Computer Cores

[limpid tiger]

Isn't question marks due to a missing ROM ?

I don't remember

[spice hound]

I have a problem with the DOS core. It is so buggy. Why is it when it comes to saved games for any game it is super buggy?

Is there any way, a safe-way to avoid corrupting your saved game in DOS games in misterfpga? Secondly. is the only way to quit a DOS game is by power cycling misterfpga?

[void belfry]

Stop thinking about ao486 as a console. It is a computer recreation, MS-DOS being just one of the supported OSes. When it comes to saving, each game is different on that (different menus, folders and so on, because ... shock and awe.. those are PC games). And ofc, quitting a game is also different, sometimes is just the Esc key, sometimes is on some menus, combo keys and so on, recommend reading game manual. Power cycling the fpga is the same as power cycling your PC and not having your game/work/whatever saved

My advice is to take some time and learn how to install/operate MS-DOS/older Windoze on ao486, then the games themselves. There are plenty of docs/infos starting from this channel/MiSTerFPGA forum, as well with quite a plenty of YT videos, mostly done by our colleagues here as well

While ao486 is for sure not a perfect recreation of a "common" 486 (not that there were much of standards those days lol), you can't just throw out it is buggy because you most probably only used "consolized" ready-to-use VHDs floating around

my 2c

[idle thunder]

Thanks will find it and add it in.

[spice hound]

lol! I think you threw 100 dollar bills and not 2c!!

[light hound]

I'm sure you are young, those of us who were born in the intel 80xx era have msdos in our blood

[spice hound]

I was born in 1979. Thank you 🙏 for the compliment

1st computer I owned was apple //c

Then c64

Then MSX

Then Atari

At age 12 I learned dos on a 286 on my own

Figured how to rename and delete files too

Then moved to windows 3.1

Enjoyed windows 95

Then 98 me

And the story progresses

But I am young , thanks 😊

[summer dragon]

@spice hound are you making sure to bring up the OSD menu at least once after saving your game and before shutting down the MiSTer?

I guess I’m not totally sure if that’s necessary for ao486…I do seem to recall there are some games where I had to fully exit back to the DOS prompt or else my game save wasn’t there when I went back to it later (at least I think)

[woven lava]

for comptures cores on MiSTer, there may be some minor delay for disk write buffers that needs to clear. So the safest way to quit a computer core is to load a different core first.

that will clear the cache and finish writing anything left

as for how to quit a DOS game, reset inside the core if needed - but usually there is a way with ESC or some other function key

its not the same as power cycling the whole device, because the MiSTer firmware is handling it

[spice hound]

thank you all for your reply

I love my misterfpga so much

best purchase ever

[woven lava]

also remember the old three finger salute (which I always think was "borrowed" from the Apple II).... Ctrl + Alt + Delete

that should also safely reset the core

well - the whole PC really (it's OG behavior)

[void belfry]

Sorry if sometimes I sound harsher than i really intend 🙂 While I can perfectly understand that our time is generally limited and not always we have the luxury to re-learn the quirks of old OSes on different core and therefore totally get the need for somehow "consolized" ready-to-use VHDs, I am still a strong promoter of DYI. Often the whole journey experience of (re) discovering how it all worked back then is more rewarding.

Sometimes useful too. As in RL I work now with OT networks/equipment , I had the very nice surprise to discover some old QNX stations still working in some networks I work with 😄

[abstract condor]

OT?

[void belfry]

Operational Technology, namely HMIs, PLCs used in plants, production lines etc

you would be surprised how old are some of the technologies/OSes/devices and whatnot still in very much use today in the industry

since they need to perform just one task without issues in a very closed system, there was no need to change

but even those age by either silicone or software and aging of former seniors on those systems. So it's either changing all completely or adjusting modern tech around the existing infra

and that's how I got acquainted with a still in use QNX 4 system at one of our customers 😄 I had a very nice convo with the only maintainer of the system, he was very impressed with the fact I managed to install it on ao486 lol (he's 5-6 years to pension 🥳)

[void belfry]

damn, forgot how straight in yo face was BitchX

[lament raft]

Has anyone added a HDD clicker to their MiSTer? https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-clicker-v02-restores-aural-ambience-of-pre-ssd-life

[rare plume]

If you have an io board there should be led headers you can plug into. Pretty sure that thing is based on hdd led activity

[copper slate]

Damn that’s wild. I love just how inventive and creative hardcore retro fans are!

[jolly kraken]

I actually quite like that. We should have something similar for CD drives for the MiSTer too

[opal void]

speaking of inventive and creative retro stuff, not related to the AO486 core, but is there anyone who is interested in joining a community run ITX-Llama?

[woven lava]

thats interesting but I wish the sound was diferent/customizable. I remember HDDs on Macs where the sound was less a click and more of a beep

[thick pendant]

My MiniMig 1.1 has support for just putting a piezo buzzer for floppy sounds, and its very cool. it was a little loud so I just covered most of the hole with tape.

I can't stand the floppy noise that Amiga Forever has... floppy sounds out the speakers really annoys me

[valid dune]

I was messing around with the Apple II core and I was excited to find GEOS for it, the same program that was available for the C64. The program works fine but needs mouse support. It would be great to see the mouse supported on the core...

[jovial mesa]

Looks like my github ticket has been ignored.. anyone else try suoer bunny on apple ii
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Apple-II_MiSTer/issues/31

[woven lava]

I replied to your issue

it's a game-specific behavior - not so much a bug of the core

[jovial mesa]

Ok great. Shame it can't be played without a real controller. Can't configuring controller fix this, wether analogue or digital?

[woven lava]

actually it may be the same with real hardware. I'll give it a try a bit later today

AppleWin has an option to adjust the X axis. Super Bunny faces right with a +1 adjustment but then you end up with the opposite issue

i.e. you always face right even on "idle"

so maybe the game was witten that way?

for Sneakers, I can get the ship centered with a -55 adjustment (!) which is a lot

[jovial mesa]

I've never had a problem with the game under emulation in the past. If you could check that out that would be great

[woven lava]

if an emulator sets the center X axis to 128 (instead of 127) then you will probably get the behavior that you expect

[woven lava]

it actually happens on real hardware - sent you a more detailed answer

if no objections I'll close the issue given it behaves identically on real hardware

[jovial mesa]

Understood. Closing it is fine

[woven lava]

it was good to test it anyway, so thx for raising it

[dawn cove]

Does the ao486 core work okay on a consumer Trinitron CRT? Or better on a modern display over HDMI?

[lament raft]

I don't know if it will work at all at 480i?

[dawn cove]

I have an old dell CRT but not any space for another CRT right now

[lament raft]

Oh is it a VGA Trinitron?

[hollow ice]

I don’t think the ao486 core works well with direct video? Something about how it is forced to go through the scalar no matter what? Someone more informed would be best to answer that question though.

[lament raft]

I don't think it supports direct video.

[rare plume]

ao486 requires the scaler, so a modern flatpanel TV or 31khz PC CRT (with an HDMI to VGA cable or Analog IO board) will work fine if the MiSTer is outputting 720p

[fleet cave]

I just went to a website where the normal annoying 'do you accept cookies' modal popup was in the style of Borland turbo c/pascal dialog

[hollow ice]

jetbrains?

[dawn cove]

okay i love the look of CRT but i'll use a modern display when i try it out. Maybe eventually if i get a second setup i'll try the dell crt

[lament raft]

How risky is it connecting Windows 95 to the internet?

[limpid tiger]

Well.. it's more a question of how capable you need to be in order to get it to do anything

[lunar trellis]

Do you mean in terms of viruses and malware? I wonder if modern ones would even work on old OS, I have no idea. Would be ironic if it were safer to surf on an old 95 machine although I imagine a lot of pages won't load as you need a modern browser

[tropic latch]

it definitely feels like it would be the most vulnerable part of whatever networked you attached it to

[lament raft]

I mean in general. Watched a video recently where someone exposed a Windows XP VM to the internet without a firewall and within minutes it had malware. They did the same with Windows 98 and it was fine. I didn’t know computers were that at risk without even browsing dodgy sites.

Just dunno if I can trust the networking layers between Windows 95 on a MiSTer and the internet? Would the Linux host act as a firewall?

[fleet cave]

are you putting your mister on a public ip?!

[lament raft]

No? Lol I dunno.

I mean using the dialup via UART.

[abstract condor]

There was an airline that still runs their systems on Win3.11, they survived the day of the bluescreen

[strong yoke]

Turned out to be a myth, that one

Instant myth generated on the spot, to take the piss out of the airline in question

[abstract condor]

Noo!

I refuse to accept that.

[void belfry]

worst case scenario you'll infect the W95 VHD, though i kinda doubt it is easy doable tbh (remember the internet access will be extremely limited to some old HTTP only websites, some IRC channels who still live) , unless you specifically search/compile old sources of viruses... Otherwise... use Linux if it makes you feel safer 😉

planned at some time to re-compile some old virii sources under ao486 to see how they go lol

[weary umbra]

Well, for one, "exposing an OS to the internet" means running it directly on a public IP address, accessible for anyone in the world to connect to. This is not the way people ran their workstations or home computers, even back in the day. Much like today, your machine would get access to the internet through your household or company router/gateway appliance, one that would essentially prevent/block incoming outside (WAN) traffic unless for connections initiated from its local network (LAN) or specifically allowed in the settings (ie by port forwarding or "DMZ" settings for specific machines in local network). Enabling such settings was rarely done by regular users. So, in default configuration, your router/gateway appliance would protect you from hostile advances from the internet (to the extent that its own OS was capable back then).

Second, old OS versions' vulnerabilities and attack vectors are fairly well documented, to the point that it's extremely easy to exploit them within minutes using scripted/automated set of commands. This should include all past versions of Windows. The reason that Win 98/95 was seemingly spared might have to do with ancient software stack. It is probably very difficult to maneouver in such environments and make any sort of useful actions to further the attack (thinking of outdated HTTP connection libraries or SSL/TLS software stack). Not to mention ancient hardware that they most likely run on -- I mean, even simple MP3 decoding could have been sort of heavy on the resources back then. So there's very little to gain.

And finally, the Win XP video does not actually show any root cause analysis AFAIR. More meaningful way to go about this experiment would have been to utilize some sort of packet sniffer or packet capture software to analyze traffic. My guess is that the machine exposed a RDP (remote desktop) port, I remember it was a very convenient point of entry back then.

Just my 2c.

Sorry for the wall of text.

[lament raft]

Thank you for the wall of text!

It's interesting and answers some of the questions I was pondering.

Tangential question, but maybe someone here knows, my router's firewall is enabled but the default filtering rules are ambiguous. From what I've read, this is just for requests initiated from within the network right? And all requests initiated from outside would be blocked?

In other words I'd use these rules if I wanted to block some device on my network from accessing the internet (like restricting access to Reddit or whatever), and not for configuring what I want to block coming in. I feel like that would be a really bad default if it was open to the web.

My DMZ is disabled.

[weary umbra]

It's called "default policy", and yes it should pertain to outgoing connections (can't tell without looking at the complete configuration interface of your router). Meaning when devices on local network (LAN) connect to systems on the internet:

• "allow" means allow everything except what I define to block
• "deny" means block everything except what I define to allow

And then the rules should be added to block/allow specific services (again, depending on this setting they're either blocking or allowing).

Connections from outside are blocked by default, and I believe they are configured in a separate page of the config interface (see if you can find something like "port forwarding" or "dmz" in the config panel, but don't touch if you don't know what you're doing).

[lament raft]

That makes sense! Thanks so much for the info. Poked around the forwarding section and everything seems to be sensibly configured by default.

So who dares me to put my MiSTer in the DMZ? Haha

[exotic prairie]

So I'm not asking where, I am just asking for proof of life. Do any games for these grant searle computer cores exist? I can't find anything about them because grant's site no longer exists?

[void belfry]

This discussion about ao486 networking reminded me I have to resume at some point the DOS multiplayer over the internet t-shoot (#dev-talk message) 😄

[strong yoke]

Mild dissent: in the “I have a modem in my machine” era (90s) you would have an actual Internet IP address if you had a good ISP and not AOL or similar

And back then I would have to rescue friends-and-relations computers occasionally from being violated within 2 minutes of dialup connecting

But you won’t get that now, in ao486 or making a retro machine at home - they’ll be hidden behind your router’s NAT

[void belfry]

In theory, given a decent router/fw (and by that I DON'T include most of ISP free ones or whatever cheap "easy-to-use" crap is in market today) you could port forward/access list traffic let's say SSH from outside to MiSTer core IP (usually .254), assuming ofc on core's end we have a service listening on that port. But the openSSH (and SSL ofc) versions used by both Debian 4 and Slack 12 working on ao486 are deprecated long time ago. Still toying with the idea of trying to compile bit newer ones, as well with getting Gentoo connected with ppp

had at some point some fun in my LAN connecting from Slack 12 (and Deb 4) to a Win11 machine running Ubuntu on WSL2 (and vice-versa)

but i had to manually permit on my SecureCRT sessions older cyphers and on WSL2 side as well ofc (at least on Debian tests)

115200 baud is also not that much speed in today's world, but for a small BBS hosting... might be actually doable, again given bit of extra security care/decent firewall etc.

[void belfry]

anyway, if anyone wanna help out progressing on DOS multiplayer gaming over internet (DOOM ofc is the prime candidate) lemme know. My lab network is still a work in progress, so can't really use a decent router/firewall other than ISP's crap though yet 😄

[fleet cave]

even in the initial cable modem days they didn't give people routers. a lot of places just plugged you directly into the modem and you got a public IP address. I'm not even sure we really stopped doing that due to security, more that IANA started encouraging NAT so you didn't need an entire /16 for your user IP pool

[strong yoke]

Fun fun! I think we missed that here in the UK - or at least I did. We went from 56k modems to ADSL2 (well, I went ISDN inbetween because I'm a huge geek, but that was rare), but I intentionally skipped all the cable companies as they were primarily TV and the internet stuff was a side business that they did really badly

So I'm not sure how naked they presented your computer to the internet

[fleet cave]

one cable ISP my friend and I used left default snmp community strings on all the gear. we had per-port/ip bandwidth monitoring of their entire network and when someone would start taking up so much bandwidth it would degrade the entire service we'd knock them offline via targeted ping of death

[strong yoke]

We'd do that to people in the college dorms until everyone settled down a bit and managed their bandwidth 🙂

[weary umbra]

Aye, totally forgot how me and roommates used to share the connection: one's laptop would plug into the modem and share wirelessly. We had a party when we upgraded from 256k to 512k.

[thick pendant]

I used to have a little subnet with ascend pipeline isdn router. Had a Amiga, and a few PCs live on the internet.

A lot of early internet apps did not work properly though NAT

[copper slate]

If it can’t NAT, give it the bat!

[void belfry]

Compiled SyncTerm 1.0 BBS client on Debian 4, runs ok under X (in this case jwm) on ao486, including zmodem transfers. Still need to fiddle a bit with tty consoles to get ncurses working right

[void belfry]

Also FSV ("It's a Unix" GUI appearing in Jurassic Park) running on Deb 4 on ao486 (well, kinda crawls actually but still)

Sources here: https://fsv.sourceforge.net/

had to compile both Syncterm and FSV actually under PCem, direct under ao486 fails with different gcc internal errors (segmentation faults, some CPU traceback smth and so on)

[void belfry]

takes 5 mins minimum to change a folder lol (depending on its number of files) and redraw it , but still funny it works lol 😄

[hollow ice]

Haha, yeah. This is UNIX! I know this!

[void belfry]

Wanted for a long time to compile/test this lol (well, didn't actually thought it would be ao486) 😄

[void belfry]

Also high time to annoy/confuse the audience 😄

[hollow ice]

That is one way to get the Amix experience!

or is this your hot take that 486 > 68040? 🤡

[abstract condor]

Numerically it isn't

[hollow ice]

Depends on the benchmark, sometimes lower is better 😉

[void belfry]

beautiful 🙂

to my surprise AmiWM is actually the most responsive wm on Debian 4 on the current state of ao486 i tested so far

[void belfry]

so yeah, pretty cool i'd say

and just why not adding DOSemu in the mix ? 😄

[hollow ice]

but can it run doom?

[void belfry]

will see at some point 😄 on my to do list lol

[thick pendant]

see if the dos emulator can run 3dmark 🙂

[void belfry]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOdR9kpj3sM&ab_channel=ctrl-alt-rees

I know I tried at some point some versions of RedHat too, think those bombed out with the IDE issue.

Have to re-check that 😄 would be nice to have it running on ao486, we ran it at some point on school's server (well, we changed several lol, including my copy of FreeBSD i won at some contest, as both teachers and us students loved to experiment)

[void belfry]

will see 🙂

also on my list is X11 forwarding 😄

[void belfry]

under dosemu 😄

[void belfry]

almost there :D))

[void belfry]

it runs under X 😄 on tty was a no go atm.

And by run i mean crawl, 1-2 FPS probably 😄

[void belfry]

reducing window size, details etc won't help either 😄

10 mins already on the demo, just reached this mob. But nice for screenshots lol

[void belfry]

watching it in slow-mo is quite funny at some points 😄

while it's fun with DOSemu and all, will see about Doom ports on Debian of that era (if any) to get a more playable Doom

[void belfry]

about one hour later it crashed whole X 😄 somewhere after that section in the demo

[void belfry]

And thanks to slow-mo, though I ran countless times Doom 1 demo on whatever platforms/OSes, now I know you shoot first the imp's buttocks before taking the definitive shot 😄 And yeah, I do realize how it sounds (and many neurons went useless with this info) 😄

[hollow ice]

Doomguy shot first!

Also, that is pretty hilarious. I didn’t expect it to work at all.

[long token]

I've been trying to get Basilisk II working for a couple of days and keep failing. Got it installed and following all the guides, but for some reason I just can't ever get it to launch; I always get a Cannot Open ROM File error. Am I missing something obvious? Got it in the fat/media/basilisk directory and named in the preferences file. I've been drawing a blank. Anyone else get stuck at this step?

[void belfry]

I... just can't simply believe it would be THIS simple 🫣

and to think the idea came from ChatGPT, I was actually searching to compile the whole damn thing 😄

[woven lava]

I've been trying to use the Mac Plus core instead... works OK for what I want to run at least

[void belfry]

Prboom on Debian 4 🙂

[hollow ice]

Haha. At least it runs better than dosbox

[void belfry]

For sure would run better windowed/less details. I'm simply amazed Debian still has this on its online repo for older versions

So, performance aside, Linux on ao486 can run Doom 😄 See LxDoom below

[void belfry]

Surprisingly, lsdoom runs extremely fast on a tty console, but it flickers the screen like hell (and I do mean it, caution advised !)

Hah, LxDoom works ~~nice ~~ amazing 😮

[void belfry]

and what a nice nostalgia trip on end 90's/early 2000 sites this whole experiment proved to be 😄

Also this experience is a very first for me as well, I have never played ported Doom under Linux (only kinda always knew in the back of my brain about it, but never really went on compiling or even as simple as package installing it). And funny it had to be ao486 core to make me go into another rabbit hole (as usual by now lol)

[void belfry]

And be nice to the grandpa of our future overlords, you never know 😄

though I wouldn't quite call it perfect setup. yet.

[thick pendant]

Did you get a mac rom and name it "MAC.ROM"?

Maybe try a LCIII rom

[hollow ice]

I wonder if aa-lib doom/quake would run

[void belfry]

you're pushin' it 😄

[hollow ice]

haha, I remember running ttyquake on my pentium; can’t remember if I ever used one of the aa-lib doom ports

[void belfry]

Pentium being the magic word 😛

[hollow ice]

you let doom run in an emulator in an fpga recreation of a 486 for hours…..I’d be willing to bet pentium isn’t a blocker 😉

[void belfry]

for quake i mean

[hollow ice]

oh yeah, definitely not. I just can’t remember if I ever used any of the doom source ports with aa-lib under linux back then….I was too cool for doom around that point 🤡

[void belfry]

now I want to try PoVRay under Linux, like I did in end 90's lol on school's server (#1047332497492553799 message -- had some fun with it on ao486 already under DOS)

[void belfry]

grr, still most of source compiling fails at various stages on ao486 directly, mostly with Segmentation fault types errors. Ofc, on most cases, I copied back the VHD to windoze and compiled whatever under PCem

hmm, seems like restarting it goes bit further each time.... intriguing (and do mind I am a frigging noob lol, so mostly I am also learning things)

and for sure not the best test case either 😄

I so have to google this 😄

dang it.. should not have done this

and still goes on..

never got this far on the core alone, but admittedly I also quitted those tests after just first error and rather did it on PCem with a better Pentium 120 setup emulation

"watching" this process in a SSH connected terminal going on is absolute bliss

GO Make, I trust ya !

I blame all on @hollow ice ! He made me do it ! I was innocent ! 😄

[void belfry]

**make **still going (had to restart it two times, like **configure ** before lol), would be amazed it will finish, then make install. Don't care it won't run, just wanna see it compiled 😄

ok.. 3rd restart of make, keep on going buddy

[hollow ice]

haha,

that would be pretty ridiculous

[void belfry]

aaand it craps out here no matter:

I will try next smth I actually compiled on PCem and runs fines on ao486, Syncterm 1.0

[long token]

Seems like that worked! I was going with Q605.Rom as seen in the example prefs, thought prefs just had to match the filename

[void belfry]

mkey, that Quakeforge failed to compile at same point on a Pentium emulated machine in PCem .. lol

[void belfry]

having fun with a friend (and colleague) 😄 (and helping him with a constant source of traffic for his tests)

So yeah, I guess this is also a first when I use MiSTer to help out in a real life use case too

ofc, I could have used any modern linux machine (WSL included), but why not, especially if conveniently slow to keep it just generating traffic, but fast enough for remote management 😄

[jade flame]

Hello everyone, sorry to ask…
I would like to know if it’s possible to implement audio input (even mono is enough) on Amiga Core to use with music software like ProTracker and Octamed ? Or emulation via usb sound card for input, but directly usable on the Amiga side.
I know that sampler is done through the parallel port, it would be great since we have digital output and the MIDI already !
I notice that with the Amiga Core, there is some king of noise on the digital side that we don’t have on other cores, possible to fix it too ?

[hollow ice]

talk about the worlds most arcane hacking tool

[long token]

I figured this out. Classic pebkac.

[abstract condor]

I wonder if the ADC board could be used for this.

[jade flame]

I read something about the ADC « onboard », they say that it’s not suitable for audio signal since it have only positive and not negative.
But why not « offset » the ground for example at 2,5v, 0V will be negative and 5V positive. I just put the values like that, I don’t even know how this ADC work, just a exemple.

[abstract condor]

Yes that should be possible.

I'm not sure what the sampling resolution is

[jade flame]

I think it’s 12bit from what I read somewhere, it more than we need for Amiga.

[abstract condor]

Yes it will be enough for 8 bit biased input

[abstract condor]

I'm not sure if anything else might be a problem though

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Minimig-AGA_MiSTer/issues/127#issuecomment-894792101

Sorgelig is/was open to accepting a pull request to support this

It would require external level shifting though

Or a mod to the adc board

[obsidian kelp]

would this work for protracker?

[jade flame]

Good news if this can be possible !

[void belfry]

almost there but don't have right now the will/time to dissect dosemu, so why not wine ? 🍷

[void belfry]

Confusing enough pic ? 😄

to those who wonder, just lost first Solitaire game I played in Wine since 20+ years ago 😄 performance wise is actually very good under AmiWM

[hollow ice]

you got daliclock!

oh wow, that is struggling….

[mint mesa]

nice work

how do you get networking to work on linux in ao486?

[void belfry]

Via PPP with pppd /dev/ttyS0 115200 noauth defaultroute & 🙂 For Debian 4 I had to install PPP from install CD, on Slack 12 you can select it during install process

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=89322#p89322

Also changed nameservers in **/etc/resolv.conf **to use Google's 8.8.8.8. As for Debian, since it still maintains its older versions repo online, I changed also /etc/apt/sources.list to reflect those links :
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ etch contrib main non-free deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian/ etch contrib main non-free

[void belfry]

Still have to re-visit Gentoo. Iirc I managed to compile the kernel with ppp support, but still have to get the package itself installed

[void belfry]

this will be fun 😉

[abstract condor]

You're going to explode it

Dond do id

[void belfry]

povray I kinda expect to work, I ran its DOS version a while ago. Would be interesting to see performance differences. As for openvpn, don't have much hopes, just as adjacent fun test while I help a friend test his setup with normal h/w lol

[strong yoke]

Back in the day I'd have my 486 doing 10-100 hour pov renders. That's crazy to think back on.

[void belfry]

yea, did the same (well, mostly on school's server as it was a Pentium 120, upgraded at some point to a 200smth)

[robust monolith]

tupid question, the cpc core, even when selecting 6128 in the settings. Reset. It's still cpc64. I know if's something obvious I'm missing. thanks!
Change the boot rom?

[sterile ether]

Do you have all roms for each cpc version ?

[robust monolith]

I've got boot.rom, I assume I need something else?

[sterile ether]

Try with this ext rom

[strong yoke]

No links to copyrighted materials thanks

[sterile ether]

Amstrad gave permission for the CPC ROMs to be distributed freely as long as the copyright message is not changed and that the program acknowledges that Amstrad still holds copyright. Locomotive BASIC is copyright Locomotive Software.

[strong yoke]

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AsnNM-hItJM6mecsLqaguTYfC8iMWg

Ok!

[robust monolith]

Yay, sorted. Thanks @strong yoke !!

[strong yoke]

Thank Breiztiger 😉

[sterile ether]

You can create sure pack for each kind of cpc computer

[lunar trellis]

Could these extra files be added to the release folder?

[wispy shadow]

I think there's a tendency for learners to dismiss something as being esoteric when it's too hard for them.

I do wonder if we will ever get a PC98 core. There's a lot of games on there than I'm dying to play on my MiSTer, everything from Yu-no to Touhou 🥵

If there's any dev wanting to make a core, I can help with translation and tracking down hardware and whatnot if need be. It seems there's a few of us here in Japan, I'm sure we all would be willing to help out to some extent.

[rare geyser]

it is easily the highest intersection of "desirable to see" and "plausible to make" out of non-existent MiSTer cores rn to me

@wispy shadow i do think you should reach out to puu and see what he might need, given that you're in Japan and can contact him in Japanese. his blog is reasonably active (he posted a week ago)

btw, since people have mentioned it: what is wrong with the X68k core currently?

[limpid tiger]

I don't think anybody knowledgeable enough has made a list. And most people aren't knowledgeable, so they may report issues that aren't actually issues.

Needs somebody like @brave mason to identify what's right/wrong about it

[rare geyser]

that makes sense, ty

[void belfry]

this will take a while for sure 😄

[void belfry]

i'll let it run for a little while, just curious if it outputs smth (as I mostly clicked/add .pov files/used modeler on the blind due to low res :D)

[brave sentinel]

How involved is it to get apple2 games to run? I kinda wanna try ultima but I'm also not willing to put much effort into it. 🙃

[copper slate]

I think there was a mister pack for it on archive

[karmic fog]

nearly all apple II disks you just put the disk in and (re)boot and it runs

it's very easy

[rare plume]

check this out (when/if archive is back up)
#1269857027077705729 message

[brave sentinel]

Thanks I'll try 👍

[rare plume]

it's pretty cool - has an interface for searching and loading games within the Apple II itself

[exotic prairie]

Oh nice!

I was just using the htdb pack

auto-booting and search is 👍

[void belfry]

😴

[copper slate]

he’s hacking again

[void belfry]

quite curious on final image (don't wanna cheat to render it on a normal pc lol)

[woven lava]

let me know if you need help. I love the Apple II

for simple action games, look up the Total Replay HDD pack

but for more complex games (adventures, RPGs) you will need the disk versions

[hollow ice]

3 days to go?

[void belfry]

¯_(ツ)_/¯ depends on how complex it is (and size ofc). on this one, first 60smth lines were rendered in about 2 hrs as not much going on them

probably would went bit faster if I didn't also display the image while rendering and maybe run it from cli (though AmiWM is extremely light and fast)

[void belfry]

yeeey, bit more than half rendered

[void belfry]

progress :))

[strong yoke]

Just like 1993 all over again

[hollow ice]

Hah, cinebench for mister sure does take a lot longer to run

[void belfry]

170 lines left 🙂

[grim current]

Hi everyone, do we have a solution to download the 0MHz DOS collection since the internet archive is not available?

[sudden ice]

No

[silver echo]

Hey all. MSDOS 6.22 installer locks up on me on the A0486 core. Following guide at https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2021/02/06/mister-ao486-core-part-1-dos-quick-start/. Also tried freedos which installs successfully to HD but then locks up during boot. Is there recent tutorial that I should be following?

[exotic prairie]

IA is back up, but still no Amigavision :/

[wind dew]

I can get to Amigavision

3.7gig file correct?

[exotic prairie]

that's the old release. they updated on the day that IA went down

or, that was the plan

[fleet cave]

IA is in read only, so they can't update yet

[exotic prairie]

ahh, I wondered

[hexed latch]

Yeah, that’s my guess. The release was planned for the 10th, but IA went offline in the morning. So, I’m pretty sure they were never able to upload the newest version.

[void belfry]

almost there 🙂 last lines should render faster, not much color/objects

[void belfry]

and there you have it, first povray image rendered under Debian 4 on ao486 🙂

[scarlet spear]

Download this torrent.

[grim current]

Thanks!

[scarlet spear]

I'm rechecking the files and it'll be available in little to no time

Just rename the zipx files to zip (2 files, one for update and one for manuals).

[exotic prairie]

You may want to delete that. Cant share copyrighted files here, friends

[scarlet spear]

Done

[exotic prairie]

Just getting to it before Robby comes crashing through to door with dad jokes

[hollow ice]

Now it’s time to render big buck bunny.

[void belfry]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKFS2bsBp7o&t=1s&ab_channel=thera34

[hollow ice]

Sure, you can play it on the mister, but can you render it? 😄

[void belfry]

life is too short for that 😄

[abstract condor]

You know what this means

Autodesk 3d studio for DOS

[copper slate]

lol what are those objects. The left one looks like a pacifier.

[waxen brook]

Anyone know what the best option is for playing Wing Commander on MiSTer? 386 core or Amiga CD-32 version?

[exotic prairie]

cd32 version doesn't work yet I don't think

Sega CD?

[hexed latch]

CD32 version works, according to the compatibility Google Doc

Also, I think only Wing Commander 3 is available on Sega CD

Oh, I guess the first one is

OH

I was thinking of the 3DO

[exotic prairie]

oh nice, I was thinking of an older list I guess. I would say the amiga one then, yeah? assuming cd audio not working is not a big deal

[hexed latch]

There are no reported issues

There is no CD audio in the game, apparently

[hexed latch]

Checked some footage and the CD32 indeed does have no CD audio, so no voice acting. If that’s something you really want, play the Sega CD version.

If not, looks like the CD32 is your best bet.

Something to not about the Sega CD version

Apparently, it has a lot of slowdown

However, looks like the Sega CD version is still worth checking out, if you want to hear the voice of Liquid Snake (Cam Clarke) as the commander.

[waxen brook]

i saw how slow the sega cd version runs on the recent MVG video, no way im playing that mess of a port, even though the voices do sound like a neat addition. thanks for the info on the cd32 version! I'll give that a shot and hope flight sticks work with it, otherwise the tried and true 386 version

[fast kraken]

WC3 works fine on ao486 iirc

it was in flynns pack at least

[hexed latch]

Oh yeah, he did make a Wing Commander video recently. I need to watch that.

[vestal goblet]

he doesn’t mention the DOS4GW exception message when exiting

Privateer was my absolute fav, never did get into Privateer 2 tho

[woven lava]

I wanted to like Privateer 2 but it just felt like a weird Star Trek episode

really loved Privateer 1 though

[exotic prairie]

2 is the one with christopher walken, yeah?

[void belfry]

simple spheres/torus/some others. I didn't check this particular pov contents 🙂

15 hrs for this one

[copper slate]

It’s smiling at us!

[hollow ice]

Pretty great, although did you just prove that povray predicted the future? The camera is a pretty familiar modern rectangular shape with a flash in the upper corner….

[abstract condor]

Amazing, both your patience and what our little machine can achieve

[void belfry]

still cooking 🙂

[abstract condor]

My god, it even does refraction

Is there anything the MiSTer won't do? (given enough time)

[void belfry]

yeah, povray is pretty cool 😄

[void belfry]

running XP (yet) 😄 I tried lol

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=7979

[weary jasper]

normal speed Fallout and stable System Shock come to mind 🫠

[void belfry]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZTJgbiP2IM&t=24s&ab_channel=thera34 --- funny thing, I actually fully completed Fallout 1 on ao486 (twice, as first time i doomed Shady Sands, the Hub and the Followers), back in the end 90's my DX4 was just a vey bit faster on this game

[weary jasper]

wow, that's actually smoother than i imagined

[void belfry]

play it under Win95, works ok-ish, as in the video capture

[weary jasper]

ah good to know

[void belfry]

under DOS, it has sound issues as well with permformance

[weary jasper]

i got a lot of the 0mhz games and amigavision set up, so i'll keep that in mind

[void belfry]

but: under DOS you can see the videos, under Win you have to skip them as they will lead to errors

[weary jasper]

small price to pay lol

[void belfry]

yeah 🙂

I also played a bit of Fallout 2 (the village area), but that is bit more slower than Fallout 1

[weary jasper]

nice

[void belfry]

#1047332497492553799 message

[weary jasper]

my mister to-do list is so long, but i love building out the collection with all the potential i would want for a lifetime 🙂

[void belfry]

my advice: use 0mhz and amigavision just until you learn/re-learn how to DIY install OSes/games/etc. You can get a lot of infos from this Discord or forum, after that, sky is the limit 🙂

[weary jasper]

nice, thanks! yeah my level right now is the idiot proof set up things 😆

[void belfry]

we all been there, so feel free to ask around 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mx2x5Zc-zo&t=2s&ab_channel=thera34 -- also not that bad performance too

there is a certain NT 4 vhd on a certain archive site that is under DDOS now unfortunately 😦

hint "MiSTer AO486 Win NT 4"

[weary jasper]

cool

my friend had a gaming pc growing up, my family just had win98+

i remember duke nukem, but not a ton of that era

[void belfry]

you were cool, I had a 486 DX/4 with 12 megs RAM and 272 Seagate HDD (still have this HDD and still working lol) since 96 till 2002 or smth 😄

[weary jasper]

at school we had apple 2e, but it was all edutainment games lol

[void belfry]

we started at school with 8086 and gradually made it to a Pentium for server and 486es for stations

we never got Amiga, MSX, C64, Apple etc. We had until '89 some clones of clones of Speccy, then switched to x86

I really need a second MiSTer to test out more multiplayer/net gaming stuff lol 😄

[void belfry]

new batch 🙂

[void belfry]

this should be nice, will see in the morning how it goes

[abstract condor]

It kind of hurts knowing we can render the same scenes in realtime in a shader on a low-end GPU

[void belfry]

~30 years of tech leap 🙂

[abstract condor]

Yep

30 years of leap didn't improve me.. I'm more obsolete now.

Tech is lucky.

[void belfry]

anyway, i didn't rendered much of the povray examples included in the default install yet (a few under DOS) and now under Linux for performance comparisons. And never on a modern system, just to resist temptation and let the 90's mix of frustration/hope/joy/banging head on wall feelings all over again 😄

while I play last Yakuza game on xbox 😄

[abstract condor]

There is indeed a lot of time to kill while waiting

[void belfry]

next week gonna push it to OpenVPN 😄 waiting for a friend of mine with a lab to be back.

well, this fun is also have a real purpose, we are installing/testing Splunk and other net/sec solutions and actually ao486 with its 11 KB/s connection is a good traffic generator

because it is slow, easy to spot/monitor/tcpdump/etc 😄

yeah, i guess this is a travel back in time in some way 🙂

[mint mesa]

this looks fun to port https://github.com/m1geo/BE6502-FPGA

[copper grail]

Even as a real-time hologram: https://youtu.be/oZFSyDfiVEk?si=bzSmTI2cMJexH0r1

[strong yoke]

Ooh, very nice

[copper grail]

Thanks! It was a fun project, but way more work than I anticipated 😅

[strong yoke]

I remember seeing it at the time and thinking "neat!" but the background stuff you've put together there is :chefskiss:

[copper grail]

Thank you! It was kind of a love letter to 3D computer animation (and the Amiga). Those early CGI videos made me decide to pursue a career in 3D graphics back then.

[strong yoke]

I only knew about half of it, which is way less than I'd expect 👌

[copper grail]

Cool to hear that. Sometimes you expect things to be somewhat commonly known and they turn out not to be.

[spice hound]

I have a question for zx spectrum next core. There is this game: https://technoshedsoftware.com/product/xeno-brigade-extinction-physical-release-preorder for zx spectrum next physical addition. Is there anyway if I buy this game can work on MisterFPGA?

[abstract condor]

I'm starting to hear 90s techno

It's trippy

[void belfry]

about 9 hrs or rendering each. Not that bad tbh

need to track down some extra povray include/libs files, then I'll try to render Amiga Juggler (or an aproximation of it)

[void belfry]

https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=39993 --- my fave back then (still is lol)

#1047332497492553799 message --- XTC-Play was my main player back then, fun to see it running on ao486 (also used my very own copy from original HDD I had back then, a 272 megs Seagate)

[void belfry]

this goes quite fast 🙂

I will settle at some point to a single one to render at what MiSTer wallpapers resolution usually are, gonna be the final povray test on ao486. It will for sure take a lot of days, need first to finish a bit of my lab with a some UPS as well

for now, doing just speed comparisons and exploration of the demo files

[abstract condor]

Nice stuff

Wallpapers generated on the MiSTer.. just feels right!

[void belfry]

i know, right ? 😄

#1047332497492553799 message -- This is also fun (and slow in the same time ofc)

FPU (emulated one, Q87) helped A LOT

[void belfry]

interesting, CPU usage almost never go beyond 82-88% under Linux, always have a small margin to multitask

swap is never used also, another thing to get rid off

besides thermal/fan sensor processes (and whatever else bloat)

[void belfry]

5hrs 48m 9s 🙂

[void belfry]

atm 1 line every ~20 mins 😄

[hollow ice]

Wow

[gloomy bolt]

Dunno if this will help anyone, but I wrote a small powershell script that MGL-ifys HDFs in a directory and pointed it at the Arquavista drop on everyone's favorite recently restored internet hangout. It takes the hassle out of D88 loading and speeds everything up dramatically... it's sort of maximum effort for a semi-dead core, but I did find it made life easier. Not all games work, of course. But that's just the incomplete core.

(Requires games/X68000/HDF directory with Arquavista hdf files as named in the archive placed directly into that directory)

[robust monolith]

@void belfry That DE10 must be on fire running for so long!!!! Interesting stuff! Thanks.

[summer dragon]

not asking for anyone to share obviously, but…I have an old X68000 starter pack that was on archive that seems to be gone now….I swear I heard that pack got updated at some point? Does anyone know if that pack did get updated or am I just misremembering?

[storm maple]

if we are thinking the same one I don't believe it was ever updated, no

[void belfry]

It's quite cool 🙂 Noctua is doing its job lol

[woven lava]

somebody please write an FPU to put the poor core out of its misery 🤣

[void belfry]

the IDE controller part has some issues too when it comes to Unix/Linux 😦

that is actually a blocking point, as there were quite a large number of Unix and Linux variants that ran without FPU on 386/486SX

[void belfry]

SCO most probably, BSD for sure (I found some old picoBSD floppy image that works just fine)

[void belfry]

190 lines left 🙂 as the image unveils (again did not RITM at all the povray source file), it has a lot of transparency, reflections and so on going on. Think it's gonna be the nicest image rendered yet

[fast kraken]

meanwhile i'm pathtracing cyberpunk at 60fps realtime 😄

[void belfry]

For Cyberpunk i have xbox 😄

[fast kraken]

the xbox version is pretty good but the path-traced mode is unique to pc and it looks like a game from the future

[void belfry]

I prefer xbox for convenience tbh

[fast kraken]

not to mention you could buy 2 or 3 xboxes for the cost of the pc required

[void belfry]

and for my Witcher 3/Cyberpunk/Wasteland 3/Yakuza needs, it's enough 😄

[fast kraken]

i just decided it was time to finally play cyberpunk this week (been waiting for polish since launch) and its absolutely blown me away

[void belfry]

hell yeah, it is an unforgettable experience

Nomad forever 😄

[fast kraken]

it looks like offline cgi a lot of the time, it really creates an incredibly cohesive image

[void belfry]

From time to time still going back to Witcher series as well (mostly 1 and 3 lol)

[fast kraken]

i might play the witcher3 after cyberpunk

i've never got into a witcher game before (bounced off all of them) but after cyberpunk i think i'm willing to give it some more effort

[void belfry]

you're going for a great treat, fully recommend the Witcher experience 🙂

but mind your choices throughout the game, just sayin' 😄 It has its unique way of bashing them (and their consequences) back to you sometimes in funny ways, sometimes brutal/plain in yo face type 😄

[hollow ice]

https://news.povray.org/irtc.animations/thread/<370644db.18204353%40news.povray.org>/?ttop=441032&toff=250 😉

[void belfry]

LMAO, I was thinking about that (also after watching **yesterday **this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTIHIlPn6Y8&ab_channel=HoldandModify) , with multiple networked MiSTers in mind

[hollow ice]

Haha, networked light wave? Will that run on an 020?

[void belfry]

i don't have a clue 🙂 but the principle stands. As well on link you sent me now

[hollow ice]

I’m actually surprised I hadn’t thought about that as soon as you started the povray stuff. I know several people who still have toaster amigas

[void belfry]

now this is a second reason I need a 2nd MiSTer box

[hollow ice]

Haha

“Recreating Battlestar Galactia on MiSTer”

[void belfry]

but for sure there are ppl here (I know some) who have multiple MiSTer setups and can try it out, would be happy to support

sneak peek 😛 now you can guess why it takes that long

[hollow ice]

Let me guess, there is also going to be light refracted through the wine glass visible on the table

[void belfry]

anyway, in theory with "minimal" effort a cluster of 254 MiSTers can be done 😄 That would be a sight to behold lol

[hollow ice]

Haha

[void belfry]

will wait and see 😄 no spoilers, no cheating on fast rendering on modern stuff

[hollow ice]

Yep, I’ve just seen enough povray to remember what was jaw dropping back in the day, so it needs light refracted through the wine glass 😄

[void belfry]

most probably 😄

I still need to test povray under Minimig, will go for same images I done under DOS/Linux on ao486

I know, comparing apples to pears and peanuts all in once in terms of CPUs/OSes, but still educative for me 🙂

[hollow ice]

Yeah, I’d be interested in seeing the 020s performance.

[void belfry]

it's the single core that can actually play mp3s 😄

[abstract condor]

When will you raytrace the new MiSTer logo for us then?

[void belfry]

one day lol 😄

[void belfry]

hope to track some of this ancient networking software, will see how much info/sites IA got saved

the more I think about it, the more I am sure it would work actually, at least from network perspective those frames info exchanged between server and client should be well within the 11 KBps

[void belfry]

ofc, 99.99% of the links (like from https://www.povray.org/resources/links/POV-Ray_Include_Macro_and_Object_Files/Include_Files/) are long dead, will see how much it can be recoverable from IA

https://tenor.com/view/running-home-bugs-bunny-jump-hiding-gif-8509983

[void belfry]

almost ready to test Amiga Juggler remake, IA ftw as always

[void belfry]

now it goes around 1 line every 10 mins roughly as it gets less objects to render

[lunar trellis]

Would am FPU in the core make what you are doing substantially quicker?

[woven lava]

it should, right? I think he is running the virtual FPU TSR

[hollow ice]

Ray tracing is pretty floating point intensive.

[void belfry]

yeah, it should. Under DOS I experimented last year with a software FPU emulator (Q87) https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=74388#p74388 , had very good results with fractal rendering (FractInt) and much more including some games fully working or running/accelerating some apps as well

[void belfry]

53 more lines left, 1 line every ~5 mins now

[void belfry]

40

Next, after I copy over some more include files will be this:

not a clue if it will work, I never got beyond simple objects in povray 😄

[void belfry]

unfortunately a lot are lost in time (this was supposed to host "Biowin is a graphical notepad (a toy ... a tool ...) for easy entering params and values to make bioforms with PovRay" )

or like that Exizt program linked by @hollow ice , still searching for it, but not that much hopes tbh

speaking of FPU (and/or emulators), QNX 4 has its own 387 emu which is spawned when running on non-FPU x86 machines. Too bad I can't really compare its effectiveness to Q87 or any other software emulators (being also aware of the underlining type of OS) as I couldn't find any port of existing rendering software I am testing under DOS/Linux/possibly soon AmigaOS (fractint/povray)

24 more lines 😄

[void belfry]

15 🙂

also live on voice chat channel

[void belfry]

10

65+ hrs of continuous rendering

also not so much heating @robust monolith 😛

not that I have ever encountered any of these kind of heating issues on any core whatsoever, and I do tend to push them to limits

5

4

3

2

[copper slate]

1

[void belfry]

not yet 😄 watch on voice chat 😛

and yeah, it's mirrored... temporary laptop, no OBS or whatever crap 😄

1

https://tenor.com/view/patrick-stewart-cyborg-serious-scary-gif-1000347867466686561

you have less than 4 minutes to comply ! you all be assimilated 😛

0

in roughly 5 mins a disturbing image will be displayed on this Discord channel, which only the assimilated ones can see. 🎃

[exotic prairie]

https://tenor.com/bfN25.gif

[void belfry]

tadaaaa !!! 😄

65hrs 30mins 59sec on Debian 4

[exotic prairie]

is that a 7th guest puzzle

[copper slate]

Oh no, you knocked a glass over!

[void belfry]

by the starting looks of it, kinda doubt it would be the Amiga juggler, but also might very well be some stuff I overlooked on my part (probably is)

[void belfry]

though i might be wrong, it is an aproximation after all. will see

mkey, my mind is starting to fill in the blanks

gotta admit that using AmiWM (besides being most lightweight/responsive window manager) is highly amusing to me when rendering a povray aproximation of Amiga Juggler 😄

https://discord.com/channels/647909397477195803/806940362899456031

from the looks of it, rendering is quite fast on this one

[void belfry]

getting somewhere

[abstract condor]

Looks like a juggler!

[void belfry]

yeah, i'm pretty amazed on resulting image tbh

and kudos to Bob Hughes who created this 🙂

[abstract condor]

Beauty

[void belfry]

took it 10 hrs 1 min and 58s 😄

[lyric breach]

Has anyone has issues with sound output on the MSX core from Molekula? I'm using a core from 23/07/02 via HDMI direct video into a RT4K.

[void belfry]

Minimig is definitely **THE **core to go for povray rendering !!! I am doing now an image that took around 15 hrs on ao486... 👀

will see when it finishes, but I guesstimate around 8-10 times faster

[abstract condor]

Whoa

[void belfry]

yeah, I'm really shocked 🙂 no wonder they used Amigas to render Babylon 5 and others 😄

[abstract condor]

https://youtu.be/drE6M2pZF98?si=3ktzVbQZcC4kRpPl

Try that on your Mac, Jack!

[void belfry]

one more reason to love MiSTer FPGA 😄

[abstract condor]

The funny thing is, the Amiga is apparently a very capable classic 68k Mac as well.

[void belfry]

yeah, I saw that Basilisk or ShapeShifter ran by some colleagues here

[abstract condor]

Yeah

[void belfry]

well, now getting MiSTer wallpapers generated by itself is much more feasible, will try higher resolutions after some more testing

[abstract condor]

You can probably run Lightwave on it

[void belfry]

yeah, still on my TO-DO list. which is getting longer and longer lol

[void belfry]

amazing difference 😄

[abstract condor]

Wow yeah

The x86 core in ao486 really isn't very good

[void belfry]

we can only hope it will get some more improvements in time. Still, a lot happened to it in these years and now we can have more options than DOS

[void belfry]

Minimig is a beast !!!

if networked Amiga povray rendering was/is possible, that would be an awesome achievement, gotta dig some more 😄

I'll do another test overnight with same image rendered under DOS on ao486, but I don't expect big difference between its render time and under Linux one

[woven lava]

Not apparently - I can confirm it runs a very decent Mac with a 1080p desktop

on MiSTer

@void belfry wait, so povray on Amiga runs better than on ao486?

[void belfry]

extraordinarily would be a better term 😄

[woven lava]

holy unoptimized core, Batman

[void belfry]

this image took 15hrs to render under ao486 on Debian (probably similar times under DOS)

[woven lava]

15 hrs to 2 hrs... wow

[void belfry]

yup...

[woven lava]

I wonder if it's because of PC vs. Amiga architecture; or because of ao486 being suboptimal

probably a bit of both

[void belfry]

i can't test on real HW 😦

[limpid tiger]

Doesn't POVray expect math coprocessor ?

[void belfry]

yes, but it will work (slower ofc) without as well

[limpid tiger]

Yes, like 7x slower

[void belfry]

well, I can guess Amiga with FPU would do wonders (not sure if it will fit ao486), provided someone will take the task of writing it

anyway, if someone around here has real H/W, would be curious about results (for both architectures)

last lines were speedy gonzales lol

but results are not the same... hmmm

[copper grail]

I still have my Amiga 4000 with 68060, PowerPC and CyberVision GPU, but it needs a new PSU.

For my first job back in the nineties, at a games studio, I used a Pentium Pro powered PC, with the DOS version of Imagine, and I rendered half a minute animations overnight (and then had some nice surprises the next morning: A power outage happened, disk was full, overwrite dialog blocking progress).

[void belfry]

nice beastie 😄

[copper grail]

Absolutely. And it earned itself back multiple times

I remember for my graduation project, a PAL resolution render could easily take 45 minutes per frame on my then 68040 powered Amiga 4000.

(also using Imagine)

[abstract condor]

The original ao486 author said the cpu core was a proof of concept and very inefficient

It's been mended a bit afaik but it can probably be rewritten with much better results, going by his words

[robust monolith]

t's pretty good for what it is, plays dos games, windows 95 games, windows 98 etc. Wish it was a bit faster though, like a 486 DX4 running at 100 or 120mhz if possible.

[void belfry]

smth is going wrong, I get noise/missing effects on rendered povray images under AmigaOS 3.2.2 ...

POV-GUI doesn't seem to work much either, though I have the proper MUI installed as well. Might worth checking on a previous OS version ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[woven lava]

yes.. unfortunately it must be a monumental task to write a 386 or 486 in HDL...

would be amazing if it was every rewritten, but I figure people will just port it to a faster FPGA and brute force better performance

[void belfry]

https://www.povray.org/ftp/pub/povray/Old-Versions/Official-3.1/Amiga/ - povamnfp.lha is the one you want for Minimig. Unpack it somewhere (RAM would be ok) and ran the install script

I'd be curious how it works under 3.1x, doing some more tests under 3.2.2 until I revive some of my older HDFs

btw, povray site can also be directly accessed from Amiga core if you have PPP enabled, so direct d/l is a possibility as well

not ok, even if it's partial image (ignore the bottom, it's not yet finished)

should look like this

so wth produces that noise, the install is default, include/povray files all the same...

[void belfry]

lol, tracked down Imagine 4.0 for DOS, will see if it even runs on ao486 😄

I imagine (no pun intended lol) it might ask for FPU, if that will be the case will see if Q87 will be up to the task

hah, was right 🙂

Q87 FPU emulator FTW !!! (also EMM386, with QEMM throws some DPMI error. 2nd note: run it with /NOXMS flag)

I have no clue what I am doing 😄

https://winworldpc.com/product/imagine/40

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=6639 - Q87 FPU emulator post. will update it with Imagine 4.0 after some more tests

For sure the first image rendered with Imagine 4.0 DOS version under ao486 core 😄

First time I use this software, so if any of you have older project files saved or have proficiency in this program, high time to test them against ao486

my best "artwork" is this predefined cow object 😄

[void belfry]

as stated before, Q87 must be patched to overcome the 15 mins demo limit (unless somehow you're the very few owners of this product lol, yet I failed to find one)

https://tenor.com/view/the-matrix-morpheus-red-pill-blue-pill-truth-gif-15865648232657580077

yeah... a front view of a cow with a huge hand in the mid. that is my finest art

[round token]

salamander

aaaaaaand that wasn't search....let's try again ☺️

[void belfry]

~5 mins to render this, but then again, I am just fooling around, everything on this is totally new for me

roughly 10 mins of hard labor (on the fpga side ofc)

[void belfry]

awesome, learned to move objects apart and set up a light source coordinates

the program itself is very responsive, rendering times of these extremely simple default objects are also fast (max 8-10 mins i would guesstimate). But then again, I have no clue on this, so most probably normal/complex scenes will take a long time to render

[abstract condor]

Cool

[copper grail]

The last thing I did with it was running it in a VMWare virtual machine (which makes it render really fast), to HD remaster a couple of animations I did at my first job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1_3lMvKANM

The coolest thing about Imagine is that it has lots of procedural textures (think of them as non-real-time shaders). I released a number of my own back then.

I must say I don't remember much of the details of how it worked, I used to know all the hotkeys by heart. I had to figure out the rendering settings again for the remasters. I still have to set all of that up again on my current machine to remaster the final one or two animations.

[plucky sleet]

Anyone know if there's work being done on the Ericsson portable laptop?

[abstract condor]

I'm sure somebody is still working on one

[plucky sleet]

Very cool, I'll look into it more, it weighs a tonne

[spice hound]

How do I set mister to be ntsc?

[chilly rain]

It's set that way by default, did you change it to pal?

Unless you are using a core that is defaulting to 50hz

Which I'm not aware of any

[spice hound]

Not really

It ia not a core it is the menu of mister that is doing it

Black and white and flipping up and down

[rare plume]

There's settings in the MiSTer.ini file

You can also set your video output type (Svideo/Composite, RGB, YPbPr)
YPbPr needs vga_sog = 1
All need composite_sync=1

FWIW I think the Amiga core defaults to PAL, but the AmigaVision menu is in NTSC and each games lists it's compatible output type in the menu

[void belfry]

My fix after an annoying work day

[abstract condor]

Nice!

[summer dragon]

anyone here know how to take a game that’s in LHA format and get it into the right format for working with the Amiga core?

[fleet cave]

lha is just a compression container/format. you just have to extract it first

you can do that on a pc even

[summer dragon]

ah ok…and I presume from there I’d have to make that into a disc image?

[fleet cave]

depends on what is inside of it

[summer dragon]

it’s this game called Mazezam

there’s only one download I could find…I think it’s freeware

[fleet cave]

oh wait

[summer dragon]

hmm there’s literally just a file in here called MazezaM with no file extension…there are also some .guide and .info files

[fleet cave]

I think in the amiga world a lot of the lha stuff was meant to be used with whdload

[summer dragon]

yeah

I wonder if I have to load it there first and then extract it from there or convert to a disk or something

[fleet cave]

I dunno that stuff is magic. maybe if you dig into amigavision you can see how that is setup

[summer dragon]

I’ve never used whdload, so i’ll have to look into that

yeah I was thinking about looking there too

[fleet cave]

or some european will wake up and know how to use it

[void belfry]

A. Extract the LHA contents on a PC and copy over to your Amiga HDF (Shared folder is a good solution). Then just double click MazezaM executable (the one you see without extension) from WorkBench (or run it from shell).

B. Copy/download the lha archive to Amiga HDF and "lha x Archive_name.lha DESTINATION:" it from an Amiga shell (or from DOPUS/DiskMaster if you use those as in here: https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=12186#p12186). I used this method, as my setups already has PPP so direct d/l from Aminet is easy as pie

[spice hound]

I have a confession to make that old guy in Amiga I found him funner, smarter and full of wisdom more than the guy representing pc or Mac

Infact I want to learn from him over the other two

[tropic latch]

I'm seeing gray haired old men who still skate and wear skateboard gear and it's very much just dudes who have been at it for decades but my brain still can't accept that this is how old we are now.

"what's that old man doing wearing skateboard shit?"

"Oh"

[exotic prairie]

Alert. We have been made whole https://mastodon.social/@amiga_vision/113461361753841683

[void belfry]

My very first mod and synthesize on a FPGA core 😄

So basically added a new PPP speed and ofc modified accordingly the MiamiDX config to reflect it. Compilation-wise was successful for Cyclone V family, just some warnings. Other than speed increase didn't test out anything else yet, but I don't think this changed anything other than that, my AmigaOS setup seems to work fine so far.

Again, this a very noob-ish attempt, try it on your own risk 😛

apparently MiamiDX supports also 460800 baud (other than custom), so will try that next

[void belfry]

hmm, it doesn't seem to like 460800 baud 😦 at least on MiamiDX, I don't have other TCP/IP stacks to test

If anyone is curious to test against other than MiamiDX (e.g. AmiTCP, Roadshow, etc). L.E. most probably not going to work anyway not going to work, will stick to the 230K one

115200 baud vs 230400 baud 🙂

[hollow ice]

Nice!

[void belfry]

I simply can't believe it was that easy fix on the Minimig.sv, but then again, it's first time I get my feet wet

[void belfry]

knew I went too far (and blindly), but still a fun experiment

[void belfry]

so far, 230400 addition in Minimig.sv works fine (expected that, as I have previously tested and posted the Linux side modification on /sbin/uartmode script here https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/advanced/computer/#cores-supporting-serial-connection). But since that file would be susceptible to be defaulted, think adding a new option in the core would be a more elegant solution

[void belfry]

I have zero exp on Amiga and its chips (think CIA was the one for serial stuff iirc), but adding 230400 baud option in Minimig.sv seems to do the trick well (and not to "hack" it via Linux as before). The question still is if it can do higher speeds ?

localparam CONF_STR = { "Minimig;UART115200:230400,MIDI;", "J,Red(Fire),Blue,Yellow,Green,RT,LT,Pause;",

the more I read on some Amiga forums, it seems to be kinda top speed achievable via CIA on most systems, please do correct/educate me

[icy obsidian]

hello all, i'm looking to buy a MiSTer to emulate amiga and atari ST for MIDI (octamed v4/5 on amiga and cubase 2 on atari ST)
i'm looking to just understand what would i need to get midi DIN in/out if possible

thank you

[thick pendant]

I just hard-code the uartmode shell script to do 230K for PPP if the corename is Minimig. I never could get 640 to work...

[thick pendant]

if you have a USB MIDI adapter you can typically use that...

I suggest Roland UM-ONE MK2

[thick pendant]

230K is top speed I was able to achieve.

[icy obsidian]

Again, I don’t want usb midi. I appreciate the suggestion but I don’t want to add another layer of latency just to translate it back to DIN midi

Perhaps I didn’t mention the usb midi in my original post sorry.

[void belfry]

Yeah, that was what I had before too, but iirc that gets defaulted on linux updates, hence I'm trying this small modification on core

[void belfry]

Seems to be the case, done some more reading/testing, so we'll have to settle to 230400 baud... Anyway it's more than most could dream back then lol

Let me know how the double speed core works for you, I didn't see any issue (don't think it breaks anything, after all just a menu customization)

[robust monolith]

BAck in the day, when I upgraded my bbs from 9600 to 14.4k I thought I was something, but 230k!!!! 🙂

[void belfry]

well, IMP3 (MOD internet radio for Amiga) works much better now, as well with normal transfers and whatnot (MUIMapparium, Amitube and the likes), no wonder here

[void belfry]

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=92202#p92202

[robust monolith]

Imagine if you could run a BBS at that speed, back say, in 89-92. You'd have Quartex, Fairlight, Crystal, Nemesis, and all of them knocking at your door wanting you to be their main HQ BBS!

[void belfry]

heck yeah :))

well, you can do it now on MiSTer 😄

I mean, would require some work on port forwarding/NAT, but think it's doable

I run IMP3 for over 5hrs now, quite nice to have it streaming background mod music

https://aminet.net/package/mus/play/imp3

I don't use AmigaVision, but I think it would work without issues (changing Miami's speed then amiget imp3)

[thick pendant]

If i go back in time, I'll make Commodore the new apple...

[void belfry]

Truly Amiga was ahead its time...

Need to update some software at least on communications/internet though, been two years since I updated most things on my setup

[void belfry]

will see if this works, atm just an excuse to see ao486 being cooked

and if it works, to make a comparison on highest speed achievable on different OSes via PPP

not much use (that I can think of right now) for DOS, probably mild on Windoze (not sure how much can it go), but for sure would be a nice gain on Debian (e.g. for installing from archived repo)

another point of interest at some later point is to downgrade the speed, I think (don't quote me on this) there are some OSes/clients who would require a lower speed (e.g. 57600 baud). But I need to recheck where I read that lol

btw, useful site: https://lucidar.me/en/serialib/most-used-baud-rates-table/

DOS no, NT 4 is also not having the option to go above 115200

and neither W95 or W98 know better, as expected

[void belfry]

and neither on Debian/Slackware so far...

[vestal goblet]

Don’t forget about The Humble Guys and Razor 1911 😉

[robust monolith]

Razor 1911, total legends, still today

[void belfry]

Awesome work, NetBSD on ao486 https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=8587

Really curious how our forum colleague did it 🙂

Now we have 19 Unix/Linux based OSes running on ao486:
**ELKS/Minix **- works as well on XT core, supports serial and SLIP connectivity. You need to modify MiSTer linux kernel for SLIP.
PicoBSD floppy - old BSD into a floppy image, more like a novelty, iirc it doesn't see/work with hdd images
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.
Debian 4 Etch - (2.6.18-6-486 kernel) working ! Also PPP and install/update over Internet via Debian archive repo mirror! WMs experience might vary, jwm, AmiWM are ok
**Slackware 12 **(2.6.21.5 kernel) - works fine, boot time and loading BlackBox WM ones are quite fast, ppp working, usable ssh (ssl still bit too old)
QNX 4.25 - works fine , supports PPP. Also its famous demo floppy disk works
Gentoo Linux - (5.15.11-gentoo kernel) Most modern Linux on ao486 I know to work
NetBSD 1.4M - not my work, boots very fast
FourEightySix Linux - a basic 5.14.8 kernel - boots extremely fast
**Mutagenix **- (2.6.18.6 kernel) - a Slackware based distro, boots, needs a lot of stuff removed
**PHLAK **(Professional Hacker's Linux Assault Kit) - Debian based (kernel 2.6.9) pentesting distro
BackTrack 2 (2.6.20 kernel) - Slack 11 based pentesting distro now known as Kali - after kernel recompilation to enable Math emulation works just fine
NetBSD 1.6.1 - quite fast, PPP is working as well, still working on X11 part
**NetBSD 2.0 **- - quite fast, PPP is working as well
TinyCore Linux 5.3 (kernel 3.8.13) -- quite fast, needs kernel/modules recompilation as well as remaking core.gz
SkatOS (kernel 2.2.26) --- floppy disk size Linux distribution which plays the popular German card game Skat
**ttylinux **(kernel 2.6.32) --- very small distro, net/ppp oriented, very fast
PiTuX --- floppy sized Linux with minicom 2.1, nice for connecting to BBSes
SHORK-486 --- kernel 7.0.6, very fast !!!

[robust monolith]

@void belfry You are insane, in a nice way, trying all this!! 🙂 Looks like you're having fun, which is the main thing. Very interesting stuff!!

[void belfry]

wrote a PM to our forum colleague, very interested how it was done 🙂

[void belfry]

i try my best (re)-learning old OSes and their networking especially 😄 and yeah, it's a great fun lol

NetBSD (actually most of BSD variants) are terra incognita for me, never had the pleasure of tackling much BSD stuff

[robust monolith]

Grabbed the VHD, thanks. I'll check it out tonight after work.

[vestal isle]

I'm the guy who added the NetBSD vhd. I've been trying to get 386BSD running, it runs well on qemu and bochs, BUT I can't create a disk image that works with MiSTeR 😫 . I was wondering why the ao486 core only opens vhd files and not .img or raw?

[white siren]

is there an oswarp image

[vestal goblet]

great to see QNX in there, was a totally mind blowing demo to see a full TCP/IP and browser on a single 1.4MB floppy at the time

wasn’t there a BeOS for x86 at some point?

[hollow estuary]

There was but it needs a Pentium or greater

[void belfry]

Rename those to .vhd, it should work. That's how I made Debian and Slackware work, first created a raw HDD image on PCem, install the base OS then rename and move it to MiSTer (https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=89322#p89322)

Also welcome to MiSTer Discord ! 😄

[void belfry]

Don't think anyone uploaded one on archive (I know I didn't lol, as I still wanted to polish it), but you can DIY prety easy: https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=46068#p46068

Couldn't make PPP work, though I tried countless times, including newer SIO drivers and so on, as well with finding a better video driver

[white siren]

ive never used os2/warp before so it's more of a curiousity

[mighty vault]

Does anyone know if there's a way to remap the mouse click to a button on my controller? I'm playing games from the 0mhz dos pack on AO486 and I can remap all the buttons except mouse click.

[void belfry]

Neither did I before 🙂 First installed and use on ao486 about 2 years ago

[vestal isle]

under the netbsd, if you want networking, add a file: /etc/resolv.conf with the contents: nameserver 8.8.8.8 AND start ppp with the command: pppd /dev/tty00 115200 noauth defaultroute&

[thick pendant]

yes, but that came out in like 99, so its probably not going to work well on ao486

[vestal goblet]

fair enough

[silver echo]

I see @void belfry posted instructions on creating debian stretch VHD on the forum. Was hoping to avoid the work and grab a pre-made VHD from IA or somewhere else. Has anyone uploaded?

[exotic prairie]

Does Amigavision have a discord?

Need some 0mhz x Tink4k help

[void belfry]

probably not 🙂 I need to re-do the base install, as my previous VHDs are not much optimized/cleaned of unnecessary stuff (unused drivers/processes/progs etc). Will see if I can get some time to do this over weekend (as well for Slack 12) with a base setup, including PPP and few network progs (like BitchX, naim, etc) as well as basic X so the user can install whatever WM or other programs

[void belfry]

I tried a while ago, it asks for Pentium right away 🙂

[void belfry]

wip

[feral dagger]

Don't suppose anyone has played Warcraft 1 and 2 on the ao486 core?

How does it run?

[void belfry]

very well. both 🙂

[feral dagger]

Oh sweet. I've not really played any dos games and Amiga stuff before. So I'm looking forward to trying out that 0mhz collection and Amigavision collection.

[merry valve]

@ruby bramble Is there any chance you could do Chuck Yeager's Air Combat? I tried and couldn't get it to work.

[ruby bramble]

I’m busy with other projects atm, but dm me and we can talk about potential solutions

[silver echo]

Trying to wrap my head around the PPP support in the a0486 core. Tutorial videos show a UART setting in the core configuration UI. I am not seeing this option. Did something change or am I misunderstanding some aspect of configuration?

[void belfry]

https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/advanced/computer/

Win+F12 to open OSD, right arrow to move to 2nd page

[silver echo]

Got it. Not sure how I missed that previously. Thanks, thera34

[silver echo]

Any recommendations for VHD management tools? prefer linux command line but open to any suggestions to simplify creation, population, resize, etc.

[twin kayak]

if you wanted a hardware emulated fpu for a dos pc core like ao4086, would you have to have 2 fpgas and plug them together?

[hollow ice]

I actually don’t know that a 486 can run like that? Intels 487 was just a full 486 that disabled the onboard cpu.

[copper slate]

new update to pc88 core - https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PC88_MiSTer/blob/master/releases/PC88_20241120.rbf

[sly crater]

Awesome!

[naive imp]

Interesting. Do anything fun and new?

[hollow estuary]

You can use dd to create vhd files, then the usual cohort of linux tools like fdisk (or other partitioning tool of choice) to do partitioning, mkfs and friends for formatting, I just tested out using kpartx to mount the image. For installing the OS if you want to use the actual installers then something like pcem, 86box, or qemu, although if you just wanted to dump a bunch of files into the image then I guess you could just loopback mount the image and copy everything across. Resizing I guess just parted

[copper slate]

i dunno

[waxen nymph]

It is more compatible with some games that weren’t working. I think disk issues fixed it.

[naive imp]

Any examples? For capture

No real notes with the core so it’s shooting blind. I had a prev vid made soon so I may open it back up with a few more examples

[waxen nymph]

King breeders maybe. Ask wark

I somehow only have one disk on my dev mister. Who knows where my entire collection of software for pc88 went.

@granite umbra

[granite umbra]

King Breeders before have track error now it goes in games.
YS1 and YS2 et Xak1 (2 and precious package still have graphical issues on intro)

Yosinda made plenty of improvements 🙂

[silver echo]

I didn't realize some of those utilities could operate on virtual disks. Thanks a lot for the pointers. I will experiment with them

[void belfry]

😏

[vestal isle]

I have been working on getting 386bsd running on the MiSTeR without success so far. I have tried everything I can think of, virtualbox and qemu run it fine, but the vhd's I create (and boot) won't boot on the MiSTeR. Any help?

[void belfry]

I would assume IDE related errors ?

can you share some sshots ?

[void belfry]

meanwhile, as I done PPP and SSH, much easier to remote install stuff on Deb 4, probably will finish adding them tomorrow and upload to IA (as well with writing a more verbose how-to for forum)

and yes, I did name my MiSTerFPGA "Neo" 😄

[vestal isle]

Ok, here is a successful boot from a vhd under VirtualBox:

but under the MiSTeR it says no bootable device when I try to boot the vhd, and the floppy image also says "Booting from floppy" and stalls.

[void belfry]

more packages to get tomorrow, calling it a day atm

[hollow ice]

@vestal isle I go back to looking into ide issues every 6 months or so. I was a bit surprised when netbsd booted because what you are seeing is more like what I would expect. The fault I believe might be happening is it is setting the SPT to a default 255, which overflows the size expected by the OS

I had intended to go back and add some basic VHD support (right now it just treats it like a flat file, so it ignores the configured footer) to allow for you to actually specify the hard drive configuration

but there are other issues as well that I haven’t traced down

I keep getting close to booting openstep and then something always comes up and steals my time away 😄

Newest version of netbsd should work, but it always fails after reading the drive header….I see the read requests, and the response of data, but it doesn’t seem to set the interrupt correctly because the OS times out waiting for the response

[fleet cave]

I bet a ton of vhds people are using on misters don't have the footer

[hollow ice]

yeah, that is why I hadn’t put the time in when it was available, I figured it would be a fight getting it merged

but that is really the only way to properly handle these finicky OSes

Openstep refuses to even get close to booting because of the SPT value default

there are a few CD commands that I had partially implemented that helped out modern NetBSD as well, but I got stuck at RAW TOC access

was just about to dig into that when I got sick, and then work picked up again

[fleet cave]

oh wait, the header has a cookie right? honestly I'm not sure sorg would push back against that too much. technically if a vhd DOES have the footer all the size/sector count etc calculations are "wrong" anyways

[hollow ice]

I don’t think vhds have a header, I am pretty sure it is strictly footer with a cookie

[fleet cave]

sorry, I meant footer

[hollow ice]

my plan was just to look for it, and read it if it existed

since the size calculations should take it into account if it exists, it shouldn’t get overwritten

[fleet cave]

it's not that big of a change, although it's one of those ones that feels like a big change because there's probably a ton of small changes due to everything just assuming 512 sectors

[hollow ice]

well, once I open up some free time, I’ll look into it again unless someone beats me to it….I think it has such a small use case (for us crazy people messing with weird operating systems) that I doubt anyone will 😆

[vestal isle]

I really want to run 386bsd on MiSteR hardware. Currently won't boot a vhd that works under virtualbox, and qemu.

[manic sluice]

Hi community! My Mister is few weeks away from getting delivered so I’m obsessing and researching more than ever since I’m really excited! Ihad a question as to the state of DOS games with the ao486 core, in particular to any experiences with Voljega’s ExoDOS converter w/ the Total DOS launcher VS the OMHZ collection. I’ve already have experience with ExoDOS so was excited when I learned about Voljega’s project. But also just learned about 0MHZ. I looked online for a comparison but couldn’t find anything. Just curious on people’s experience and pros cons of each method.

[rare plume]

0mhz DOS is 1 game per preconfigured hdd image setup where you launch them from the OSD, like a core. The games are vetted and should work on the MiSTer.

DOS launcher would be 1 big hdd image with a DOS based explorer. Since the hdd image has a single configuration since all of the games are on it, it could lower compatibility or ease of use.

Personally I like 0 mhz better on the MiSTer since it makes launching games easier and each game will work. MiSTer does not have the most powerful 486 emulation and the curated list helps set expectations.

[manic sluice]

I see thanks for the explanation. Am I correct in that this is that curated list of games on 0MHZ? https://github.com/0mhz-net/0mhz-collection/tree/main/mgls or am I missing something. Look like the last game added was 5 months ago

[exotic prairie]

there hasn't been an official release since....march? April. There are unofficial games that have been added - but the curated listed from the amiga vision team hasn't been updated since the initial release I don't think

And I believe they have said it's unlikely they will add games

[manic sluice]

"There are unofficial games that have been added " Besides adding my own games, and the Amiga teams curated list, is there an unofficial list of games that are working on 0MHZ somewhere?

[exotic prairie]

that script will actually download them

I think there is an option to download from the unofficial curated list too

but even that hasn't been updated since like mid april. if you search archive for 0mhz, you will get a bunch more games that, while not curated by the team, are set up the same way (launched from the OSD, etc)

[manic sluice]

This is excellent info thanks!

I see the the Space Quest series on the 0MHZ Github page! I think that may be one of the first PC games I'll boot up! Can't wait!

Of course I get the Amiga box art lol

[exotic prairie]

I am waiting on my mt32pi so I can finally experience the sierra games with a roland card. I remember seeing that in the setup options and always wanting to be able to hear "real midi music"

[manic sluice]

Exactly! I'm thinking about it, already have a Pi zero 2w, but I don't have a I²S DAC. I've some great videos on it. I especially like the the Roland MT-32 MIDI track for Police Quest 2! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjWTy-C2JKE

After hearing that again I definitely need to get that DAC now!

[exotic prairie]

https://misteraddons.com/products/mt32-pi?_pos=1&_sid=6cbddf023&_ss=r

[vestal cypress]

Why do the 0mhz collection point to these folders?

Shouldn't it be media/fat/games/ao486/albion.chd?

[exotic prairie]

no, it's actually media/fat/game/ao486/media/albion/albion.chd

the MGL assumes media/fat/games/ao486

[vestal cypress]

Ah

I will check my folder structure tomorrow

[void belfry]

mkay, almost done getting most of Debian packages I consider to have for a more than basic Debian 4 install (PPP, bitchx, naim, lynx, ncurses, dialog, X11 as well as gcc/perl/other dev tools). Writing some doc/forum post is the most difficult lmao 😄

[lunar trellis]

If the "official" 0mhz collection is set and won't be added to, would it make sense for someone to create a supplementary "0mhz Extra" collection that can collect every other game that someone makes a version of and that can be slowly added too over time?

[cerulean rivet]

I'm not sure the 0mhz collection manage the mt32pi midi music as well as the top300 collection (which has an automatic switch between the different config). I.e. monkey island intro music sound strange to me in the 0 MHz collection.

[lunar trellis]

That's interesting, not heard that reported before. Is your MT-32 Pi up to date?

[cedar isle]

I like this idea. For the sake of easy preservation.

[vestal cypress]

has anyone else been able to have both flynn'sbit and 0mhz collection at the same time

0mhz uses the same config for all games

does it interfere with flynnsbit?

I created an MGL to automatically configure the core for flynnbit but never tested it, specially not while having 0mhz at the same time

[exotic prairie]

Flynn is the top 300 games, yeah?

[cerulean rivet]

I don't know, i just try to configure the mt32pi option in mister a little bit. I think i heard a similar thing with a fixed image on the french discord server. I'm more in a playing period right now so i did not investigate further.

[lunar trellis]

Might be worth checking your MT-32 Pi is the latest version and if not update it, may fix the issue

[vestal cypress]

yeah he improves on them

[vestal cypress]

oh, so that means its not reproducible?

I was interested in an MT-32 pi in the future, saw that message and decided not to download the mt32 versions of the 0mhz, but if its only 1 user having the issue then I can get those as well

[exotic prairie]

Oh I didn't think they were still maintained. Interesting! I may have to track them down

[vestal cypress]

perhaps I miscommunicated, they are not maintained. Flynn developed his fixes to the top 300 collection then left it at that. the last update is from 2022. That is why I also use the 0mhz collection. that and because they focused on different games

[exotic prairie]

ahh, and top 300 is a hard drive image, yeah?

Great, now I’m going to spend the evening tracking this silly thing down

[vestal cypress]

I think 2 of them

the problem is that its not compatible with the 0mhz collection without a customer MGL for flynnsbit

[exotic prairie]

oh interesting

[vestal cypress]

so you need to find a way to change configs on the fly, so I learned how to do an MGL

[copper slate]

Yeah, just make an MGL for the Top 300 and you’re good.

[vestal cypress]

have you tried it?

[copper slate]

Yup, works great. The MGL just says to load a VHD along with the core. Best to do it with the Top 300 because every 0mhz MGL does the same thing.

[torpid vale]

Does anyone have the ao486.cfg file from the original Top 300 DOS games pack? My setup is acting a little wacky since I loaded the 0mhz pack and Im wondering if the cfg file had anything to do with it. Thank you very much

[torpid vale]

ooo timely, Im interested in an MGL if you have that too for the Top 300 pack

I guess I could just use one of the 0mhz MGL files as a template to make the Top 300 MGL

[jaunty iron]

I'm not sure what's up with the 0mhz pack config files, but when I use them it causes the ao486 core to just not load anymore. I had to delete their included config file, and things started working properly again.

[torpid vale]

Do you have the original cfg for the Top 300 pack???

Yeah probably makes sense to create a separate MGL so you dont overwrite configs

[copper slate]

Yeah that’s exactly why

[torpid vale]

The original AO486.cfg from the Top 300 pack does not seem to be archived on the internet. Does anyone have a backup copy or one that seems to work with it?

[fleet cave]

I don't think it required anything special other than setting the disks up?

[robust monolith]

Yes and it works fine, I kept a copy on mega untouched. 60gig 7z.

[opal void]

Top 300 pack isn't back yet?

[robust monolith]

Yeah ut doesn't as far as I know.

[manic sluice]

I’m curious what monitors people are using their computer cores with? CRT/LCD model, VGA/HDMI, etc. no wrong answers just curious.

[copper slate]

Regular HDMI with a computer video preset I made

[jovial flower]

Ya'll are really using 0mhz instead of building your own system? I guess it does make things easier for those who don't know how the old stuff needs to be set up.

I was thinking about building an image that people can start from. Wondering if I should go with a 500mb and rely on installing to secondary drives. Then I remember how much potential there is for anything outside the basic A, C, D configuration to cause random problems. 4gb seems like a happy medium between taking up too much space and having enough room to play a reasonable amount of games. Having said that, even if I were to post it somewhere I don't think anyone would find it useful, anyway.

[void belfry]

I made my own setups, tailored with my games/apps/dev tools etc. Since I need multiple configs (HIRAM/EMM386/QEMM/etc), went for DOS 7.1, pretty much inspired from @vestal ginkgo work, plus some other tweaks/changes.

Creating a VHD file with dd under MiSTer Linux side, then fdisk/format/sys it from DOS, then just copy over whatever I needed (QEMM, DOS, drivers, DOS Navigator and so on) is quite easy

My main DOS 7.1 setup is about 2 gigs, still have around 7-800 megs free, so I'm good

[jovial flower]

sure it's easy. for us. Because we know what we're doing. I guess 0mhz is the lowest common denominator way to help people who are not as experienced.

[void belfry]

yeah, I agree on that

But I strongly encourage people to DIY, DOS is really not that complicated. The only thing worth mentioning is having memory managers set up, with the ram block exceptions for MiSTerFS

and for that , there is plenty of info on forum/Discord/YT/whatever else sites

[weary umbra]

0mhz appeals to people running their Mister mainly for console gaming. I love the fact that it is actually more versatile, and allows one to build their own PC/Amiga/Mac system from scratch. Just like in the days of yore.

[feral dagger]

I like these compilations such as 0mhz and Amiga Vision as it's super simple. Just drag a few files over.

Plus I don't even know what games are good on Dos/Amiga/Commodore.

[woven lava]

if you ask you'll get plenty of opinions 🤣

[vestal cypress]

even in the days of yore I hated the amount of tinkering needed to run the games 😂

[vestal cypress]

say what now???? I guess it must be easy for some people

[hollow ice]

With the wide library of games, it actually acts as the anti choice- you spend so much time getting one thing working that you feel required to play it 😉

Or, treat it like most people nostalgic for the experience- slowly set up a library of 100s of working games and never play any of them.

Dos memory allocation is the real Tetris experience

[robust monolith]

Any of you geniuses know what is required to compile a MIST core for the Mister? I mean I can compile the code from the git, but the RBF it produces is far too small for the Mister - been messing with the TS-Conf, if anyone can do it - the mist core is more advanced than the mister one. Thanks - https://github.com/UzixLS/TSConf_MiST

[thick pendant]

you need to port the core to the MiSTer framework. you can't just compile it and expect it to work.

[robust monolith]

@thick pendant Aha, just reading up on it now. https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/developer/porting/

[lunar trellis]

Is this a MiST core we don't have?

[robust monolith]

@lunar trellis We've got it, just the Mist one is more improved. Both written by Sorg and others, so I would have thought it would have already had the code merged into the Mister one, if that's possible that is.

[fleet cave]

someone took the mister one and ported it to mist+made some improvements

[lunar trellis]

Ah OK, so someone "just" needs to port the changes back

[robust monolith]

Yes, I think so. Been reading up about how to set it up first before you port it with Quartix. I'll give it a shot tomorrow once I get my head around the example on the documentation.

[summer dragon]

yeah, I mean, I know how to work with DOS too, but I definitely prefer the 0MHz style of launching a game and jumping right into it

[copper slate]

Yeah I lived that in the 80s and 90s, it sucked back then and still sucks now. 0mhz removes all barriers to just enjoying the games.

I don’t want to ever figure out what my sound card’s IRQ is ever again lol

But it think it’s awesome that people can still do that and want to do that. It’s just not for me anymore.

[rare plume]

For some tinkering is the game

But yes these EZ packs are a delight and a good gateway into esoteric 80s and 90s computers (but I guess that's the MiSTer in general)

[lunar trellis]

Might be of interest to @waxen nymph or @chilly rain who keep an eye on MiST things

[waxen nymph]

Usually I would just diff and pull in a few changes unless it is brand new. If it is brand new I have a tutorial on my github / youtube

[thick pendant]

At one point I had a SoundBlaster Pro, Gravis Ultrasound and SCSI. Talk about running low on IRQs

[copper slate]

Haha damn! Well it felt pretty badass once you got everything working. Like you solved the puzzle.

[hollow ice]

Heh, you never got it working, that was the beauty. The next thing would come out and you would get an out of memory error and have to start over.

[chilly rain]

what is improved specifically? i perused it just now and it looks like they moved more stuff into ddr/sdram because MiST has less bram

maybe there's more stuff than that

also looks like they modified video out by moving it out of an altera ip block that inferred it into bram

hrm looks like jt12 was bumped and they modified a parameter in jt49... there are a few changes

there are quite a few modifications, maybe hit up sorgelig on facebook messenger and ask him if he wants to take a swing at it

he probably knows this core better than most

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/TSConf_MiSTer/issues/7

looks like they already requested it

read the comments and translate to english further down

almost all of it is up to date, some sound issues are still present

[jovial flower]

lol QEMM recognizes all 256mb of ram and gave me 1mb of swap.

[void belfry]

I usually stay in the 16mb area with qemm/emm386 managers, more than enough for most games as well for compatibility

[jovial flower]

I wanted the full 64 but emm386 wasn't giving it to me.

I was only getting 16 for some reason.

[void belfry]

DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS71\EMM386.EXE AUTO 32768 RAM FRAME=D000 D=256 X=CE00-CFFF I=B000-B7FF I=D000-EFFF I=C800-CDFF

you can play around with ram size, but yeah, not many apps/games will use that much. Don't really remember why I went for 32mb ems few years ago tbh (think some app needed it)

the most important config is to exclude CE00-CFFF , if not you'll have issues with MiSTerFS (think also accessing floppy iirc, but don't quote me on this, been a while since I made/refined my setup and it is working perfect for me since)

[jovial flower]

I have the exclude in. IDK if QMEM actually supports it for sure. Not sure what the point of the includes are. Oh, and I'm using dos 6.22. I'm in seattle so I'm doing all the microsoft piracy I can. Mouse driver pettiness as well lmao

[void belfry]

DEVICE=C:\QEMM\QEMM386.SYS RAM BE:N FRAME=D000 ARAM=D000-DFFF ARAM=B000-DFFF RF X=CE00-CFFF

for sure it will work the same under 6.2.2

[jovial flower]

DEVICE=C:\QEMM\QEMM386.SYS RAM X=CE00-CFFF is what I'm currently using

[void belfry]

`[MENU]
MENUITEM=HIRAM
MENUITEM=EXTENDED
MENUITEM=EMM386
MENUITEM=QEMM
MENUITEM=CLEAN

[CLEAN]
SET MEMMGR=CLEAN
DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\XCDROM.SYS /D:IDE-CD

[HIRAM]
SET MEMMGR=HI
DEVICE=C:\DOS71\HIMEM.SYS /Q /TESTMEM:OFF
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\HIRAM\HIRAM.EXE /Exclude=CE00-CFFF
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS71\SETVER.EXE
DOS=UMB,HIGH,NOAUTO
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\XCDROM.SYS /D:IDE-CD
devicehigh=c:\dos71\ansi.sys

[EXTENDED]
SET MEMMGR=EXTENDED
DEVICE=C:\DOS71\HIMEM.SYS /Q /TESTMEM:OFF
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS71\SETVER.EXE
DOS=UMB,HIGH,NOAUTO
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\XCDROM.SYS /D:IDE-CD

[EMM386]
SET MEMMGR=EMM
DEVICE=C:\DOS71\HIMEM.SYS /Q /TESTMEM:OFF
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS71\EMM386.EXE AUTO 32768 RAM FRAME=D000 D=256 X=CE00-CFFF I=B000-B7FF I=D000-EFFF I=C800-CDFF
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS71\SETVER.EXE
DOS=HIGH,UMB,NOAUTO
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\XCDROM.SYS /D:IDE-CD

[QEMM]
device=c:\qemm\dosdata.sys
SET LOADHIDATA=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.RF
DEVICE=C:\QEMM\QEMM386.SYS RAM BE:N FRAME=D000 ARAM=D000-DFFF ARAM=B000-DFFF RF X=CE00-CFFF
device=c:\qemm\dos-up.sys @c:\qemm\dos7-up.dat
DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /RF C:\QEMM\QDPMI.SYS SWAPFILE=DPMI.SWP SWAPSIZE=1024
DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /RF C:\DOS71\SETVER.EXE
SHELL=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.COM /RF COMMAND.COM /P /E:640
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /RF C:\DOS71\IFSHLP.SYS
DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /RF C:\DRIVERS\XCDROM.SYS /D:IDE-CD

[COMMON]
FILES=50
BUFFERSHIGH=35,0
FCBSHIGH=16,0
STACKSHIGH=11,512
LASTDRIVEHIGH=Z
NUMLOCK=ON`

I prefer a multi-menu , as different games require different mem managers

[jovial flower]

I think I only ran across it once or twice as a kid. Don't even remember what game it was. I do remember that the older the game, the more trouble I had making it run. We'll see how much of this I do once the USB connector for my saturn controllers come in lol

[void belfry]

when installing a game (from floppy or cd images) check the readme/help/manual included, most of them already have the required info to run them , how much conventional, EMS or XMS mem it needs as well if issues with different mem managers

iirc for example, Elder Scrolls Arena needs EMS, while Betrayal at Krondor uses XMS

Also, having a file manager (I recommend DOS Navigator, but Norton/Volkov Commander / others may be used as well), ease up things A LOT

[jovial flower]

I have Norton Commander, DOSSHELL, and fixing to instal win 3.11

[void belfry]

DOS Navigator imho is the best, it has a lot of built-in functions/apps, as well with possibility to use external ones for whatever files (like Turbo Assembler/Linker to compile an asm file, or whatever media app to open directly your media files)

but to each its own 🙂

[jovial flower]

When I did all of this for my pi, I did it to run a disc a friend found for me at a thrift store. I thought it was fitting given all the work it took.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python's_Complete_Waste_of_Time

[void belfry]

had at some point a RPI for emulation stuff, wasn't much fan, now repurposed as mt32-pi for MiSTer. As it should be 😄

[jovial flower]

I have a 4 that runs emulators. my 3 is now a mt32pi

[void belfry]

have several around (one 3 and two more 4s), until recent used one of them as https proxy/ssl offloader for Minimig/ao486 until I moved that stuff on MiSTer linux side

the rest of them are just small linux boxes for different projects

[copper slate]

r u a hacker?

[waxen brook]

https://spillhistorie.no/the-story-of-the-amiga-cult-classic-twintris/

[void belfry]

just an average 90's kid 😄

[chilly rain]

the shit we had to do to play video games on a pc back then

[granite umbra]

Updates
https://github.com/albconde/ZXNext_MISTer

[elfin oxide]

That new Next core works well so far

[idle thunder]

Does it update through update all ?

[elfin oxide]

No you have manually add it

its still only a WIP

[torpid vale]

Here is the original AO486.cfg from the Top 300 Pack in case anyone needs it. I recommend setting up T300 with a separate MGL file so you dont overwrite configuration files when installing the 0mhz collection.

[vestal cypress]

but how do you keep both configs at the same time? you would have to rename both and then rename them again with an MGL? or keep them on separate folders and point to them with MGLs?

maybe someone could suggest on the github the ability to have 2 config files

[fleet cave]

just make an mgl for top300, use <setname same_dir="1">top300</setname> and rename the config to top300.cfg

you can use whatever setname you want, the important part is the same_dir="1"

[vestal cypress]

ah, interesting

this one

like this? @fleet cave

[fleet cave]

yeah, I think so

[vestal cypress]

awesome, thanks

[idle thunder]

Good stuff next version of atic atac now works.Thanks

[tall grotto]

https://tenor.com/view/mars-attacks-martian-mars-attacks-gif-5841021

[sly crater]

Anyone had luck getting the DOS port of Rusty working? I found a 0MHz version but I get a black screen at boot

[gritty sun]

I tried a bunch, i don’t think it works

[sly crater]

Thanks for the reply 🙏

[sly crater]

Hey @ruby bramble sorry to tag you, just searching the Discord for answers about the Rusty DOS port. Is there something special you need to do to launch this game as W3.1? the vhd launches to a black screen for me currently

[ruby bramble]

Off the top of my head no, everything should be included

Are other 0mhz style packages working for you, it could be your ao486 setup maybe

[copper slate]

There’s a Win 3.1 version that works

[sly crater]

They are so far, I think civ2 is a windows 3.1 example that works but generally have tested a few other games at random. I haven’t really configured anything, first time trying it. I will say that all the required files are being loaded via smb. But thanks for the response!

[ruby bramble]

Oh you think he’s trying to make his own vhd?

Ohhhh okay

[sly crater]

Yeah looking into the vhd it’s definitely got windows on it!

[ruby bramble]

I remember I had to do some fuckery to get it to boot in windows 3.1 properly, whereas in windows 95 it worked without any tinkering

[sly crater]

Oh interesting

[ruby bramble]

Let me think about it some to refresh my memory

[sly crater]

Thanks again for the help

[ruby bramble]

It might have been in the properties for the play.bat file

Run in dos mode makes it glitch like it does on dos

So running it in the windows mode I think is what fixed it

I don’t remember if that was the extent of it though

[sly crater]

Do you know how I would run it in windows mode? Can I unpack the vhd and modify some settings?

Basically can’t get to windows or dos from the vhd I’m using

I guess I could try making my own from scratch starting with a windows install then installing the game from there

[ruby bramble]

Are you modifying the one I made, or using a fresh 3.1 install?

I don’t quite understand what you’re doing yet

[sly crater]

So I have a pre-made vhd, I think it’s yours but not 100% sure. Came from a 0mhz collection on the archive

Trying to boot just gets a black screen so just trying to see if there’s some other config step I’m missing

Other 0mhz stuff is booting alright

[ruby bramble]

Hmm… I think mine is the only one up there, to my knowledge

Do you have a link by any chance?

Okay so, is windows booting to a black screen, or is the game within windows booting to a black screen?

Also, I’m at work, so if anybody else reading this could test rusty to see if it still works… that’d be fantastic. Maybe an update broke it or something idk

[ruby bramble]

Oh wait, you can share links here… just give me the username of the person who uploaded it

[sly crater]

Sure, terrorgrafx I believe

[sly crater]

The core itself seems to fail on load- can’t open osd, just a black screen no loading

[ruby bramble]

Sounds like it could be a corrupt download maybe?

[sly crater]

I’ll try to redownload

Does internet archive have a hash for the file somewhere listed?

[ruby bramble]

That’s me

You might potentially also have a setting in your ao486 that is stopping windows from booting?