-based-gif-21665669

[thick pendant]

Yes, saying the Amiga's hardware was useless other than for gaming is like saying a GPU is useless for anything other than gaming.

[copper slate]

The Amigas are awesome PCs

I never owned one but the games and desktop environment is impressive as hell for the time

[opal void]

yeah the games were so good until PC hardware picked up in the early 1990s

I was always fuming when I compare between the graphics of MS-DOS games and their Amiga ports

[fleet cave]

the amiga environment is cool, but I wonder how much of the pain I'm not experiencing because I run it on a mister

like how annoying was it to run from a floppy

[opal void]

it never had HDD?

[hazy tree]

You could put a hard drive in it but most people didn’t have one, and back in the day before whdload most games weren’t installable anyway

I miss the floppy disk noises

[hollow ice]

Depends on what it was used for. Those toaster/flyer amigas tended to have a ton of hard drives.

Games, probably not so much.

[elfin oxide]

Yes the Amiga was great for early video work like Genlock, early 3D modelling etc but the computer was marketed and used more as a games machine. You could argue this is where Commodore did their most business with it and even then it was very regional based, being more popular in the UK and EU
Workbench was mostly useless from floppy disk and hard drives were silly money especially around the A500 times

[elfin oxide]

It was very painful from floppy and then of course you had limited space.

[elfin oxide]

But those were not really consumer focused, even the likes of the A1500/A2000 were very expensive

The A500 in 1989 was £399 which is around £1200 now accounting for just inflation

[void belfry]

Yes, as @hollow ice said. Speaking on 68K series and Unix, I was also thinking to this https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/x68k/

but again, we will need more than 030+ (FPU + MMU) if ofc someone makes it, but also SCSI emulated and so on

[copper grail]

If that was true the big box Amigas wouldn't have existed at all

[copper grail]

The desktop booted pretty quickly from a diskette, because most of the system was contained in the Kickstart ROMs (which, when using an Amiga 1000, you still had to load from a disk first). Usually you would just boot into DPaint, 3D application, Assembler etc. A second drive was really handy to have to save your data to.

I worked for years on a standard Amiga 2000 without a harddrive (programming, 2D/3D graphics and animation, music etc.) and my cousin worked for many years that way (on a basic Amiga 500), making music with Music-X using his vast collection of classic Roland synths and doing DTP with pagesetter.

[elfin oxide]

Originally GPUs were useless for anything but gaming then GPGPUs took over. Nvidia rode the low compute model for sometime even up to Maxwell/Pascal architecture. AMD embraced it earlier as it saved development costs when they were struggling one architecture for a both markets

[thick pendant]

the first PC GPUs such as the IBM 8514/A, TMS34010 (TIGA) , XGA and Targa were NOT used for games...

Same with all the ATI "Mach" and Matrox stuff.

I had the Matrox Millennium and the only game for it was the included fighting game which was more of demo than a real game...

https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturers/matrox_millennium.php

[cerulean rivet]

https://www.patreon.com/DuneIITheBuildingofARemaster/About

[inland sinew]

Gahh... how can a floppy have DRM?

Game tells me it doesn't detect the same floppy I used to install it!

[summer dragon]

@inland sinew what game and is it ao486? There are softwares like Neverlock that can remove DRM from some games

[elfin oxide]

These were very different to MPGPUs we have now which are used for compute, AI etc. I had a Matrox G200, 3Dlabs Permedia 2 etc back in the day. The advantage now is the parallelism and the amount of shader cores which are multipurpose

[inland sinew]

Lemmings and yes, ao486.

[ruby bramble]

The second I learned of this game’s existence I had to stop what I was doing and immediately make a vhd for this up on archive.

@copper slate I’m sure you will def get some use out of this one

[void belfry]

close, but no cigar 😦 trying again LUnix networking on C64 core, unfortunately it does have issues detecting rs232. So basically the fifo64 (a simpler serial driver) detects it as 16450 UART, and not the 16550 that the standard driver rs232std expects ?

[copper slate]

That’s amazing! Thank you!

[summer dragon]

ah ok, I’d bet that Neverlock or another software can remove the protection from that one. If I get a chance, I’ll take a look later today

[inland sinew]

It's weird that it won't detect it naturally though. It's a floppy, right?

[woven lava]

https://github.com/nukeykt/LPC-GUS

would this work with the ao486 core?

[wicked smelt]

^^ that was the first thing I thought of when I saw this

[wheat folio]

welcome @wicked smelt !

[tall grotto]

Welcome :3

[tall grotto]

depends if there's room in the core. Not for me to say though

[woven lava]

it can always be forked for a dedicated GUS core... not ideal but Id rather have a way to use GUS on MiSTer

[umbral oar]

the Epic MegaGames core

[wheat folio]

Epic MegaGames: "We sure wish we'd bought Amigas"

[woven lava]

Epic and Demoscene Core

[inland sinew]

Looking for an Atari ST guide. I can get it to boot and run .st games, but can't find anything on how to configure more advanced stuff.

[limpid tiger]

Speaking with an FPGA developer friend of mine (who is not a MiSTer dev yet), he says he's found some bugs in the X68000's YM3802 section, and has rewritten it to work properly...

It is part of the x68000 core. For some reason it was called EM3802 whereas the chip is actually called YM3802.
I'll finish my project and once I know it is sound i.e. my board works on a real X68000 + Roland expander, I'll offer it.
Via a pull request

It seems it might also have been an add-on for MSX at one point, but I'm not sure (and it probably isn't in the current MSX core)

I just wanted to gauge whether this is something that people might be interested in

(You can probably tell from the quote above that he is making an actual board for the actual machine first)

[sweet scarab]

Any improvement is welcome, I would think.

I really need to dive into the x68000. Been holding off in hopes some improvements would be made.

[woven lava]

the Japanese computer cores need more love

[sudden ice]

This is great!

[inland sinew]

Call me 40 years too late, but damn, GEM was such a great GUI for 1985!

[opal void]

esp. NEC and MSX

[opal void]

I can help with the ROMs of the NEC PC-6001 MkII

[jolly kraken]

X68K being completed is most wanted non-console core by a long way

[wheat folio]

https://tenor.com/view/so-sayweall-battlestart-galactica-william-adama-bsg-twelve-colonies-gif-18616973

[copper slate]

Is it because it has pervert games?

[wheat folio]

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

[jolly kraken]

Why else?

[woven lava]

surely less than the PC98🤣

[inland sinew]

That and FM Towns

[languid sparrow]

Speaking of which, I remember as a kid it felt like Dragon Knight III had a full page ad in like every gaming magazine for what seemed like years.

At the time, I had played Ys I & II, Cosmic Fantasy 2, etc., on TG16-CD and naively figured this must be similar.

[limpid tiger]

hahaha. I heard the computer version was a LOT racier than the console version.

[crimson fulcrum]

System requirements 286 w/ MS-DOS
IBM Compatibles confirmed hentai computer

[languid sparrow]

The modern hentai machine:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805356267711.html

hmm, doesn't seem to have a Turbo button that I can spot in the pictures

[hollow ice]

I see someone found @copper slate’s magazine stash

[tall grotto]

So much this ... No shame to the fm towns lovers but I feel the x68k has a far more interesting library. Not the hentai stuff even. I'd love to enjoy a lot of the legacy that console started. Street fighter 2 had its home debut on the x68k and was used as the basis for other console ports.

[copper slate]

LOL even if I wanted to buy it but damn my parents would never buy me a game with that kind of cover. Hooooy moly lol

[woven lava]

you might have had a chance with the previously imported game

[copper slate]

I did get away with leisure suit Larry 7 lol

It’s by the kings quest people, how could it be bad???

[worn wyvern]

Datana Twinbee on PSX and Saturn is apparently based on the X68000 version (telling from the credits), which is probably why it doesn't support tate.

[inland sinew]

I agree that the X68K is the superior computer, but the FM Towns is still worth it for some stuff, too.

Both cores would be good to have to cover arcade games whose cores we won't be getting until way later.

[merry valve]

Is it possible for someone to make a 0mhz VHD for Chuck Yeager's Air Combat? I suppose I can try myself if there is some sort of tutorial.

[inland sinew]

Does it need to be a 0MHz VHD? It's not horribly difficult to run games from virtual floppy images once you have DOS set up and can access the command line.

[merry valve]

I'd just like it to be congruent with the rest of my setup.

[opal void]

only nerds like to do that /s

[summer dragon]

@merry valve if you want to check the MiSTer forums, I posted an easy VHD maker tool there and there are instructions in there. Once the VHD is made you can just mount it in Windows, add your game files, adjust a few settings and you should be good to go

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=85737#p85737

I had started on trying to make a more “all-in-one” tool that let you specify the path to your game files and needed settings and it would do everything for you, but life got busy and I lost motivation and no one has bugged me about it 😅

[inland sinew]

Does a collection/interface for Atari ST like how Amiga has WHDLoad?

[opal void]

how congruent?

[rare plume]

I noticed in the 0MHz collection that the Ultimate DOOM was only loading the original game with 3 episodes. I opened up the VHD file to replace the WAD file, but it matched. Looked through the README and FastDOOM requires the WAD to be named DOOMU.WAD to load the Ultimate DOOM

working fine now after renaming the file

[turbid swallow]

Nice catch!!

[summer dragon]

sweet, I’ll have to adjust that!

[ruby bramble]

@copper slate uploaded almost the whole Pajama Sam series for the little ones, I’m doing more games by humongous later. Putt putt, freddi fish etc

[wheat folio]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/30-years-later-freedos-is-still-keeping-the-dream-of-the-command-prompt-alive/

[copper slate]

Lol you’re a household hero, I told my kids “I talk to the nice man who made these work” they know you as Billy lol

[ruby bramble]

That’s awesome! I’m uploading the fifth pajama game now

Beyond the first five they’re too new to get going

Is there anything else I should be looking at?

Somebody recommended the magic school bus, I’m nostalgic for one of those but there’s like 10 of them

[copper slate]

Man I dunno, I’m swimming in riches thanks to you lol

Thank you!!!

[ruby bramble]

You’re welcome

All these games by humongous are really high quality

I’m quite surprised, I remember them from when I was younger but didn’t think they’d hold up

The Darby the dragon game I uploaded before should also be up your kids alley too

[ruby bramble]

Darby the dragon has more of that Zelda cdi animation from that same studio

[proper zodiac]

Grew up on humongous and loved all those games. Played some recently on the mister via scummvm and had a great nostalgia trip

[turbid swallow]

Freddi Fish, Spy Fox, Putt Putt, those were my first adventure games as a kid before graduating to the Lucas Arts stuff. Awesome work @ruby bramble

[ruby bramble]

Thank you, they seem like a small step below lucasart visually and animation wise. Very impressive. Really stylistic games for what they are. Well written too for the type of material it is.

[inland sinew]

I've been playing some of the DOS ports from arcade and NES out of curiosity. I am rapidly losing curiosity. How does one mess up SF2 that badly?

[ruby bramble]

Ohh buddy, try Contra

[inland sinew]

I have already tried Crapholevania.

[proper zodiac]

The dos version of simpsons arcade is tragic

It was the only port for the longest time

[hollow ice]

Some of those sf2s feel like hacks. The one I know for sure is official is super street fighter 2 turbo

It runs sort of poorly on ao486, but I remember it being near perfect on my pc at the time. Resolution is a bit off, but the arranged soundtrack was great

[rare plume]

Need to try out Mortal Kombat 1 and 2. They had good PC ports

[hollow ice]

I don’t remember them being playable on the core. They had good ports for sure though.

[wheat folio]

That was such a heavy hitter port on DOS. I was amazed by it and let down by the lack of quality controller options.

[hollow ice]

Yeah, that’s the funny thing. I remember having six button control at some point, but I might just be misremembering. I think mine actually came with the Gravis gamepad which was 4.

At some point I bought a Microsoft sidewinder pad with 6 buttons but I can’t remember if I used that or not.

[wheat folio]

There was an official Capcom pad that came with ssf2 (not turbo) that sucked but had six buttons. Then the sidewinder was pretty good and had six buttons as well.

[hollow ice]

the version that was in flynns pack didn't have an option for 6 button, so, I think I am just misremembering using my sidewinder with it, or maybe I used a keyboard mapper or something

[turbid swallow]

I played Abuse way back in the day, fun/frustrating times with that one. I was surprised to find that there was a version with music, the version we have in the 0mhz pack has it. Off by default, but you can enable it in the setup.exe.

On that note:

[spring lodge]

Please tell me how to add a game to the dos 0MHz collection?

[copper slate]

The files are organized in a way where you can drop the three folders into //media/fat/ and it’ll work

[spring lodge]

how do you add Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion?

[copper slate]

Do you have three folders in the zip file?

[spring lodge]

I have a 0Mhz collection with games installed initially, how can I convert dangerous dave.exe so that mgl, vhd and config files appear?

[copper slate]

The 0mhz collection comes with everything you need to drag and drop over to your SD card. There’s no converting necessary. You launch the game using the MGL file provided.

[spring lodge]

Where can I get Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion mgl?

[copper slate]

I can’t link you to where you can find dangerous Dave unfortunately. I would check the internet archive.

Sorry

[spring lodge]

But does it definitely exist for the 0Mhz collection?)

[copper slate]

I see the issue. So there’s the official 0mhz collection that’s in one archive. Others have contributed games outside of the 0mhz archive and Dangerous Dave is one of those games that’s not part of the 0mhz archive.

You’ll need to search for that

They are presented in the same format. An MGL, a VHD, and a config file.

[spring lodge]

Found it, thank you very much!)

[copper slate]

I’m glad you did. Sorry for not being able to link it directly but thank you for understanding.

[spring lodge]

Why can't you provide links here?

[copper slate]

Being this is the official MiSTer discord, we don’t want any copyrighted material being shared here. End users must locate or source that themselves, presumably from their own game collections.

It’s just a U.S. legal thing

[spring lodge]

Understood thanks)

[fleet cave]

I kinda love how someone created a semi-curated collection of vhd/mgl stuff for PC, named it '0Mhz collection' and then everyone basically devalued the actual curation part of the 'collection'

[wheat folio]

GORILLA.BAS 0Mhz collection

[hollow ice]

Or, by providing the containers they have made it easier for each person to curate their own collection 😉

Given that even the downloader is third party and the original intent was “download the individual games you care about”

[copper slate]

The term “0mhz” has sort of become the PC Game MGL launcher format. There’s an official 0mhz collection of course but I love all the additional games converted over to MGL that the community has provided. Additionally sticking with the 0mhz tag has also made it super easy in discovering those games.

[lunar trellis]

I wonder how large the entire DOS library would be in the 0mhz format, if it would be feasible one day with storage being so cheap to just have everything as a pack

[void belfry]

Basic Linux distro (https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/) running on ao486 🙂
I still have issues with it running directly off the VHD (some partitioning/lilo issue, will probably get rid of it soon) and needs boot floppy, but it works nevertheless. The Initial install was made in 86boox, as it appeared ao486 has some FDC issues.
Also to figure-out the correct ppp config to get it on the net as well. Supposedly there is X11 support, will see.

[void belfry]

Very crude method I used: got floppy version, unzipped it.
There is disk1 (the boot disk) and a disk2.tgz archive which needs to pe copied on an empty FAT formatted floppy image (that would be the root disk)
Created a 42 megs fixed sized VHD with 86box, booted disk1 on my close enough 486sx setup and followed on-screen help/messages, swap to disk2 etc
I used "fdisk /dev/hda" to make a single bootable Linux (type 83) partition, then "mke2fs /dev/hda1" , mounted it to /hd then used the "install-to-hd" script.
After finishing, also did "lilo -v" and it works just fine in 86Box. On ao486 it would require to boot off floppy and hit Control key when LILO appears then issue an "hd root=/dev/hda1"
I tried to do the same dance of installation directly on MiSTer but when swapping the boot for the root floppy image, it will throw some "device busy" errors on and on.
Thinking already to see if using 2nd FDD would help, as well as testing dual boot/install with/from a DOS partition as well.

As I said, that I will get trying to boot off right away the VHD from 86box will fail, but the root fs is there, as showed with the help of boot disk. Might be smth off on that side as well, as some VHDs worked, some didn't in the past as well, iirc (and not very sure on that memory) smth related to disk geometry

[woven lava]

look up SFLIU... it's not exactly a hack... more like a homebrew with graphics ripped from photos of an NTSC TV (!) ... but it was better than the official SF2 port!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiVHnGWvZkA&t=1146s

[void belfry]

with boot disk, root fs on hdd

[woven lava]

fighting games work quite well on ao486 with gamepad mapped to keyboard

[void belfry]

when it comes to fighting games, while amazing me on OMF/FX Fighter and some others, ao486 "failed" me when it came to Body Blows and some obscure rabbit ninja smth game 😄 not a biggie, just some old memories of what I played in highschool lol

[rare plume]

Anyone try One Must Fall: 2097 on the core?

[void belfry]

yes, it works. Replace dos4gw with dos32a, from the top of my head. You can also check previous discussions around that using the search function

Think there is also an "archived" bootable vhd with it, but not sure tbh, I use my own stuff

[rare plume]

Awesome - definitely need to add that. Thanks!

[worthy zealot]

Indeed. DOS32A generally does better than DOS4GW. I think there might be a few games that has issues with DOS32A, but its less than a handful. Some games hide DOS4GW in the exe, or even some data file. F.ex. Command and Conquer wont run if you run it without DOS32A, but its not obvious that it uses DOS4GW, because it hides in a... I think its a bin or dat file. But if you use DOS32A on that big data file, it will find and replace the DOS4GW part and run the game without even using the exe file.

One of the issues with DOS4GW is it lacks support for more than 64MB of RAM, at least unless you have the latest version of DOS4GW, but most games use an earlier version.

[white siren]

i think this is the one i played

does FX fighter work

[void belfry]

it does with the help of an FPU emulator. https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=6639

[void belfry]

yeah, I remember Command and Conquer issue we talked about some years ago 🙂 https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=13211#p13211

[void belfry]

lol, i didn't see this yesterday 😄 Renaming to VHD and it boots just fine on ao486

[inland sinew]

What sorts of other games have been put into the 0Mhz collection?

Also, anyone know if or how well OS/2 3.0 Warp works on ao486?

[void belfry]

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=46068#p46068 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwXnxgOE1Po

Still not been able to find a better video driver and make slip/ppp work. Other than that, think it runs quite ok.

I'll get back to it at some point, for time being I'm distracted getting Unix/Linux - like OSes to work if possible, plus some other obscure OSes for other cores

I got recently some ftp mirrors with tons of OS/2 related stuff, need some time to dig through all of it

[void belfry]

CD-ROM/FAT/Audio support on Basic Linux, as well as MC aaaand X 😄

[void belfry]

PPP is working as well 😄 so now I can use the shared folder to ftp the packages from ARM side to BL3

[copper slate]

lol you said PP

[void belfry]

Now to get a better browser, and add ssl support as well 🙂 fun times

[copper slate]

@void belfry hey that’s pretty cool stuff, I hope you succeed!

[void belfry]

It is also amazing fast

[languid sparrow]

I was thinking of playing Quest for Glory in order, because you could import your character from part 1 to part 2, etc. What would be a good way to transfer the save file between them?

[ruby bramble]

I see your point on curation, but the 0mhz collection encouraged submissions from the start, both in the faq on the website and the fact that it linked to the archive search results and not his archive page directly.

[void belfry]

IRC (using NAIM client) working, as well as FTP with ncftp client under BL3

[void belfry]

multi-tasking, several virtual consoles (3 default), different Window managers, I start to love how good this works. Still no dice with SSL support (will need to upgrade a lot of libs, maybe even the kernel if possible and so on). Plus to find some old Opera (ver 8) static-QT package. And Doom if extremely lucky. WIP 🙂

[void belfry]

lol, went whole 9 yards to get ftp working from ao486 with BL3 to MiSTer ARM Linux in order to transfer some files when the more obvious choice was there all along (mounting the damn VHD in ARM linux side of things, copy whatever crap and be happy).... 🤦‍♂️

[worthy zealot]

Linux on AO486? I just started my Summer vacation, and do have plans to test some things I have not gotten around to test on the MiSTer. A optimized build of the AO486 core I need to try out and my new PiMidi, and the MiSTer Floppy for the Minimig core. And now it seems, this Linux that can run on AO486 🙂

[void belfry]

So far I got Gentoo and this BL3 (Slackware 4, 2.2.6 kernel) Linuxes working, as well with ELKS/Minix and QNX Unix based ones. And some PicoBSD floppy, couldn't make it see the IDE though

Have to do some more work on Gentoo, already compiled the kernel to support PPP but need to install net-dialup packages

BL3 so far is the most promising, it boots amazingly fast and Slackware 4 packages can be installed as they still use libc5. These days I'm trying to update it as much as I can, so I could use better packages from newer distros, still having issues with SSL. And to try as well better GUI resolutions

[void belfry]

For who wants to quick test it, there is a 100 megs BL3 image (BL3 3.50 image for QEMU users link) on the https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/ page.
Rename it to VHD and it boots just fine.
There are several add-on packages as well, the most important for me were **mc **(Midnight Commander), **naim **(IRC/ICQ/AIM client) and **icewm **(a nicer Window manager for X)
You can transfer them to VHD by mounting it under MiSTer ARM linux (F9/SSH into it), don't forget to umount it afterwards:
"mount -o loop,offset=32256 bl3-5qemu.vhd /mnt" to mount it, "umount /mnt" to unmount it.
Package installation is easy, from BL3 just issue "pkg package_name.tgz" and it should get it done. Eg. "pkg mc.tgz"
For audio you need some module files (https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/add-ons/2_2_26/modules/misc/): soundcore.o, sound.o, uart401.o and sb.o
Put them in the /lib/modules/2.2.26/misc directory from the BL3 VHD.
Do an "edit /etc/rc" and comment/uncomment/add several lines as in the image below:
-uncomment (delete the #) insmod/mount lines from Activate_CD_Drive section
-comment (add a #) lines from Activate_Ethernet
-uncomment insmod lines from Activate_PPP
-add an Activate_audio section as in the picture
Ctrl+O saves the file, Ctrl+X exits it.
PPP can simply be started by "pppd /dev/ttyS0 115200 defaultroute mru 1500", don't use that "pppsetup" default script.
Be sure PPP is selected in OSD, plain 115200.
You can as well put that pppd line at the end of /etc/rc to have it automatically started at boot.

Also, for cd-rom you need to "edit /etc/fstab" and add a last line like below:

Now, the BL3 should have CD-ROM, audio and PPP support right at boot. GUI starts with startx, I used first option (640x480), will see better res later

Oh, /etc/resolv.conf should be also edited with a "nameserver 8.8.8.8" (or any other DNSes of choice

[void belfry]

while it can boot off the floppy image as well, it has issue with it afterwards. Discovered this while trying to make a bigger vhd and playing around with bootsectors (lilo freezes on my install for now, otherwise with a boot floppy it can be used without issues)

[void belfry]

Except using qemu (which I only installed it now under WSL2 Ubuntu and didn't tested it yet), I failed to produce a bigger VHD fully bootable with BL3, neither with ao486/MiSTer or 86Box (floppy install works in 86Box/fails under ao486, cloning the working disk work in both but neither results are fully bootable, no matter if using MBR or just having lilo in first (root) partition).
The ext2 filesystem is there, the partitions and the files are there, but it will freeze after displaying "LI" from Lilo prompt.
Even dd-ing the bootsector from working VHD to new one didn't do the trick, but using the boot floppy disk, hitting Ctrl key and then "hd root=/dev/hda1" boots and mounts the root (and other partitions) from VHD

[thick pendant]

can you get this working? https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/

[void belfry]

I highly doubt it will work 😄 Never heard of this until now, but it seems based on ubuntu with kde, probably way too much for ao486

if the kernel is compiled for i386 with FPU emulator, there is a chance. However, from all I tested so far (starting from Unix V, BSD to Linux without FPU) most of them also failed with the FDD/IDE controller errors or some other errors

The only Unix or Linux OSes I know to work on ao486:

ELKS/Minix - works as well on XT core, supports serial and SLIP connectivity
QNX 4.25 - works fine, supports PPP. Also its famous demo floppy disk works
Gentoo Linux - not my work, still need to install at some point net-dialup so it would have PPP. Most modern Linux on ao486 I know to work
Basic Linux 3.5 - Slackware 4 distro, still working to get a fully bootable bigger vhd
PicoBSD floppy - some old BSD crammed into a floppy image, more like a novelty, iirc it doesn't see/work with hdd images

[void belfry]

I wonder if installing it in a VM/emulator, rebuilding the kernel with FPU emulator support might do the trick... Again, no clue how it will work (or not) with ao486 IDE afterwards

[void belfry]

hmm...for now 86box doesn't boot the iso, PCem does it but will crap out at some point with graphical artefacts when installing. ao486 does boot the iso, but needs a different kernel due to lack of FPU so can't proceed further with it yet on the core

[void belfry]

maybe qemu will give better results, still need to set it up properly as I need to test BL3 as well

[wraith creek]

Regarding the OPL3 implementation in AO486; is it just a software issue on my side (a badly configured driver or mixer?) or the volume of the OPL3 is a lot quieter than that of the rest of the soundcard? I have to put audio boost at 4x in the Mister menu to hear music with my speakers at almost maximum volume, and then when a sound that isn't from the OPL3 plays it's extremely loud

[fast kraken]

did it get worse recently or always been the case?

[wraith creek]

It's been like this at least since april with gtaylormb's many updates to the OPL3, but to be honest, I haven't really tried it before so it could have been like that before too

I haven't tried on a new image/install so I don't know if it has anything to do with it but I was mostly just checking if it was a known issue everyone has

[fast kraken]

it's always been a bit quiet (thus the 4x boost option) but that sounds extreme

[elder basin]

seems fine to me, but it really depends on the game and how they've programmed the instruments vs Fx that determines the levels. I find in Doom I set the Fx volume to 25% and the music volume all the way up. I used to do this too on my PAS-16 486 machine in the 90s. Which game specifically?

I also use an external DAC over toslink now, so total volume isn't a problem for me

[wraith creek]

For instance, Adlib Tracker 2

[elder basin]

I actually thought that didn't run on ao486: https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=6199&start=60

but, great you have it running. Although maybe not the best to test Fx vs. music volume

I'm interested to know more about how you got AT2 running, but don't want to hijack the convo. Are there other games that include DSP and OPL3 that seem way off? You are the first person to report this to my knowledge

oh wait, I see it was you that posted "2.3.52 works for me, it does not use CWSDPMI."

before I started using my external DAC/amp setup the most I used was audio boost 2x and OPL3 was plenty loud on my Senn HD-25s directly connected to headphone jack on analog IO board

but never ran AT2

easy enough to do a left shift on the samples coming out of the OPL3, but I don't think anyone else is having this issue

if it's just AT2, I assume you have control of the instruments? Try boosting the levels of your operators, e.g. TL=0

[bitter oar]

I did a lot of interesting and fruitful experimenting with PC-98 on RetroPie on my Pi 3B+; can't wait to get a MiSTer soon and see if I can contribute anything meaningful

[blazing canopy]

Just got the 0mhz collection on my sd cars. But all I get is a black screen on all games. Anyone know what im screwing up? I had flynns top 300 before and it worked fine.

[copper slate]

Did you overwrite the ao486 cfg with the one provided?

[blazing canopy]

Yup. I did. Several times since it didnt work 😅

[copper slate]

Double check you placed the provided files in the right location

//media/fat/games/ao486/media

I think that’s it

You launch the games with the MGL file

[blazing canopy]

Looks exactly like that. And yes mgl files. Got the pack from archive.org

[blazing canopy]

I just found what I f-d up.
When removing the top 300 I also deleted the bios files.... 💪🏼

[wraith creek]

Now that I think about it, everything that does this that I remember runs through Windows 3.1 (including AT2, I can only get it through Windows)

[summer dragon]

that’ll do it! I feel like a black screen on boot for ao486 means missing bios files like 95% of the time

[wheat folio]

Chatting about 0mhz collection on another server, and just found out that both Hawk Hubbard (of ACiD Underworld BBS/ANSI scene) and m0d (who ran the modarchive for demoscene music) died in the past few months. Profound sadness for this old MS-DOS user. 😦 We're all fading away...

[worthy zealot]

😦

[copper slate]

Just a reminder that gaming peaked with this release

[ruby bramble]

Make the vhd, I’m waiting!

[copper slate]

lol I don’t know how. But I asked my dad to buy that game for me when I was a kid and boy oh boy was I disappointed LOL

[ebon tundra]

i still have it some were i think.

[ruby bramble]

I could see why though, that cg render is something special

[tall grotto]

Damn. You should have asked him for an X68000 instead. Then maybe we'd have a completed core.

[void belfry]

Work in progress, will see if first I can produce a bootable vhd image and afterwards if I can recompile the kernel to use 387 emu for our core (also working to do the same, except recompilation for Basic Linux 3 distro). QEMU seems to be the only emulator I tried who can boot the HM iso, besides ao486 (86box and PCem failed on this for me)

since BL3 bootable img on the site was produced with QEMU, I have high hopes I can make a bigger bootable VHD with it

[granite umbra]

For PC88 :
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PC88_MiSTer/pull/7

[lunar trellis]

Nice to see the PC-88 core getting some love. Be great if it could launch games on first load without a reset after and support more file formats.

[granite umbra]

What is other file format? You mean for cassette ?

[lunar trellis]

It has been well over a year since I looked at this one just am sure there were a load of different file formats for PC-88 games and programmes that the core didn't support, maybe different flavours of tape formats

[granite umbra]

Yes, Tape is not implemented

[late nacelle]

are we only missing the hardware for that? I asked the other day on the forum because of the missing pc-98 harddisk thingy - i probably could source a controller here...

[tall grotto]

To my knowledge, no. Making a core is heavily dependent on understanding the hardware. Understanding the hardware really needs documentation on the design... The X68000 is Japanese. The manual is in Japanese, and not just Japanese... 80's Japanese along with notation scribble sometimes. Like English, the 80's had different terms and usage for words regarding computers back then... They're not the same today. And you can't translate Japanese to English without context as Japanese isn't straightforward like English or other latin-based languages. A lot of it hinges on references and the like. Thus someone with an understanding of 80's hardware would be needed.

So how likely is it to find someone that can read fluent Japanese and understand hardware and tech speak from the 80's and also be able to write fpga code.

You can see how slim those results would be...

[tall grotto]

The current status is incomplete because the developer moved onto fm towns before finishing the x68000 core.

A lot of games don't work because components are missing from the core.

[lunar trellis]

My understanding is a big issue with these old Japanese PCs isn't just that the documentation is in Japanese, it is that not everything is documented and what is, is in esoteric Japanese technical language that even if you are fluent in Japanese you won't be able to translate it unless you understand what you see reading from a technical perspective.

Which is me just echoing what Nerd Pork said a couple of comments up 🙂

[limpid tiger]

More like "all the documentation isn't centralized into a central place". Think of the IBM PCs of the 1980s and 1990s. There were a lot of add-in boards, right ?

the X68000 has pretty good doc's from what I've heard. But so few people in the west ever owned them.

And all the games seem to need different, unique sets of hardware

[late nacelle]

I am not sure I understand the argument. At least not all of it. I get that documentation might be hard to read, but that will be the same for english - for a native japanese speaker. Both languages are very old and were not made to describe computer components. the process of understanding the terms should be roughly the same. As for documentation: I am not an fpga developer, so I can't tell - but I would be surprised of there was a documentation of the super nintendo or of all those arcade boards publicly available to a point where you could just replicate the hardware from it. Wouldn't most companies treat this as their intellectual property and be very lip tight about it? Especially here in Japan, where there basically are no such thing as fair use or preservation rights...
And it also comes to mind how many decent software emulators are out there for those systems. Sure, fpga is completely different, but a working software emulator also means that someone, at some point must have had a certain insight about the inner workings of the system...

[crimson fulcrum]

for the x68k (and actually, for quite a few other Japanese computers of the era), there's system and service manuals that provide quite a lot of insight on how things are supposed to work, that can be very valuable for creating emulators (fpga or software).

Even on the software side, a lot of x68k software emulators are based on the old XM6 emulator which was written by a Japanese person originally, I'd imagine from testing on a real x68k and from using documentation from said manuals.

but also yes, I'm not really sure where the "esoteric Japanese" part really comes in. I've done some skimming of various Japanese PC manuals from the era and armed with a dictionary it's not really that much harder to grok than a similar manual in English. We still end up at the cross roads of needing someone who can read Japanese and do fpga programming, or a couple people willing to work in tandem to figure things out.

[late nacelle]

while I live in Japan, I unfortunately failed to adapt the required language skills - but I would gladly help out with getting hands on more exotic hardwre, etc - though my eyes are more set on the pc-98 at the moment

It seems that x68k is now open source and various people help with little stuff - do you have any insight if that would be an option for pc-98, too? as far as I have seen the only source to get the core are the compiled binaries on puu's blog...

[crimson fulcrum]

there's source out there for puu's pc98, it's bundled into the archives on the blog, but IIRC someone out there did some reorganization of it for mister, forget where tho

it's definitely something far from complete, and PC98 in and of itself is a huge beast just thinking about sound hardware, graphics accelerators, and the generations of processors it went through

[late nacelle]

thats right - though the thing I am missing the most is currently a sasi adapter, since the missing option to create/work with existing hard drive images really takes away a bit part of the classic computer experience

[lunar trellis]

As a side bar comment, when people talk about wanting a PC-98 core it is worth noting that the PC-98 range ran from 1982 to 2000. So worth specifying what model/era you are hoping for. We actually already have cores for all the chips needed for the early models, but I can't imagine anyone asking for a PC-98 core is hoping for an early 80s PC-9801 revision.

[crimson fulcrum]

yeah I think most people asking want something that can play touhou and rusty and other "Japanese not needed" games

which is mid-late 90s-ish

[late nacelle]

I want to suffer through all those "japanese absolutely required" visual novels hoping they force me to finally get my language skills up to par 😉

[crimson fulcrum]

tbh unless you're already well used to reading kanji, the crushed up fonts on some of those early VNs can be a bit annoying to recognize

[late nacelle]

I wouldn't call it "reading", but I can roughly recall the meaning of some 😉

things you pick up in daily life here - like finding out when someone wants money again from an official looking letter and stuff

[crimson fulcrum]

yeah those letters use nicely made and clear fonts haha 🙂

[late nacelle]

you don't often get letters from japanese tax authorities, do you? 😉

[crimson fulcrum]

most of my taxes get paid out of my salary automatically so I usually only get letters asking for me to pay my property taxes

[late nacelle]

yeah - I am running my own company here and my tax consultant likes to make uncommon mistakes - so I often get letters from the tax office with handwritten post-its attached explaining what part of the official letter still stands and what part I should ignore...

[crimson fulcrum]

ah yeah, hand written notes is a whole thing

[surreal marsh]

There are actually several PC-98 fan translations.

36 are listed as fully playable.

[crimson fulcrum]

I guess that still comes up as are those from the V30 CPU era or 286 or pentium era?

[surreal marsh]

I don't know much about them. They seem to be mostly 1990s.

One game named "The Screamer" is from 1986 but I don't see any others. Could have missed one since I didn't click on everything.

[crimson fulcrum]

yeah by the early 90s we already were seeing 286/386 based PC98s, and late 90s had pentiums

it's kind of like, we'd need something on the scale of the AO486 core, rejiggered with extra PC98 goodness, to get the large swath of what people would consider good pc98 games

if anyone wants to play with PC98 stuff right now, neko project 21/w or neko project ii kai, are quite solid for playing VNs and even stuff like Rusty

[surreal marsh]

Dosbox-x also says it emulates PC-98.

[crimson fulcrum]

dosbox-x's pc98 had weird/wrong sound last time I played around with it

[late nacelle]

that would be a dream...

[lunar trellis]

How well documented are the early PC-9801 hardware revisions? We do have all the parts needed for the first few models, although even old these Japanese PCs that on paper seem simple have tripped up many a developer trying to build a cores.

[tall grotto]

Adding to what @crimson fulcrum said, PC's of the era were a lot different from consoles. They were generally sold to consumers with the allowance of adding more hardware or working in the system. It was more of an open platform, while consoles were locked down. They had different market strategies.

Also dp, I would look at the X68K manuals.. there's a lot of scribbles and hand notes in there that are a lot different from the more professional looking manuals...

[wheat folio]

The weird inaccuracies and compatibility issues of the AO 486 core just make it all the more period Authentic to me.

Like I had a 486 that works fairly well, but in a certain doom level editor every time I left clicked, it would turn the computer off.

[copper slate]

holy shit lmao

[wheat folio]

It was an IBM that had its own power management stuff that predated all these standards we have so I’m guessing that was it.

[opal void]

which board is that? so I can avoid 😛

[opal void]

ah one of these PS/1 machines that offered early "standby" function?

[wheat folio]

That is the one

Highly doubt you would find the board on its own anywhere

[opal void]

yeah I had one

it was so low end... Doom would run on single digit FPS haha

and getting it upgraded was a major chore

so I just sold it

[wheat folio]

Mine had an overdrive socket so I rocked it as a dx4/75 for way too long

[crimson fulcrum]

do you happen to know off hand which x68k manuals have the hand scribbles? The ones I've poked at I didn't notice.

[ruby bramble]

Is anybody here nostalgic for storybook weaver?

[opal void]

but if you want 100MHz I think you need to do some modding?

[wheat folio]

Probably. I think mine was locked at 25mhz base.

[opal void]

yeah I remember a lot of modding was required to increase the cache memory, RAM itself, VRAM, adding a DX4/100 etc...

[ember crane]

Maybe lot asked question, i want to modify certain games of my 0mhz collection, for example flashback to play it in french language what files i need to change?

[summer dragon]

@ember crane find a release of the game that has french as an available language and then open the VHD and replace the game files with the new version. you might have to edit the rungame.bat file if the filename to start the game is different (or just rename the exe/bat file that starts the game to match what’s in rungame.bat)

[ember crane]

I already have the french release of the game. The most difficult part is in fact the modification of bat file, i'll follow your advice and modify it

I'll come back late to tell if it's working

[ember crane]

It perfectly works! Thank You!

[granite umbra]

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PC88_MiSTer/pull/8

[jagged lance]

Hey all I am trying to troubleshoot FastDoom in DOS on the ao486. Does anyone have a DOS 6.22 image set up and can try to recreate the errors that I am having?

@ me here or DM me and I'll get you links and explain the issues. This is for an open issue on the FastDoom github.

[void belfry]

Fingers crossed 🙂 Debian 4 Etch, will see how far I can get with it on ao486

[void belfry]

As expected, traditional boot/root floppy disk install will fail as many other Linux distros I tried (unmounting/changing FDD image is not recognized)
Luckily, CD-ROM boots just fine, but I am expecting a "many hours later..." experience lol 😄

[tall grotto]

https://nfggames.com/X68000/index.php/Documentation/ My brain may have been remembering wrong. but in the Books folder here, the schematic text seemed like a lot of mess

[sudden ice]

Btw, the x68000 documentation pretty much documents everything about the hardware and software. So you could probably develop a core with refering to that documentation

[tall grotto]

yes but a lot of it is in Japanese, and it's from the 90's and 80's with technical speak from that era. Not the easiest thing to translate unless you also know hardware

so .... from what we understand the only way this is possible is for the same person to understand Japanese, understand 80's/90's computer hardware and how to code in FPGA languages

Hence why we think the x68k has been wip for so long

[eager bronze]

i really don't think that argument holds as much water as some people say it does.

as someone who's done exploratory research into working on the PC-6001 (had to stop because i got sick), all the technical speak i encountered there was very readable. often using direct loanwords from english (katakana) for specific technical phrases. at a certain level, electronics is just electronics.

i don't think we should be shutting people down from even trying the japanese pc cores before they even give it an honest go.

at a certain point it sounds like people are just repeating this mantra which creates a vicious cycle of no-one even looking for themselves to see if it's possible

literally 100% of the documentation i found for the pc-6001 was comprehensible to me through very basic machine translation, my already-existing understanding of computer engineering concepts, and a tiiiny bit of japanese language knowledge (reading phonetics, not kanji) (you can teach yourself that in 1-2 weeks!)

[limpid tiger]

I think one thing that would be helpful is to gather the documentation into a single spot, so that when somebody gets ambitious, that ambition doesn't evaporate through the search

Also, if the documents are already in digital format, modern google translate does a significantly better job than it did back in 2015 or so

(Although I suspect a lot of the documentation will be scans or photocopies, and not reliably copy/pasteable)

There are inevitably going to be situations where it would be very helpful to own (or at least be familiar with) original hardware

I understand that X68000 programmers used a lot of techniques to push at the edge cases of the hardware (especially for protection mechanisms)

[eager bronze]

OCR works pretty well with japanese unless it's really, really mangled by a photocopier or extremely low-res.

[limpid tiger]

I've used OCR for Japanese documents. It's hit and miss.

Somebody famliar with Japanese would be able to bridge the gap easily, but not somebody who isn't

[opal void]

what kind of level of documentation?

[eager bronze]

right, but bridging the OCR gap something someone with preschool-level jpn skills can do. it certainly isn't as esoteric as some claim

[opal void]

I used to have the English version of the manual for NEC PC-6001 Mk II, but it got lost 😦

[limpid tiger]

Not true. There are multiple types of problems, and you're referring to alignment. There is also mis-recognition of kanji and so on.

[eager bronze]

I had some technical docs & schematics for 6001 produced by a third party, as well as a website where someone had documented in detail their experience developing a windows emulator

they're still around but i can find em if anyone wants

i believe it was for the original 6001, not MKII?

[limpid tiger]

PC-6001 is a pretty simple machine, and shouldn't be too hard. X68000 is a couple of generations later, so would be harder (and more documentation)

[eager bronze]

the schematics were of the era and in very simple japanese

[limpid tiger]

schematic diagrams are always incredibly helpful

[eager bronze]

this is true. but we currently don't have a 6001 or 8001 core at all

[eager bronze]

i'm talking about stuff like using a dictionary to produce sensible results when OCR outputs nonsense for complex words

using context clues can get you a long way

[limpid tiger]

Yeah, and lots of translators will let you input the kanji by hand.

But nobody will do that without some Japanese background

It's quite tedious

I guess what I was trying to say earlier was that translation is something a somewhat non-technical person could do, to prepare for core developers

Everybody always seems so easger for the core to be written/updated, but most people stop at "but I can't write a core", leaving a large gap for the actual developers to do all by themselves

There are things that people can do to help

[void belfry]

"Many hours later..." -- still not getting a full bootable vhd, though I have now some more progresses

on ao486 it will freeze (or maybe taking longer than 1.5 hrs ?) at partitioning stage (no matter if I did already partition/format the vhd). 86box freezes at some point when copying files. Didn't try yet PCem or qemu (or any other emu/virtualization). But at least this is a kernel which boots on ao486 🙂 Later edit: bootable CD iso (not netinstall ones) on archiving site, first find with "Debian Etch" keywords

and heck... I do need to restore some older machines I have to paralel test this stuff

as you can see, with enough fiddling, some Unix/Linux can be run on ao486, despites its obvious flaws (missing FPU, wonky FD/IDE at first)

[lunar trellis]

If someone is thinking about taking on a Japanese PC, then before trying to take on the Sharp 68000, consider trying to get the Sharp X1 done. There is a WIP core here that was booting in simulator if I recall.

https://github.com/JasonA-dev/SharpX1_Mister

There are also abandoned/stuck WIP cores for:
Sony SMC-777
Hitachi Basic Master Junior
PC-6001
PC-8001

They could all be forked and worked on if someone were inclined

[hollow ice]

@void belfry any idea if the hard drive issues can be due to the old bios implementation?

Given that there is an alternate windows 32bit driver that works, I wonder if all our problems are related to the old bios

[void belfry]

¯_(ツ)_/¯ Unfortunately I can't really pinpoint where exactly the issue(s) is/are. By alternate Win 32bit driver you refer to UniATA for NT ?

[hollow ice]

Yes

[void belfry]

a shame a similar one doesn't exist for Win 9.x 😦

[void belfry]

getting somewhere, I hope. On PCem install seems to go on (had some drawback because i made the vhd too small lol). Will see if it will be also bootable when/if finishes correctly

[foggy silo]

The newest PC88 unstable fixed a bunch of games to didn't load due to FD issues!

[void belfry]

https://tenor.com/view/frankenstein-its-alive-happy-excited-gif-5625959

gnome still loading, not sure it will even work (very stock Deb Etch, for sure bloated with non-working stuff)

kernel 2.6.18, ofc very old by todays standards, but still amazing

guess it will take a while, if at all, but mouse is correctly working.

we're really getting somewhere 😄 Frigging Gnome (damn, hope i won't jinx it)

c'mon, ya little piece of awesomeness, you can do it !!!

[hollow ice]

Haha

[void belfry]

almost ther, it is struggling as hell 😄

damn, this is exciting

[hollow ice]

Interesting that it is running that slowly even though it isn’t touching swap

[void belfry]

no FPU maybe ? graphical card is not great either (or what we have as it)

for sure this install can (and will) be tweaked, and honestly I can settle with CLI and/or lesser than Gnome X managers, clearly an obvious overhead

I am glad and amazed it took the IDE test (still not a clue if floppy images would work after install though).

due to "install-all"/whatever default route I chose, for sure there are a lot of not-going-to-work/unnecessary crap, starting with gdm

and yeah, nothing happened yet since my last screenshot in terms of GUI, but core is not frozen, mouse working, processes changing prio/usage and so on

while Gnome is loading (or tries to at least 😄 ), multitasking/switching between multiple consoles is spot on

[hollow ice]

The earliest computer I ran linux on was a Pentium 100, never tried on a 486

and even that was before gnome, so … no idea what to expect

[void belfry]

I ran Slackware on a 486 (DX admittedly) back in the day and also confirmed a distro of it working on ao486 (including X, but hell nowhere near Gnome)

at some point it might fully load (doubt , but still) but i don't think it would be any near usable

[hollow ice]

once it loads, it should be pretty usable

[void belfry]

still no progress in terms of GUI, though the screensaver kicked in at some point (and worked correctly)

patience is really a virtue lol

anyway, great success for PCem help on creating and installing this distro, it's quite the first vhd made under this emu to actually boot fine directly/on first try

[void belfry]

had to stop it as i need some sleep lol. will explore more the following days

[spice hound]

What is everyone opinion toward zx spectrum next?

[copper slate]

I guess it’s cool. Not really interested in it.

[spice hound]

I see.

Cool.

[copper slate]

What about you?

[hollow ice]

I think their production model is pretty awful, but if that is what it takes to get units out I guess it works.

[crimson fulcrum]

is there anything to go play on the ZX Next? Like good enough to bother booting the core lol

[hollow ice]

For me it is more the idea of a classic z80 computer with a bit extra oomph and a good keyboard to waste time with. Main reason I haven’t just gotten an n go- the speccy keyboard is awful.

[ruby bramble]

I’ll be honest, other than the homebrew castlevania I haven’t even found a good reason to boot the regular zx spectrum core lol

(Somewhere a British guy is grinding his teeth)

To be fair I also feel similar apathy towards the commodore 65 despite loving the c64

Or was it commodore 128? I don’t remember

[hollow ice]

Both? The mega65 is the c65 reimagining

But unfortunately the u64 already has a 48mhz mode, so… it has some tough competition

In my opinion the 128 is criminally underutilized, but there have been a lot of cool advancements in understanding recently

[ruby bramble]

I would love these hypothetical platforms if they had any games

But it’s all neat, I just don’t want to play them

[granite umbra]

Yes, Yosinda made very good fixes !

[surreal marsh]

I never got the idea of new retro platforms. Existing platforms have games because once upon a time,the industry was focused on them. A new retro platform will never have such a library.

And if you just want to code on something with more power than an old retro platform, you can use a hacked 3DS. It's much more likely to get you an audience.

[fast kraken]

3DS is 100% retro now anyway 🙂

[void belfry]

PPP working under Debian Etch on ao486 🙂

[void belfry]

Still no luck with Gnome, looking up for lighter desktop managers atm. Also, now that internet access is possible, working to get NTP/SSH running, MC etc

[void belfry]

now we're talking business 😄 updating/installing stuff on Debian 4 (Etch) over the internet 😄 Nice thing the Debian archive, it ease things up A LOT

only had to add the link to Deb archive in /etc/apt/sources.list and it took off

I could increase the PPP link's speed as I usually do for Amiga, but it's ok as it is. More than I had back in the 90's anyway (and yeah, this OS is 2007-smth iirc lol)

Lol, think/hope I am the first one who got a Linux distro installing stuff over internet on ao486 from a still maintained repo. And that stuff is of course Midnight Commander 😄

[copper slate]

r u a hacker?

[hollow ice]

Can’t be, the text isn’t green

[void belfry]

just a regular network engineer with a bit of background in programming and general OS stuff (mostly servers). Being alive/teen in tthe 90's when Internet matured helped also

[void belfry]

btw, found out a curious bug when doing several screenshots in a row (Win+PrstScr) which eventually pretty much locks up the OS

starts with this: and continues with the one above

and yeah, didn't had yet time to change console colors 😄

as I always do otherwise 😛

anyway, if anyone wanna jump in the testing of this, feel free to ask/DM me, I'm not an expert but I'll try to my best to help out

[hollow ice]

Hmm, looks like the timing gets thrown off. I guess the arm chip isn’t powerful enough to do storage and screenshots 😆

[void belfry]

my thoughts exactly

more interesting one is regarding floppy disk controller, it very much looks like this one: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer/issues/103 , as when I tried first to install it directly on ao4866 via boot/rood disk method it got me into busy/not ready state errors

the same issue I got with Slack distro called Basic Linux (kernel 2.2.something)

[hollow ice]

Interesting, so a potential regression? I haven’t played around with floppy support in a long time.

[void belfry]

not really a deal-breaker, as I installed anyway the OS within PCem (probably qemu would work as fine too)

also not realizing the Debian archive still works got me to install (as default usually does lol) more crap that is for sure slowing down the system (frigging bittorrent comes to mind first lmao)

[hollow ice]

Haha

[void belfry]

tbh, I did not expect at all to be even bootable on the core, so yeah... fresh install process is to be updated

anyway, in CLI is as any Linuxes, snappy as hell. Maybe a small hint of lag in MC when switching to some large folders... but so far it works just fine

[hollow ice]

A little sad, though- I had hoped to one day cheat and implement ne2000 support like the ide support (expose some registers but handle all the actual networking on the Linux side using a tap interface) but it looks like there might not be enough cpu juice to do that.

[void belfry]

maybe doing it via I/O port with an adapter like Grabulosaure did to use on Sparc ?

[hollow ice]

Yeah, that will most likely be the best way to handle it anyway. I still need to get a newer io board so I can hook ip the ss core to Ethernet

[void belfry]

my very first used IRC client on a Linux in the 90's is running just frigging fine 😄 and yeah, gotta love its name 😛

[void belfry]

and again: a Discord - IRC ##MiSTerFPGA bridge would be so nice to have 😄

on a side note... what a trip to memory lane just by seeing the default messages on this fine IRC client 😄

[surreal marsh]

Yeah but it's existing retro, so it's got a huge install base.

[ruby bramble]

Plus you can always develop your new games for the Amico 🤣

[void belfry]

and still frigging using it after so many years, no matter the distro or platform it runs on 😄

here to move some files from ARM side to Debian via FTP link

[hollow ice]

haha

sadly, doing a quick implementation of IDE reset during lunch didn’t fix my problems, but it did remove one error message….I am going to get next booting if it is the last thing I do 😄

[void belfry]

next days will try Xfce or other lighter desktop manager, as well as cleaning up the unnecessary crap on Etch

[thick pendant]

I also used BitchX client

also remember AmIRC on Amiga

[hollow ice]

So, dumb question, but when I was debugging mister main a few years ago, I just copied my new binary over to the mister and ran it from the command line. Now, it appears that at some point printf is hooked and redirected to the serial line. Anyone know how to turn that off?

[fleet cave]

debug=1 in the ini

[hollow ice]

thank you, I swear I even commented out that check in the cfg.cpp, but I guess not

[void belfry]

anyway, cleaning up my previous install (with Gnome and all crap) is way too tedious, so rebuilt the VHD with just standard bare OS and now installing/building over the internet from Deb archive repo directly. Compilers, networking stuff, utils, audio and X, in this order

[copper slate]

CONFIRMED

[void belfry]

👀 it throws some IDE errors when halting the system, but otherwise it works ok if ofc I don't go happy trigger with screenshots

[hollow ice]

I need to make some progress tonight- I am not sure I was properly ftping over the binaries when I was experimenting last night…once I can reliably compile code and run it, I’ll be in a situation to trace some of those ide issues

[void belfry]

updated my notes on which Unix/Linux based OSes I know for sure/tested to run on ao486:
ELKS/Minix - works as well on XT core, supports serial and SLIP connectivity
QNX 4.25 - works fine, supports PPP. Also its famous demo floppy disk works
Gentoo Linux - (5.15.11-gentoo kernel) not my work, still need to install at some point net-dialup so it would have PPP. Most modern Linux on ao486 I know to work
Basic Linux 3.5 - Slackware 4 distro (2.2.26 kernel), still working to get a fully bootable bigger vhd. PPP/other (and better desktop manager) installed.
PicoBSD floppy - some old BSD crammed into a floppy image, more like a novelty, iirc it doesn't see/work with hdd images
Debian 4 Etch - (2.6.18-6-486 kernel) working !!!! Also PPP. And frigging install/update over Internet due to Debian archive repo mirror !!! F*** yeah !

[hollow ice]

so the answer to the age old “can you make a beowulf cluster with those” is yes

[void belfry]

oh boy, you dragged me into another rabbit hole LMAO :D))) that is a term i haven't heard in so many years

[hollow ice]

haha, if you have the de10s to make a beowulf cluster….

[void belfry]

i don't :(( anyway I plan to get a second, as I need it to fully test out LAN multiplayer stuff (mostly DOS era, as it's most proeminent)

[hollow ice]

time to bring on the low cost clones!

[void belfry]

my plans with a Dosbox machine on an old P4 died, with the PSU 😄

and my RasPis are just for mt32pi, https/ssl proxy in some cases when I can't just do it directly on ARM. Probably I can do some DOS emulation with those and integrate in the network, but too lazy 😄

[hollow ice]

Can you run more than one instance of 86box? I’ve never tried

[void belfry]

¯_(ツ)_/¯ never tried either

my laptop is not in any way that good, so I just won't try 😄 glad that it works ok along with any other emus/virtualization stuff (PCem/Vbox/qemu/WSL etc) one at a time 😄

for the lolz I need to install dosemu, I remember how we struggle to get it run on highschool's server. Think at some point we even got Heroes of Might and Magic 2 (besides Doom ofc) run on it

and POVRay. we left over night/weekend batches of it to be rendered, as it was a Pentium 120 iirc (while my home PC was a 486 DX/4)

POVRay image generated with ao486 under DOS

[hollow ice]

I remember seeing all the images, then getting a copy of povray and immediately being disappointed with my ability to do anything artistic with it

[void belfry]

same :d I didn't get much past of spheres/basic shapes, but we had an ISDN line at school and leeched a lot of files to render them later

RIPScrip and POVRay are lost arts imho

[hollow ice]

Still some cool bbses around, so I see good bit of new petscii stuff (granted, mostly through random c64 related youtube videos)

but yeah, most focus on petscii or ansi from my personal experience

[void belfry]

yeah. a sad news that Hawk Hubbard (one of the most important figures on this scene - RIPScrip/BBS) died recently. I visited from time to time BlackFlag, especially with RIPterm for max experience

I also try to build SyncTerm client on Deb Etch, will see how it goes

[void belfry]

And Dosemu works under Debian. Will test it more at a later point to do some benchmarks/game tests

[void belfry]

Making nice progress, that Debian repo makes things much more easy to install:

mc, arj, rar, unrar, zip, unzip, bzip2, ssh, openssh-server, bitchx, binutils, binutils-doc, cpp, cpp-doc, flex, gcc, libarchive-zip-perl, libc6-dev, libcompress-zlib-perl, libdb4.3-dev, libpcre3, libpopt-dev, linux-kernel-headers, lynx, m4, make, ncftp, nmap, openssl, perl, perl-modules, zlib1g-dev, autoconf, automake1.9, libtool, bison, autotools-dev, g++, gcc-4.1-locales, doc-base, naim, ntp, ntpdate, dosemu, dosemu-freedos, xfonts-dosemu, + whatever extra dependencies

[void belfry]

moving on to audio part, it will take a bit 🙂

[void belfry]

fingers crossed 😄

ok... seems it worked 😄 now to figure out some music players and get some mods/midis/wav/even mp3s to test

the 2nd part is easy, i put now MC with ftp link to copy some over from ARM side

[void belfry]

don't wanna jinx it, but besides ssh/openssl not really working due to old cyphers and compilation errors on SyncTerm (which I will later test in emulator), everything else towards building a workable Debian Etch on ao486 is fairly easy and straight-up forward so far, especially with the online repo (ofc, patience is a virtue)

it boots very fast (and still can be improved as there are a lot of unnecessary modules loaded/or tried to by default as fan, thermal and a lot else). Multitasking, virtual consoles, all the good stuff

[hollow ice]

the days of having to tailor a linux kernel to your hardware 😄

[void belfry]

ahahaha, so true 😄

and tbh, this is quite an experience on ao486 lol

very long shot lol, will see

meh, too long shot 😄

[hollow ice]

Too bad fastdoom doesn’t have a Linux port

[void belfry]

and maybe it is because freedos, not regular MS one, a lot of things can go wrong with dosemu (as back in the days lol)

[ruby bramble]

@copper slate

[copper slate]

Hell yeah Putt Putt, I grabbed em yesterday! Thank you!

[ruby bramble]

I still have like four or five to look at, not sure what’s going to work or not though

Windows 95 stuff is a complete crap shoot

[void belfry]

authentic enough lol

[copper slate]

man theres a lot of putt putt lol

0mhz collection should be renamed to "0mhz + billybitmap collection", haha

[ruby bramble]

@copper slate Puttmhz Collection

Or Puttz

[hollow ice]

Well all that debugging and the primary issue is openstep doesn’t like spt values larger than 63.

[hollow ice]

I swear it used to be able to handle the weird chd file, but either I broke my chd or the changes to the cdrom over the past couple years has caused a regression. I should probably regenerate it rather than trace through these cd audio changes 😄

[hollow ice]

Device reset for hard disks isn’t implemented. Might be the reason for those errors, might not.

I thought I might need to stub it in for openstep, but turns out the issue was elsewhere.

Big issues I have found so far is the default spt value of 256 being a no go in openstep and set features isn’t implemented at all.

Hard drive access is looking positive but now I need to track down the issue with cd rom access.

[void belfry]

The joys of remote administration 😄 Though at a later point I need to revisit OpenSSH/SSL certs/cyphers as they are quite old lol. For a LAN fun is quite ok

[void belfry]

X Window System working, at least the very basic install, will see about something lighter than Gnome/KDE

will see how it goes

[void belfry]

lol, never knew there were so many 😄

[hollow ice]

I was a wm luddite for a while and stuck with twm

[thick pendant]

I remember using that window manager on my i-opener device

[chilly rain]

need some people who know how to use this core to test it to make sure the framework update didn't bork anything for me please, ty

@lunar trellis on alert

[lunar trellis]

Sorry, settled down for the night. Anyone played with this one before able to kick the tires and give it a spin? Or indeed just dig into it for the first time

[granite umbra]

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PC88_MiSTer/pull/10

[lunar trellis]

Really nice to see someone appear who is interested and able to work on an old Japanese PC core. Are they a forum member? Don't think they are on here

[granite umbra]

I don't know

[lunar trellis]

Whoever they are, great to have them on board. If they are working through the list on the GitHub page then some big improvements could be coming to the core 🙂

Known Issues
Timing issues
Gamma correction doesn't seem to change anything (?)
TODO
Update T80 cpu
Add choice Sound YM2203 or YM2603 on the OSD
Add Audio Mix
Add support of multi-resolution
Add support of tapes
Add support of other models like PC8801MC

[white siren]

i would love to support something like that but i also have zero nostalgia or knowledge of those types of PCs

[lunar trellis]

I am no developer, but it may be straightforward to update the T80 CPU if there is a newer version in another core (assuming that is what the job means). Also may be similar to add in YM2203 of YM2603 from another core and have the option to switch which one is used. I have no real idea though. Maybe @waxen nymph knows how difficult the to-do tasks are for PC-88.

[waxen nymph]

I haven’t looked at the cpu in the pc 88. Is it bad?

[lunar trellis]

I have no idea, I am just going by that Todo list in the GitHub readme, and remembered you were involved in porting it over

[granite umbra]

It is a list i have done. Maybe the CPU update will not implied better accuracy...
I need to pass time to test last updates.
I think on the Todo the support of tapes will be the last big things and support more models because pc8801mc (using a CDROM) and also support resolutions and 15khz.
For the moment it is only 31khz 640*480

[void belfry]

Probably another first, trying to upgrade the Linux distro from Debian 4 (Etch) to 5 (Lenny) using the archived repo over PPP on ao486

[void belfry]

main reason that triggered me on this "quest" lol :
ao486:~# ssh -V OpenSSH_4.3p2 Debian-9etch3, OpenSSL 0.9.8c 05 Sep 2006

I'll keep compiling from latest sources/searching for a backport methods as last resorts, though most probably I will need to go that route...

at ~11kB/s, it will take some time 😄 just like in the 90s dial-up (if you were lucky)

[void belfry]

also, big frigging THANKS to Debian for maintaining the online archive repo for its older distros, starting with 2.0. Not only makes package install/upgrade process much easier (anyway, we are talking peanuts when it comes to Unix/Linux packages sizes and transfer times even at 11 kB/s) but on ao486 also retains that authentic feeling/time spent when net installing Slack/Red Hat in the 90s as well

about 2 more hours left until the moment of truth 🫣

[void belfry]

go go go 😄

[void belfry]

~40 more mins ⏰

[copper slate]

What’s going on

[void belfry]

#1047332497492553799 message --- doing it right now 😄

[copper slate]

Lol you’re getting Linux running on the ao486 core?

[void belfry]

no, already done that. Trying to upgrade it online now 😄

[hollow ice]

My first pass at fixing ide issues hasn’t yielded much yet-

NetBSD is a really promising test subject though. Gives me a lot more output than openstep

[void belfry]

lol, BSD's code related to floppy controller has no issues like the one from Linux. There is the picoBSD floppy image with a crammed BSD kernel plus some apps which boots just fine. Ofc, it does not detect any VHDs (tried different vhds with different partitions/file systems etc)

[hollow ice]

yeah, it is probably something dumb, but I am spiraling around it

[void belfry]

20 more mins 😄 damn, this is fun

[hollow ice]

I’ve implemented a few more atapi commands, and changed the configuration a bit to reduce the level of ata/atapi support (stolen from qemu, plus none of these computers were mainstream when the current advertised level of support was introduced)

the identify packet currently returns support of ata/atapi-5, which was released in 2000

I removed that and BSD stopped requesting a few annoying atapi packets 😄

[void belfry]

lol, frigging love this rabbit's hole :)))

[hollow ice]

haha, funny you should say that…I have a lot more respect for the rabbitholecomputing group…I was a bit upset that their zuluide only did atapi devices, but after having dealt with this nonsense, I can see why they don’t have block device support yet

[void belfry]

i don't remember now, but think Unix V variants also presented similar if not the same issue as BSD

not recognizing any kind of vhd on ao486 i mean

[hollow ice]

yeah, I really think it is just setting up the parameters and responses correctly….once I figure that out I suspect a lot of these hard drive issues will disappear

I still hope to see nt4 without a separate ide driver

[void belfry]

almost there... fingers crossed 😄

and yeah, takes bit longer as the base image would as i have some extra basic stuff installed before

[void belfry]

so far so good

[hollow ice]

pretty exciting

[void belfry]

yeah 😄 for me it's like first net installs on high school's server. I'm gonna send this to my two IT teachers, one taught me assembly and C, the other one Unix/Linux/networking 😄

oh well, those almost 3 hrs were only for downloading the new packages, will wait and see for rest of the process

[hollow ice]

haha, good luck

[void belfry]

except some perl warnings about locale standard crap, it goes on smooth

IF it works, most probably won't bring me what I need (usable openSSH/SSL/etc), but bit closer and a nice exercise after all

[abstract condor]

Was there a Sparc station core at some point?

[void belfry]

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=4421

not official core yet, had some fun with it (need to revisit/play some more with it at some point)

[void belfry]

started around 5 PM, 4hrs and a half later and still going 😄

admittedly, 3hrs spent on d/l the packages

[strong yoke]

Very true to the era

[void belfry]

not much of a kernel leap, but will see

IF it works, ChatGPT gets a cookie from me, I was actually lazy search with it the latest supported versions for python/gcc/openssh and related packages on Debian Etch until it bugged me to try to go further than Etch.

[void belfry]

still going on, nothing broke so far

20 mins until 6 hrs of running the update 😄

for sure syslog will be fun to check at some later point

final push ?

[abstract condor]

That's going to take all night

[void belfry]

¯_(ツ)_/¯ never tried on an SX (and for sure not as wacky as ao486)

[abstract condor]

I did run Slackware on a 386 but never Debian

[void belfry]

me neither (on Debian). Slackware 4 distro (2.2.26 kernel) works, wish there was an similar online archive repo

had two segmentation fault error during upgrade but script went on, re-launching apt-get dist-upgrade seems to fis the issue

those segmentation faults occurred when processing portmap and ssh/openssh packages

took about 6hrs and a half to reach this, will see

[abstract condor]

Wow

[hollow ice]

yeah, definitely doesn’t have power management features 😄

[abstract condor]

It's an error you don't see every day, failed inserting processor

[void belfry]

and semi-failure, it doesn't seem to recognize the root fs

[void belfry]

yeah, i didn't do any cleaning on modules installed by default

apparently some issue with 2.6.26 kernel, but with the older 2.6.18 it works

[hollow ice]

interesting, that is my openstep/bsd issue

does it have any disk partitioning built in?

[void belfry]

bit of improvement :
ao486:~# ssh -V OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-5, OpenSSL 0.9.8g 19 Oct 2007 ao486:~# w 02:57:53 up 9 min, 2 users, load average: 0.82, 0.68, 0.46 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT root tty1 - 02:52 21.00s 1.33s 0.90s -bash root pts/0 192.168.100.26 02:57 0.00s 0.57s 0.19s w

[void belfry]

`ao486:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 2.3G 764M 1.4G 36% /
tmpfs 122M 0 122M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 672K 9.4M 7% /dev
tmpfs 122M 0 122M 0% /dev/shm
ao486:~# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 2621 MB, 2621251584 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 318 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e9db0

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 297 2385621 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 298 318 168682+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 298 318 168651 82 Linux swap / Solaris`

[hollow ice]

I meant from the error console.

[void belfry]

ah, didn't check

[hollow ice]

haha, I yell at my mister all the time: “you definitely can see the hard drive, what did you start to boot from?!”

[abstract condor]

Kernel: "I.. forgot how i got here"

[void belfry]

this looks fine too ... will see tomorrow more about it

[abstract condor]

Have you considered 720x480 btw? Our lord and savior

That font is suffering

[void belfry]

not for the moment :D) I try to stay focused on what it can run at least on basic level (CLI + networking)

[void belfry]

ahahaha, with OpenSSH 5.1, ssh connections FROM ao486 running Debian TO MiSTer ARM linux side are working now !!!

[abstract condor]

Awesome

You now have a really slow Linux box 😬

But still, cool

[void belfry]

no clue yet why 2.6.26 kernel doesn't work, as long as of now with 2.6.18 and the new Lenny packages gets me closer to have a stable Linux install

[abstract condor]

hmm

[void belfry]

the boot sequence might take a bit longer than W95, might compare it to as WinNT 4 boot time. Afterwards, it is quite snappy, could do even some DOSemu crap

still working to get a stable X config, but that again is kinda last on priorities until I get it stable enough

[abstract condor]

Yeah just like with NT4, you're not meant to reboot often

I remember the Sun boxes taking absolute ages to boot

[void belfry]

well, inbound and outbound ssh connections are working now, so high time to relax a bit on MiSTerFPGA IRC before closing 😄

and ofc, the joys of multi-tasking and even romote admin 😄

and with this, I'm done experimenting for today :))

[strong yoke]

I remember that being very true to the era too, breaking boot on kernel upgrades a lot in 2.1x and 2.2x

Unfortunately I only remember the annoyance, not any fixes

Probably involves building your own kernel with some added modules/drivers. Which probably takes about a week on ao486

[void belfry]

What I actually didn't try and is by far simplest lol: just to install Debian 5 directly (or with PCem then hope to boot on ao486) 🤨

[void belfry]

@hollow ice this happened while booting and also transferring some ISOs via sftp on MiSTer 😄 didn't break anything, just waited for the damn transfer to finish

[void belfry]

lol, was too tired last night to get the full message 😄 that image is actually taken via capture card, it does some scaling by default, I didn't actually dig much into those settings as I take screenshots with it mostly for troubleshooting

[void belfry]

Debian 5 (Lenny) different live ISOs does not seem to work directly on ao486, so PCem way it will be 😄

[hollow ice]

no drq after multiwrite is weird…I really need to graph out the state machine

I haven’t made my way through the base ide identification packet, but in the packet identification packet some of the timing expectations were left blank, maybe the DRQ wasn’t raised in time?

once I get further along in my work, I’ll get one of those images and play with it

I am still trying to figure out the handoff between bios and controller….do you know maximum support hard drive size of the debian you successfully installed?

[void belfry]

not a clue... i only made 2.5 GB images so far, but since Etch is using ext3, I think it can go up to 2 TB in theory, but iirc ao486 can use up to 130 GB smth

[void belfry]

now that I have a base image with net support as template and a 2nd one with more tools/compilers/utils/audio/other networking stuff in works, will also have a look on recompiling the kernel to get rid first of some unnecessary modules and will see how it goes from there

[tall grotto]

Do not recommend transferring over SFTP, to be honest at all ever if I can avoid it. It's stupid slow and hits CPU harder than most protocols because of the encryption not really being optimized for fast file transfers.

Definitely recommend either Samba or FTP instead if its on your home network

[void belfry]

since I don't move around that much data, is ok :)) main reason actually is that I use SecureCRT/FX bundle and by default I make all my connections SSH2/SFTP 😄 in very little cases I go over SSH1/telnet/ftp/rlogin etc to bother lowering protocols/cyphers algorithms etc if not really not necesarry

[tall grotto]

what client are you using?

[void belfry]

https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/

I know it is overkill 😄 But that is my fave terminal, been using it for a very long time, mostly at job actually 😄

[tall grotto]

Can't really vouch for that one. Most people recommend WinSCP or FileZilla

The MiSTer has had issues with various tools so.... could just be teh one you're using doesn't like it

or vv

I use Directory Opus

[void belfry]

I can 😄 from a network and security engineer point of view, that is one of the best (if not the 1st) paid tool bundle to have. Very versatile on protocols, supports as well a lot of scripting languages and much more. But clearly overkill and not a good investment for home use (unless your boss/company buys it for ya 😛 )

[tall grotto]

I could say ditto for Directory Opus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K57m_Ogy8Lg

[void belfry]

DOS Navigator and Midnight Commander for life ! 😛

[tall grotto]

Hate to break it to ya but Directory Opus has more features and is 4 years older than Midnight Commander.... and it is still in active and healthy development

It's also resource light, and provides all its features via a command line for use externally

[void belfry]

https://tenor.com/view/thanks-tropic-thunder-rdj-gif-11188303

[tall grotto]

suite yourself... you may be surprised what you see if you bother to watch teh video at all 😛

[void belfry]

I trust you mate, but old habits die hard lol 😄 and yeah, still watching/pausing it as I jump bak and forth to my trusty SecureCRT connected to Debian on ao486 to install/check packages

[tall grotto]

hey I appreciate you at least humoring it 😛

[void belfry]

I know DirOpus fromm Amiga lol

[tall grotto]

Fair enough. Haha

it's hard to show everything this has so... I've yet to find a single summary, video or article, that does it justice tbh... lol

But it's a culmination of everything from regex renaming to TeraCopy, FTP and remote file transfer on acid, 7z/rar's accessible like folders, meaning you can directly copy to and from them and FTP or remote locations, as well as write scripts to manipulate them for you. Secure deletion, music tagging, symlinking, image conversion with good algorythms for shrinking/growing (also scriptable), and file syncing/comparison be it remotely or locally (with byte checking or date/size, and filters, etc)

I mean it's fine ... I get wanting to use what you're comfortable with. So I'm not going to keep pushing this down your throat haha. But I couldn't live without it now.

[void belfry]

Same way I feel about this Secure CRT/FX bundle 🙂 even wrote at some point an "interface" for my scripts (mostly data gathering/network automation), with an installer to adapt to my sessions and custom generate the final version adapted to each user

and yeah, because I could, embedded some music file to loop during install 😄

[tall grotto]

sounds fun haha. I wrote a script where I can drag an N64 rom on a button on the hotbar, and have it detect the CIC type and then send the proper command to have it transmitted to my 64Drive flashcart haha

This was before a tool was made that could autodetect it, because the official command line tool requires you to manually supply the CIC type

technically I could have made a right-click custom entry instead with DOpus but... never bothered xD

I've never touched on DOpus's dialog script features tbh

it does have them though

[void belfry]

yeah, it was fun doing that some years ago :)) I'm a lazy man, if you give me smth that can be automated, I prefer to spend several hours researching/making some automation (scripts, whatever helps) than doing any kind of crap repetitive work

[tall grotto]

Yep... I love tinkering xD

[void belfry]

when you need to deploy some crap in a large network, we're way past of tinkering, it's survival mode 😄

[tall grotto]

agreed lmfao

[void belfry]

and due to the miracle of remote access, the same is applied on ao486 😄

[tall grotto]

sounds fun. I guess I've always just used KiTTY

Kind of boring I suppose

I spend some time in the terminal for my headless servers but I've set most of it to maintain itself

I don't do it professionally for work

just hobby servers 😛

[void belfry]

"fork from version 0.76 of PuTTY" --- hope they upgraded the code since, as Putty 0.76 is vulnerable to MitM and some other crap

I remember this sh1t (0.76 putty) as I argued and won over to some managers who insisted on having opensource free stuff, some years ago.

[tall grotto]

Thanks for the notice... would seem it may not have: https://github.com/cyd01/KiTTY/issues/520

[void belfry]

while for personal use I am all in for open source, when it comes to corpo crap I do want to have a paid tool (even if just for worst case scenario to have someone to support you or to blame for, depending the case lol)

[tall grotto]

I would care more if it was for professional use for sure

[void belfry]

well, since the company graciously bought the tools on my name with their $$$, who am I to complain and not to use them to the full ? 😄

[tall grotto]

lol

[void belfry]

speaking of terminals, at some point I need to retry to compile Syncterm (excellent ANSI/RIP/etc capable terminal) on Debian Etch/Lenny

the best (still maintained afaik) for connecting to BBSes from more modern OSes

for DOS/W95/NT/OS2 the classics like Terminate, ProComm, RIPterm and whatever I forgot to mention are the best way to enjoy that kind of activity imho

[hollow ice]

not cool-retro-term?

[void belfry]

lol, never heard of that until now 😄

[hollow ice]

sadly, looks abandoned

[void belfry]

since I could run/upgrade (some, not fully tested) packages from Debian 5 using the Deb 4 kernel... I am thinking now to just keep this kernel for time being and see where/how further updating of (some) packages will go. Beside the crap with removing bloat modules/other stuff

and at a much later point to try to also upgrade the kernel

hence I now keep track to almost all packages I install, versions, keep them at minimum etc.

[void belfry]

hmm, from time to time (several hours, didn't log it exactly) it drops the ppp connection. Another point to investigate/check logs/tshoot etc at a later point

Damn, this is old 😄
ao486:~# apt-cache madison openssl openssl | 0.9.8c-4etch9 | cdrom://[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r9 _Etch_ - Official i386 CD Binary-1 20100523-00:54] etch/main Packages openssl | 0.9.8c-4etch9 | http://archive.debian.org etch/main Packages openssl | 0.9.8c-4etch9 | http://archive.debian.org etch/main Sources

[void belfry]

Think I solved it by commenting out "lcp-echo-interval" and "lcp-echo-failure" in /etc/ppp/options after checking the logs:
Aug 7 05:08:02 ao486 pppd[2819]: No response to 4 echo-requests Aug 7 05:08:02 ao486 pppd[2819]: Serial link appears to be disconnected. Aug 7 05:08:02 ao486 pppd[2819]: Connect time 55.6 minutes. Aug 7 05:08:02 ao486 pppd[2819]: Sent 276473 bytes, received 2381202 bytes. Aug 7 05:08:08 ao486 pppd[2819]: Connection terminated. Aug 7 05:08:09 ao486 pppd[2819]: Hangup (SIGHUP) Aug 7 05:08:09 ao486 pppd[2819]: Modem hangup
Will see if it holds, then at some point make a nice clean /etc/ppp/options file to expedite the connection process from Debian end

[void belfry]

sound seems to be working now as well

[hollow ice]

that great, I guess the next step is figuring out xconfig?

[abstract condor]

I want to see you launch a discord client, @void belfry

[hollow ice]

haha, electron on a 486 would be miserable

[void belfry]

for the moment I want to try to upgrade openssl and related. Lynx and W3m are working, but can't access any modern https yet.

[void belfry]

too bad we don't have an IRC - Discord bridge 😦

[void belfry]

also trying my luck compiling this 😄 https://fsv.sourceforge.net/screenshots/

added GTK+, will see how it goes

[void belfry]

apparently it still happens, but now from ARM Linux side, I'll see if disabling "lcp-echo-interval" and "lcp-echo-failure" there too will do the trick. From my understanding, if for some reasons the peer does not respond from time to time (mostly happened during some high CPU/downloads/apt-get stuff) it ends the PPP

[abstract condor]

That's nuts

[void belfry]

now that is working at default, the real nightmare begins, to actually make it more usable, higher res, some desktop/window managers apps and so on 😄

Gnome/KDE are out of the question, would just insanely crawl to no real use

[abstract condor]

Maybe try emwm

[void belfry]

#1047332497492553799 message ---there were quite a lot of them :)) IceWM or JWM might also work, as I have then running on the Slackware 4 distro (2.2.26 kernel)

[void belfry]

will see, now I have to backup at every important modification lol, I already trashed several VHDs before 😄

otherwise, CPU load seems ok, will get some more bloat soft/modules/etc out at some point later

Also need to tinker more to load ALSA SB16 drivers at boot, atm I'm ok it works. Heck, I could even play an mp3, admittedly at half speed, didn't went yet to lower bitrate or anything which might actually make it play properly (like on Minimig)

and yeah, my MiSTerFPGA is called Neo 😄

[void belfry]

struggling a bit 😄 go go go, you can do it lmao

hmm, might be too much or smth still missing/wrong in config. after backup, will check some others before any deep dive

spoke too soon 😄 it bloody works lmao :)))) not at all as fast as on Slackware though 😄

for sure those widgets and whatever else stuff don't help

[void belfry]

@hollow ice wasn't paying attention for the beginning of this issue, I was doing apt-get install smth via remote ssh console, while also uploading some VHDs to MiSTer and doing some RL crap :D))) anyway, I'm seeing a pattern here (will check whatever logs I have later)

[void belfry]

E: Couldn't find package emwm : maybe I need to search for package elsewhere ?

all my work (for now) is based on what I can get from Debian Archive repo

[void belfry]

now you can on ao486 under Debian Etch as well 😛

fast enough too I would say, considering we're still on ao486 and the OS itself is from 2007 smth

moving the mouse over whatever window activates it, I so dig this 🙂

[abstract condor]

Yeah it's too new probably

[void belfry]

http://xwinman.org --- long dead site, but preserved on WebArchive, I get some inspiration from that too

I remember some more mainstream ones, but not that many lmao.. think I toyed at some point as well with AfterStep one back then