Search results

We don’t live in the 80’s anymore. Most school computers didn’t even have hard disks, and if the kids were ever typing their homework in school “file management” meant not accidentally writing your book report to the AppleWorks disk instead of your data floppy. Kids these days are expected to...

I might be interested in #2, I think I have almost everything I need to populate this other than the chipset lying around. (I guess I need to see if my TL866II programmer can handle the PIC.)

It's not a Raspberry Pi, but if you want a disposable Linux laptop fast enough to emulate some classic games get yourself an "expired" Chromebook and hack an alternative BIOS onto it. As an example, the 2016-ish vintage Lenovo N42 based on the "Braswell" platform (these things were sold under...

I'm also of the opinion that labeling is just "wrong" and they're normal AT-format disks. I put "wrong" in quotes there because I feel like if you're splitting hairs you can say that all the floppy formats we call "High Density" are actually just "Double Density" that happens to run at a higher...

Something a bit like this? (Looking at it I'm actually badly torn myself whether it's a dumb toy or potentially super useful. It has an internal SSD slot in it, so for the "crash cart" role I could imagine loading that with a Linux distribution set up to do diagnostics and OS imaging. Just plug...

I'm going to ignore the MDA part of this, because MDA/Hercules is potentially a huge rabbit hole. Long and short of it is Hercules was *never* a "BIOS supported" video standard; the PC BIOS supports *MDA* in text-only mode, there's zero BIOS support for the graphics extensions. Complicating...

It’s not quite that simple. Typically the actual RAM chips on a motherboard (and/or slave memory card, those are usually direct extensions of the motherboard ram decoding and RAS/CAS generation) are behind a bidirectional data bus buffer, and in some designs that buffer will always be enabled...

I would swear that 90% of Dolch's lunchbox output from the 1990's went towards building dedicated "network analyzers". (Which of course were just 486 or Pentium machines with network cards and DOS based packet generation/analysis software on them.) They were pretty sweet machines with lovely...

Here's a thread on the forums asking about what appears to be the Sperry branded version of this machine; there a photo (stored on Google Drive) of the motherboard linked in that thread, does yours match it? It looks a lot more similar to what you're describing about yours, such as the fact it...

Yeah, I remember them mostly as "sewing machines", or "luggables". "Briefcase" computers was one of the more common terms for the first gen of flat screen portables (whether they were "fits in your briefcase" machines like the Tandy Model 100 or the early clamshells that, you know, were about...

There are definitely gotchyas in play if the machine has a proprietary memory slot. The "Model M" seems to be an OEM machine that was sold under several names and the information about it on the web seems pretty sparse. That said… How hard would it be for you to actually post a photo of the...

ISA's a brain-damaged 8-bit subset of it, but I suppose that's neither here nor there. If you dig around AliExpress and the other usual suspects you can find mostly dead listings for what I strongly suspect is the source of the SoCs for these systems, a SBC in the form factor of a mid-length 16...

Life is going to be more complicated than that if you really wanted to try this. VGA cards don’t just statically have RAM mapped across the whole A0000-BFFFF area all the time; most VGA cards when they just wake up only map 32K to the CGA buffer location (or the mono text buffer location at...

That might be a *little* excessive. ;) Just eyeballing the first few pages of the Tandy forum I'd say you *might* be able to make a case for: I/III/4 2/12/16/6000 MS-DOS (Tandy 2000 + Radio Shack's PC compatibles) CoCo Portables (this covers both Tandy's proprietary laptops and the pocket...

If you're going to draw a line between categories like this it seems like you should have some kind of reasonably solid justification for doing it, and... what's an "era"? To me that implies some significant technical innovation or discontinuity, and as post-2000 developments in desktop...

Did you bother looking at Ark? That model of Atom is 64 bit. *And* dual core. The last 32 bit Atom was the 2011 "Lincroft" core (parts in the X6xx line, mostly reserved for Intel's aborted play for positioning the Atom as an option for tablets), and those things are utterly destroyed by an...

There's so much more to "quality" than leaky caps. The previous "Hand386" (which was based on exactly the same SoC) had a pretty lousy reputation for just randomly dropping dead, and as evidenced by the Book 8088 threads here and on other forums that system also has massively inconsistent build...

Really? Citation needed. The only 32 bit chips I can think of from that late are the last 32 bit Atoms and maaaybe Via was still churning out the C3/C7 for a few customers. An Athlon 64 will run rings around this trash. People are apparently forgetting just how slow and out-of-the-box obsolete...

Why not? The point of doing it by architecture is that 32 bit CPUs are, in fact, incapable of running any modern mainstream operating system, not just "too slow" to do it. And sure, you can whine that it's not an exact year cutoff, there's about 7 years of gray area between 2003 and 2010 where...

I know nothing is ever going to make anyone happy, but maybe a reasonable compromise would be that all PowerPC Macs get to be "vintage" now, and at the same time we once and forever define the "vintage PC" goalpost so only non-x86-64 processors (and their associated software and OS issues) will...