Notices by Manawyrm | Sarah (manawyrm@chaos.social), page 2

@mntmn mine only goes down to about 800mV, but it's an older RX580... but sure -- that's very normal.

@foone that's a fail :P

@foone ... actually: with this behaviour: Clean the contacts on the RAM with IPA and the ones on the CPU as well.

@foone it's a bit hard to tell from the DMI info, but is the RAM installed the right way round (each vendor together per memory channel)?

I would've expected Slots 0,1 to be A, Slots 2,3 to be B, not interleaved like this.

@mntmn @wolf480pl So:

- ASUS used to be very good, but they've started to really lack care & attention to detail to their firmware in the last couple of years. Bad firmware/ACPI fuckups like missing CPU idle states, broken SATA hotplug, broken PCIe hotplug, wonky PCIe BAR configuration, etc.

- MSI mostly makes awful hardware with bad designs (overheating voltage regulators, etc.). Their expensive boards are okayish, but at that point, why not buy another companies products?

@mntmn @wolf480pl
- ASRock is at least currently my go-to vendor, they also sometimes have questionable hardware decisions, but at least they seem to have some employees that know what ACPI is and their firmware is somewhat OK.

@mntmn Gigabyte are known for their okayish hardware and shit (absolute garbage) firmware. It's always a bit of a crapshoot, different from model to model whether your firmware is mostly OK, then your machine will work well.

(you've installed the latest BIOS, right?)

@mntmn it's a gigabyte board...

"well, there's your problem"

At a retrocomputing exhibition (Classic Computing) currently.

Someone brought over a BTX terminal and I got my first look at BTX (and the open source neu_ulm.py server reimplementation).

We managed to get the modem talking to our ISDN setup & PortMaster at a blazing 2400baud! 🚀

#BTX #ISDN

I already bought a proper, internal ExpressCard/34 to M.2 2242 adapter from China. Hasn't arrived yet.
ExpressCard/34 is just PCIe x1 (and 3.3V power), just like the M.2 M+B key slot.

This was my first BIOS mod, using a lot of crazy PhoenixBIOS tools, hex-editing and crossing fingers.
I had to do the "crisis recovery" procedure 4 times.

Speeds are around 250 MByte/s (RW), limited by the PCIe 1.0 x1 (2.5GT/s) slot.
Newer laptops (like a T430) could do PCIe 3.0 x1, reaching 1GByte/s!

Samsung offers a native NVMe driver, which will run on XP. I had to write my own txtsetup.oem file to be able to load the driver in the XP setup routine. Included the driver using nLite into a XP SP3 ISO.

Modding the BIOS requires arcane knowledge, which I managed to figure out by trial & error and reading old russian forum posts.
Here's what I did: https://gist.github.com/Manawyrm/d4a6fe18ca4c129179f527e9d0854099
(can't share the tools/binaries used, they're a little bit hard to find, but out there)

More random pictures from the development process :)

@arek The *60 and *200 series devices were also what I was thinking about. Those could probably really benefit from a nice NVMe SSD and they‘re still not using UEFI (unlike my trusty ex daily driver the T430 (not T43))

My classic ThinkPad T43 (from 2005) used IDE/PATA storage. That's slow and unreliable, especially after the PATA->SATA bridge IBM included.

Instead, let's use NVMe SSDs in the ExpressCard/34 slot!
I modified the BIOS to include a custom Option ROM, which can translate the BIOS disk accesses into NVMe.

Windows XP, Debian 12, MS-DOS 6 can boot fine from NVMe!

Option ROM Source:
https://github.com/Manawyrm/nvme-int13h-optionrom

YouTube-Video in Action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVKbFLtXLYM

Pop-Quiz: What's this?

If you know the answer to this one, I feel truly sorry for you!

Very exciting news for collectors of old cellphones:
There's ways again to get data connectivity on devices which don't support GPRS/packet data.

This Nokia Communicator 9110 is running DOS on a AMD x86 CPU and is connected to the internet via a 9600bps CSD call through a private GSM network!

The Osmocom free/open GSM stack gained CSD support over the last months and it now actually works :)

@foone Hey :3

I just saw you in the comments section of the Barbie video from Tech Tangents.

Do you have any more idea about the hardware (maybe had a look inside)?
I was also thinking about maybe just executing the software in a VM and looking at the serial port. Judging by the unidirectional nature, maybe it's just pumping out data at a fixed rate and not checking anything.

Some details I found about the audio data:
https://gist.github.com/Manawyrm/88b2aa28afcc1d8538e61af9a50de497

@mntmn @whitequark Yeah, that should be perfectly capable of doing this.

I hope you're not planning on doing any of this on x86, otherwise you're in the deep video BIOS/Option ROM, 16bit segmented memory hell hole.

Should be pretty okay on Arm, I'd guess?
I wonder how hard I'd be to build a physical virtio-gpu card.

@mntmn @whitequark Just general purpose "playing with PCI"...

The ICE40 probably wouldn't be ideal to implement a VGA card, too little RAM and probably to slow.

I've gotten it to enumerate and blink some LEDs from the PC, but then haven't followed up, my FPGA skills were still too bad back then (and probably still are)

@mntmn @whitequark and maybe don't do what I did and do this on a PCB instead :)

The ASM1083 chips are available and you don't have to sacrifice an old firewire card (like I did here).

IIRC this is also feeding 5V I/O into the 3.3V I/Os on the ICE40, but it didn't really seem to mind that.