I figured out why the USB card I bought won't work in OS 9 in my Beige G3...apparently, there's a firmware bug that keeps OS 9 from seeing multi-function cards properly. You have to use Linux or OS X to even use USB 1.1 in this case. :P
So, in regards to my last post, I have a USB 1.1 card on the way, since that's cheaper than replacing the motherboard. (Yeah, I could just upgrade to a rev B or rev C ROM, but those are even harder to find than the motherboards...)
Also, one of my 120 GB Maxtors has bad sectors, I'm running SeaTools on it now to see if I can get it working. I was going to use the 4 GB Quantum that came with the G3 in the 6360, but it's ball bearing and really loud. :P
In other news, since I'm bored waiting for dinner and for LXDE to install on the Athlon XP machine, I went looking for info on my Blu-Ray Player's guts. The one picture I found of the inside shows it to be a relatively austere-looking Sony custom chip, but some more digging revealed that it's actually a rebadged (customized?) Mediatek MT85xx-series media processor with an ARMv6 (ARM1176JZF-S or so) core—essentially, it's Mediatek's equivalent to the Broadcom BCM2835 in the Raspberry Pi and the Roku 2.
Oh, and I should mention: I got Debian onto the T30, and it's quite a bit snappier. It's not going to win any speed records, obviously, but at least it's usable now.
Neat, I found out what the odd "data path" chips in my old PC 350 did. Apparently, when they were making ye olde Triton chipset, Intel couldn't fit the entire memory controller into the north bridge, so they put the part that controls data flow between the RAM, the CPU and PCI on a separate chip and used two identical ones (each handling 16 bits of the 32-bit memory bus).
Also, it seems AMD hasn't released any public data sheets for their CPUs in years. Pretty much everything past Socket 940 is NDA-only, since clearly they think they're NVIDIA now. :P (Compare this to Intel, who still has datasheets for practically every chip they've made since at least the early 1990s on their site someplace.)
And yay I got the USB card working on the G3! It turns out the USB support was ignoring the card, even if it was USB 1.1 only; I don't know if it's specifically a OS 9.2.2 problem, or if the USB driver on the iMac G4 installer I'm using for 9.2.2 is hardwired to work only with the Key Largo USB in that machine. Trashing the stock extensions and installing USB Card Support 1.4.1 makes it work.
The bad news: I can't run Linux on it.:P Initio never provided detailed programming information to the Linux SATA people, and there's been reports of the existing driver corrupting volumes, so Debian has disabled it (meaning that the installer won't see it). This means I have to put OS 9 on the SATA, or pay $80 (!!!!!!!) for a fucking Sonnet Tempo. >:P
The first PC compatible we had that wasn't horribly limited somehow was a 286 we got used in early 1993, a Packard Bell 686 with a 40 MB hard drive and a Hercules card. Yeah, behind the times even then, but it was something. And it was certainly better than the half-in-the bag Sanyo we did have.
First hard drive I ever had was a Great Valley Products side-mount rig for my Amiga 500. It had a 20 megabyte hard disk and 2 megabytes of memory on it. It was awesome.
I bet the 20 MB HDD was a MiniScribe 8425, too. Those things were everywhere in the late 1980s and early 1990s, almost as common as the Seagate ST-225.
In other news, I've been playing with MESS recently, and I found out that a lot of the LeapFrog and VTech kids' video game systems (as well as the Chintendo Vii/Ken Sing Ton Sport Vii, as reviewed by ashens) are powered by a Sunplus chip whose CPU is a simplified, binary-incompatible 8086. Freaky, man.
It seems like there's a lot of odd processors out there (especially in Japan) that are based on either the Intel 8080 (often by way of the Zilog Z-80) or the 8086. NEC's 78K and V series and Toshiba's TLCS-900 are a few examples I can think of off-hand; the latter is pretty much what would have happened if we'd ever gotten a 32-bit Z-80 (indeed, it's pretty similar to Zilog's own Z380 and eZ80).
I like how this 30 GB SSD on my desk says "DELICATE PRODUCT SENSITIVE PARTS INSIDE. DAMAGE MAY OCCUR IF SHOCKED." when it's an SSD and doesn't have any moving parts. :P
Well, probably someone whose motherboard just broke and doesn't want the expense of buying everything new.
I find it fascinating to read about how old OSes needed to work around how slow hardware was, and how different relative speeds are. BSD UNIX on the VAX 11/780 used to copy large amounts of memory via swapping it to disk and pulling it back off, because the CPU was generally under much more contention than disk DMA.
No because that still won't stop people from trying their non game programs in DOSBox.
The purpose of the naming of the forums is to funnel people into specific areas so they can get proper support.....even if that's to say there will be no development support for programs in DOSBox.
It is still useful to direct those people to use other software\emulators or to user their program in DOSBox but not to expect integrated patches to support a program.
Why should the DOSBox developers, beta testers and patch creators support a company for free? That is the reason for no official support for programs in DOSBox. We do not want to be liable for corrupting your data. We do not want to do your work for free when we have more important things to do like getting games to work. We do not care one iota about your database app.
Extract the content of your database and import it into something more modern or use a emulator that supports your program.
One of the big rules of software is that trying to discourage people from doing things you didn't anticipate and don't support is next to impossible. Telling people to fuck off like this, aside from being incredibly rude, is also unhelpful and just makes you look like an asshole (and will likely get your project forked if you keep up the bullshit). :P
Additionally, if DOSBOX is not OK for commercial or mission-critical use, put it under the MAME license or some other license that forbids commercial use. It will make you a lot less popular, but at least you'll be fucking honest.
Oh, and trying to get DOS running on anything except DOSBOX is a huge pain, in large part because VirtualBox has no Guest Additions for DOS and I'm not sure if QEMU has any sort of shared-folder system.
I wanted one of these so bad when I was 10, because barcodes were so cooooooooool. I think there was even a VCR that could use barcodes for programming at the time. These days you could do it with your phone and one of the N barcode-scanner apps on the Play Store, but still...
Yeah, same disease as MAME (hence why I kept bringing it up), though at least MAME has a good reason for limiting commercial distribution, especially on machines that need non-free ROMs to work. It just annoys me that a program that is a good product otherwise is clearly only meant for dicking around with Commander Keen. :P There's nothing inherently non-free or limiting with the code, they just don't want to bother. (The way they word everything seems to imply they don't want to deal with the liability of someone hosting an important application on DOSBOX, but last I checked most open-sources licenses contain a general disclaimer saying no warranty is implied.)
I don't remember seeing barcodes in TV Guide, but they came up with VCR Plus later on (which was a relatively clever way of encoding the channel, start time and running time into a string of numbers).
Though I guess they could simply go with a no-warranty-implied defense when it comes to it. "You develop your own specialized tool that works consistently, if you need it for business."
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Somehow it's nice to know that the whole "everything will have barcodes in the future!" thing is much older than the attempts to make QR codes catch on back at the start of this decade.
The first hard drive weighed over a ton, was the size of a large refrigerator, stored less than 4 megabytes of data, and transferred at a rate of 8,800 characters per second. This was in 1956.
It could have had a larger capacity but IBM's marketing/sales didn't think anyone would be interested.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I wonder how long before nobody even uses tape anymore? Disk is getting so damn cheap it's almost pointless. The only real need for it anymore is because places already have it and don't wanna switch.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I just like that it's not just me who feels the need to try stupid things just because "hey, I wonder what happens when I try this."
Granted, I guess that's pretty much what all of science is, but still.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
When I was like 7 and 8 my mother would actually give me old electronics to pull apart, hee hee.
I wonder how long before nobody even uses tape anymore? Disk is getting so damn cheap it's almost pointless. The only real need for it anymore is because places already have it and don't wanna switch.
I thought tape was still in common use for archival stuff because it's still ridiculously dense.
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Also, one of my 120 GB Maxtors has bad sectors, I'm running SeaTools on it now to see if I can get it working. I was going to use the 4 GB Quantum that came with the G3 in the 6360, but it's ball bearing and really loud. :P
Abstract: Someone made a full 186 PC with VGA, and the whole thing (BIOS and hardware) is GPL. :D
20 megabyte hard drive, motherfuckers
I don't remember seeing barcodes in TV Guide, but they came up with VCR Plus later on (which was a relatively clever way of encoding the channel, start time and running time into a string of numbers).
Though I guess they could simply go with a no-warranty-implied defense when it comes to it. "You develop your own specialized tool that works consistently, if you need it for business."
Granted, I guess that's pretty much what all of science is, but still.