I'm enjoying a cup of coffee here at 8:29 local time, so we can start celebrating my birthday all over again. Erik has already begun the celebrations in true admin/moderator fashion by upgrading the forum software so that everything looks unfamiliar. That wll keep the spammers at bay. I will continue to do my part by harassing people unnecessarily.
During winter in Minnesota we have to avoid the urge to hibernate. This past month has been busy and I have finally had some time to sit and, well, do nothing. A week ago we upgraded the old 27" Samsung television from 1997 and it morphed into a 50" Samsung plasma, which is just fantastic except that I am not willing to fork over another $60 a month to the cable company for a real signal. We are not big television watchers but I do enjoy movies and DVDs look better than they ever have, so things are relatively in balance. Besides, this monster has a VGA port so I can connect a laptop and pretend that my entire wall is a monitor. And it heats the room nicely.
Yesterday I was able to spend a good block of time on my telnet code, and wow, that was a disappointment. In my attempt to get rid of 'snow' on real CGA displays I broke everybody out there who was using a monochrome display adapter. The good news is that the number of MDA users worldwide fit in an old style phone booth, and nobody reported the bug because nobody was using the code. But it is fixed now just in case somebody should stumble upon it. I fixed a few other bugs, added a few features, and I am pretty happy with the code again. Nothing beats a day of programming that requires two different Technical References, Options and Adapters Volume 2, the Phoenix BIOS book, and the 1200 page TCP/IP Guide by Kozeriok. (I have a bug in my DNS resolver that needs some attention.)
I have also had some time to test some old Zip drives on the PCjr and to clean up the collection of unmarked floppies that was proliferating on my desk. It took hours, but I was able to get the old Iomega Zip Tools installed on the PCjr with some help from the 80386 machine. I am amazed that all of the stuff required in CONFIG.SYS runs on the Jr, and that the Zip specific tools to lock/unlock/eject media also work, even from the command line. (No Guest.exe here!) I am really amazed because the quality of the Iomega software is horrible in general and the PCjr is one of the worst compatibility nightmares ever made. (Well, maybe a Dec Rainbow or a Tandy machine deserves the highest honor.)
I have this cruddy old Trantor T100 SCSI card that I bought a few months ago and haven't had time to look at until recently. And that just does not work. I am not sure if it is the drivers, the machine, or the devices. Given the rarity of the card, it's going to take a bit more work to see if it is even feasible. The drivers see the card, but that is about it - so close, but yet so far to go ...
On the todo list ..
- More TCP/IP code! I need an NTP client for machines that don't have clock chips. I also want to do a network virtual drive using a DOS drive letter and UDP. I really want the world to discover the joys of putting an 8088 on the home network, and on the Internet in general. With my FTP, IRC and Telnet clients the code is getting pretty useful! (Telnet and FTP especially!)
- PCjr IDE! Jeff Leyda and Andrew Lynch have been a real inspiration on the XT IDE project. I want to recreate some of what is in their head to keep the process alive and also to extend it to the PCjr. I also want to modify the XT IDE adapter to do memory mapped I/O to make it faster. I know what the code looks like, but I need to get more in touch with my hardware side to add the memory address decode logic to make it work.
- Keyboard adapter: Chuck has some micro controller knowledge which is value for mapping keyboard data streams and scan codes from one platform to another. This is another great project that I'd like to adapt for the PCjr. There are older adapters out there - I use a 5150 keyboard on the Jr right now. But the new design seems to be a bit more adaptable, so it's very interesting.
- The telnet BBS .. I don't know why.
And that's just the computer geek todo list. Given the size of the full list, I have to live until I'm about 100. I need to do more flying, I need to start planing for my next car, I need to do some house fixup, and I need to do all of this without neglecting the family. While holding onto a job that frequently takes me out of town.
Anyway, this was a bit too long for a HBD reply, but I wanted to say thanks in a proper way for the greetings. Birthdays are a good time for reflection and for looking forward. I wish I had more time to good around with the old machines during the year, but given everything else that happens in real life this hasn't been a bad year.
Mike
