Recent content by Scali

This is the inside of my PSU anyway:

Okay, something strange happened... I wanted to take the machine apart, and I tried to power it up one last time... It powered up in one go. So I put the HDD and VGA card back in there, and it still worked. Then I left it running for a few minutes, and it just dropped off again for no reason...

Since my Commodore PC20-III is broken, I wanted to mount its HDD in my Philips P3105 instead. The P3105 has an XT-IDE interface on board, just like the PC20-III. The HDD in question is a WD93028-X. It was formatted in the PC20-III, MS-DOS 5 installed, and it used to boot just fine. But I can't...

For those of you who hadn't heard of Serdaco's OPL2LPT yet: there is a device that is basically an AdLib with a printer-port interface. Now, the PCjr may not have any ISA slots, so there is no chance of ever getting an AdLib installed... but it does have a printerport sidecar, so I thought I'd...

My Commodore PC20-III died the other day. It was powered on, and at some point, it just went dead. I tried to powercycle it, but not much happened. On a few attempts, the power led came on weakly, but then it went away again. I took the PSU apart and checked the fuse, but that was not it, fuse...

Over the years, I've heard various stories on the vertical retrace interrupt on EGA/VGA cards, and how this may or may not be supported, is broken, or whatever... So I want to put this myth to bed and find out what's what. To begin at the beginning... IBM first implemented a vertical retrace...

This is not my auction, but I recently bought some other stuff from this seller, and he notified me of these two batches of software he's put up on Ebay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/272979202584 https://www.ebay.com/itm/272979166315 Perhaps someone here is interested.

I did a bit of a hack, which turned out ok: I took a smaller pot, used the front-middle pin through the PCB, and bent all the others so that they could be soldered on top of the PCB. The result is actually quite nice, and the pot is now accessible from the back of the PC :) This is what I would...

Perhaps some of you were aware that this past Easter weekend, the world's biggest demoparty was on: Revision. There was one release for 8088 there, it was a chipmod song using the sound routine that reenigne originally developed for the endtune of 8088 MPH. The rules required that the executable...

My demo group, DESiRE, has just released a megademo on the TI99/4A at the Synchrony demo party. Thought you might like it. You can download the binary here, if you want to run it on real hardware: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68783

Having toyed with a few clones over the years, I recently heard a recording of a real Covox that Trixter made. The sound quality was excellent, better than any clone I heard. So I'm looking for a real Covox. Clones need not apply.

I have made a simple program to check the timings by polling for the vblank signal, and recording times between two vblank signals in PIT ticks. And indeed, in graphics mode I recorded less ticks than in text mode, which confirms that the refresh rate is slightly higher in graphics mode. For...

I am currently playing around with Hercules graphics programming. I don't have a real Hercules card. I do however have two clones. One is an ATi Small Wonder, the other is a Paradise PVC4 (two very similar cards, perhaps even a shared design?). What I noticed is that these cards use a 16.257 MHz...

I have the following code: typedef enum { MACHINE_PCXT, MACHINE_PCAT, MACHINE_PS2 } MachineType; ... MachineType machineType; _asm { mov [machineType], MACHINE_PCXT } Now, for some reason, OpenWatcom complains about an invalid operand for the MACHINE_PCXT value (I ported this code over...

For my retro coding I use either Turbo C++ 3.1 or OpenWatcom 1.9. I wanted to write some common library code, where I use some #ifdefs to handle compiler-specific parts, so the same code can be used for both compilers. I stumbled upon this very useful page, so I thought I'd share it...