Notices by Charlie Balogh (chainq@mastodon.social)

@gorplop What I learned from this chart - the Amiga is essentially a mainframe. 😅 🤪

@Gammitin My worst VGA card is my best VGA card in some sense. This trashy PCI S3 Trio 64V2/DX 2MB, that we swapped out as "broken" from a customer's machine at my first $dayjob in 1998-ish.

But I picked it from the e-waste pile, plugged mismatching RAM chips onto it from other cards in the pile, and since then, it's been my no.1. test PCI VGA card, also has been a daily driver and beater for a while. It's scratched up, dirty, smells like beer... (Long story... 😅)

Still works every time.

Last minute #DOScember entry, if fiddling with BIOS stuff counts... A while ago I bought this Soyo 386DX mainboard with a 486DLC + FPU in it from evilBay, with the intent of reproducing one of the quirky and weird setups of my youth. But that board had Mr. BIOS in it, while this thing came with AMI BIOS.

So I bought a handful of 27C512 EPROMs, burned a matching Mr. BIOS image thanks to the preservation efforts of people on Vogons.org, a quick chip swap and here we go. 😍

#msdos #retrocomputing

How can one make a weird 386/486 setup even quirkier? Lets add a sound card that's never been. I present you this Logitech-made Pro Audio Spectrum 16 clone. I impulse-bought this a while ago after watching a PAS video by Necroware. 😅 But I never even tested it until now. Works like a charm.

The 486DLC cannot really keep up with high mixing rates, especially in many channel modules, but 4-8 channel MODs and S3Ms in Inertia Player 1.22? We'll call it "period correct".

#msdos #retrocomputing

In a classic "it's me" move, now that it's January (after the #DOScember deadline), I finally managed to boot the 486DLC into DOS.

Also wrote my first XT-IDE ROM in the process, not because it's technically needed, but because I wanted auto-detection, because I was too lazy to figure out the "geometry" of the 256MB DoM I use... 🤪

Also managed to get online using mTCP (IRC log feat. @ratman), and figured out this thing is pretty slow for a 486DLC. Oh, well... 🤷♂️

#msdos #retrocomputing

You cover up the EPROM window because you're afraid it gets UV erased. I cover it up because I like labeling stuff. We're not the same.

Plus some other motherboard and hardware "beauty shots".

#msdos #retrocomputing

@mntmn ... does that mean it's still glitching, you just don't see it any more because it's glitching so fast? 🙃 (That's still a 100% valid fix btw, not criticizing. 😅)

@mntmn @andreasdotorg "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ... and by extension I guess "Any sufficiently advanced skill is indistinguishable from wizardry."

@nixCraft None. We need a record of all of our mistakes, to prevent them happening again... Or at least happening again too often.

@mntmn It gets better, but never reaches the level of the older shows. S1 is the weakest, but both it and S2 has some good episodes. Sadly it feels like, Archer is written very inconsistently as a captain. Season 4 is my favorite, it contains a lot of 3-4 episode story arches, that are awesome. Season 3 is praised by a lot of people, and it's a single story arch, but it's not really my cup of tea.

@mntmn @SoniEx2 Does it work in BE mode? That's usually the big thing with JIT engines, if they make hardwired assumptions about endianness. Especially web stuff is guilty in thinking everything they need to care about is little endian. I think you run the ZZ9000 in LE mode, too, no?

@SoniEx2 @mntmn I'm not aware there's anything like that exists. If there's one written in somewhat portable C, that could probably be compiled. Or we need to write one in Pascal... 😉

"Look Ma! No hands!"

Free Pascal Compiler outputs a working WASM binary on AmigaOS, with no external tooling/dependencies. I doubt anyone has ever tried this before (maybe Marcus Sackrow, my partner in FPC-Amiga crimes did?), but it works, first try.

Experiment on request/idea by @mntmn.

#webassembly #pascal #amiga

@mntmn In theory, yes. I never tried it, but I could... And fix it if it doesn't work. 😅 But in theory (with some caveats), on any platform which can host a native compiler - and Amiga is one of them -, can be used to run any sort of cross-compiler builds too. It won't be fast, but should be usable.

It all depends what kind of external tooling it needs. But I think we mostly did our own tooling, because external tools were too dependent on "what LLVM does".

OK, lets check. Now I'm curious. 😅

@mntmn Free Pascal has a webassembly target, mostly with our own tooling, IIRC. And it runs 68k hosted (Amiga/Linux), if needed.

WASM works very differently to any "regular/real CPU" assembly. It's a stack machine, which is mostly good for compilers with SSA or some sort of a binary tree internal representation. It's not even recommended that you write it by hand...

Calling it "assembly" was the biggest marketing stunt ever, IMO, to gain the cool factor... But this is a story for another day.

@mntmn I knew it from the mid-90s as: "Windows is an ancient Native American word, it means "White Man Sits In Front of Computer Looking at a Hourglass" "

Meanwhile, other systems are improved to this level too... 😁

@mntmn I think the reason for this is that the Fediverse isn't a good marketing tool for traditional companies, unlike Instagram, or X, or Facebook even. There is no algorithm feed to hijack and get you go viral. There is no one to pay money to someone to shove your stuff down people's throats.

It needs a lot of consistent work and good values, to stand here on good terms with a community that is mostly consist of very conscious consumers. It's hard.

A Reform laptop serving as router for a Macintosh IIcx, 10Base2 power! Setup by @vkoskiv, the Reform is apparently his daily driver! Spotted at #68kinside, cc: @mntmn

#m68k #demoscene

@mntmn I wonder if any of these high-end non-Apple ARM chips will be available for "mortals" to buy and design hardware around, or this will just remain yet another walled garden.

@nixCraft I like how he was told to ... promptly leave.