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.

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/23/svardos_drdos_reborn/

A #DOScember surprise: fits on a single floppy, but has a network-capable package manager

<- by me on @theregister

New Thread
My second #Doscember 486 project.
A 486DX2-66 VLB desktop rebuild, here's the CPU, more details to follow soon (Yes, it will run DOOM):

The budget soundcard for my #Doscember 486DX2-66 VLB DOOM PC build is (ing it arrives safely):
Avance Logic ALS100 Plus+ Pro16/32PNP+

It's #DOScember! Here's DOS and Windows 3 running on a... NeXTstation color?! It's also running Mac OS. And NeXTSTEP. All at the same time. And it did that 34 years ago. SoftPC got a version of DOS/Windows from Microsoft that's (partially) compiled for the Motorola 68040. #retrocomputing

It's December, and that means it's #DOScember

And for this month, I'm writing articles to highlight FreeDOS— weekly on All Things Open, and weekly on Both.org

Check out today's article, about 5 editors installed with FreeDOS that I like using the most!

FreeDOS Edit
FreeDOS Edlin
Freemacs
Fed, the folding editor
OpenWatcom’s Vi

https://allthingsopen.org/articles/5-freedos-text-editors

So... here we are two days into #DOScember and I haven't even booted my DOS/Win3 machine much less done anything fun with it.

IDK, anyone want to set up an IPX-over-IP net and play some OG Doom?

(and how do people even do that nowadays anyway? Kali and Khan are long dead obviously)

So it's now #DOScember, time for a rebuild/upgrade project.
This year I'm going for a 486 based system, my plans are
- 486DX2- 66Mhz
- VLB or fast 16-bit ISA Video
- PicoGUS (Gravis Ultrasound)
- Period correct CD-ROM
- Custom 5.25" Drive bay, with Gotek and MHZ display!

I'm planning on starting a Twitch stream in a couple of weeks, to participate in the #Doscember event. Current plan is to stream on Wednesdays at 7:00 pm EST starting December 4th. For my first stream I'll be playing #Freedoom and getting started on #TexMurphy : The Pandora Directive.

My #Twitch URL is https://www.twitch.tv/whiskytangofoxtrot/

What are your plans for #DOScember in December?

I'm planning to write some articles about the cool stuff you can find in FreeDOS, to run on different websites like ATO and Both.org

I'd love to make a DOS game but (1) game dev isn't really my strength area, and (2) I don't know what genre of game I'd write that doesn't already exist on DOS. DOS has a lot of games.

@mos_8502 just in time for #DOScember!

Let's benchmark the #Apple #PC Compatibility Card for #Macintosh just in time for #DOSCember!!
https://youtu.be/SB-oy31dsco

felt like playing some christmas lemmings

which of course turned in to an hour of debugging ~TSR conflicts~

one thing i didn't realise about DOS lemmings, it does some tricky palette switching business for the bottom status bar?

is it switching to 16 colors?

long story short, Zeno (a BIOS text accelerator) somehow interferes with this and causes the button bar to black out

making the game rather hard to play

so don't run Zeno

in fact Windows 95 detects Lemmings and tries to force you to run it in plain DOS mode

because if you force it to run inside windows it runs unplayably slow and the color palette flickers

so pure DOS mode only folks

lemmings is doing some wild stuff with timers and VGA IRQs or something

i believe its entirely 16bit code

merry phosphor christmas!

My OPL music player is making progress! Now it supports VGM files. It can play OPL1, OPL2 and OPL3 songs, and supports VGM GD3 tags and loops!
Performance is not great yet (needs roughly a 486DX-33) but there are lots of opportunities for improvement!
#retrocomputing #DOScember

The #Tandy 2000 improved on the IBM PC, but the improvement came at the cost of compatibility. Tandy learned its lesson. But I argue they learned their lesson too well. In this blog post, I trace Tandy's early 90s problems all the way back to 1983. #RetroComputing #DOScember https://dfarq.homeip.net/how-the-tandy-2000-doomed-tandy-computers/

Today's blog post covers Intel's 186 CPU. The 80186 was a flop as a desktop CPU but a famous company founded by two guys in a garage in California used it very successfully in an early handheld. Not to mention the extensive use it saw as an embedded CPU. #RetroComputing #DOScember https://dfarq.homeip.net/intel-80186-cpu-so-misunderstood/

continuing #DecemberAdventure in #DOScember

fun fact: the original IBM 5150 PC had a very slow and unskippable memory test, WITH NO USER INDICATION OF WHAT IS GOING ON

(the PC XT added the now iconic memory count)

on a cold boot, a PC loaded with a full 640k meant a small school child staring at nothing more than a blinking cursor for a full.... 50 seconds! nearly a full minute before you got a beep and drive noises!

and pcem emulates this with 100% fidelity ​

after getting really sick of waiting for this delay while testing lcdcal, i did what any sane person would do and dig up the PC BIOS source code... and build it

some seem to think the PC BIOS was some sort of secret, but in fact the source code was published in the IBM Technical Reference manuals

machine readable copies have floated around in the dark corners of BBSs and warez disks ever since

but how do you build it? a thread

Adaptec controllers were the best of their kind and at one time we considered them essential. But they seemed to sort of fade away. What happened to Adaptec? I found out. #RetroComputing #DOScember https://dfarq.homeip.net/what-happened-to-adaptec/