• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Recent content by VileR

  1. VileR

    MicroPython on IBM PC?

    Depends on how modern is 'modern', but gcc-ia16 is a thing. https://github.com/tkchia/gcc-ia16
  2. VileR

    Public Brand Software disks--worth archiving?

    On one hand, those are artifacts of digital culture worth preserving, and the source code for some of these could be interesting. On the other hand, there has to be some special punishment for whomever named one disk "Indiana Jokes and the Laff Crusade".
  3. VileR

    MS-DOS Reading keyboard port (60 61) without interrupts

    This. Although as long as you're taking care to read the port yourself, you can mask off IRQ1 at the PIC via port 21h, ensuring that INT 9 will not be invoked until you re-enable IRQ1.
  4. VileR

    Wang Advanced Professional Computer

    That was from NEC - I don't believe Wang's APC had anything to do with the NEC series, despite the initials (which stand for "Advanced Professional Computer"). :) Seems be a 286 machine that's not quite AT-compatible: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1985-10-01/page/n33/mode/2up?view=theater
  5. VileR

    Problems with the Book 8088

    From the Star Control II manual, p25: "AT-class" - won't work on an 8088, or at the very least it wasn't tested on one. Even if it ran, you'd probably have a pretty miserable game experience.
  6. VileR

    Text displaying/graphics issue on my 5160

    As vwestlife writes those are indeed ANSI escape codes, but ANSI.SYS wasn't around until DOS 2.0 in 1983; and even then it couldn't be used with the original Deadline, since that one was a booter (i.e. loads itself with no DOS present, hence no device drivers). So while ANSI.SYS might work with...
  7. VileR

    Missing threads/messages from the old forums

    Maybe I'm having an extreme case of delayed ignition, but it seems that a lot of content from the old pre-migration forums is completely MIA. To be clear, I'm not referring to the separate issue of broken links in older threads (where the content may still exist, but cannot be accessed with the...
  8. VileR

    EGA PEL panning & scanlines

    Cycle-counting sounds like overkill for this purpose. Why not poll the status register at 3DAh for bit 0 (retrace) to detect the overscan period of each scanline, and make your changes then? Many parts of 8088 MPH and Area 5150 use this method for CGA as well (others do require cycle-counting...
  9. VileR

    CGA 160x100x16 bidirectional scrolling

    Huh - that's weird, considering that the ColorPlus card appears to use a real 6845, and no custom video BIOS extension. I assume they had to map the chip to the same port, and couldn't play too many tricks with address decoding or with the data lines, else the normal BIOS video modes wouldn't...
  10. VileR

    LDebug — „debug de Luxe”!

    I've been using DEBUGX/Enhanced Debug for a while, seems like the feature set is pretty similar.
  11. VileR

    A 'Hacker News'-type site for vintage computing/gaming

    A different idea I guess - it's more of a link aggregator where you can submit/discuss interesting material from elsewhere... not exactly like the typical discussion forum (although we do have this Link Exchange section here), or a Q&A/help site like Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange. As I see it...
  12. VileR

    A 'Hacker News'-type site for vintage computing/gaming

    https://twostopbits.com/ Not mine, and I'm not affiliated with it... but I like the idea.
  13. VileR

    IBM 5150 with Medley menu

    Thank you- that is much appreciated. Anyway, glad it works. I'll chalk it up to a lucky guess about that 5150 BIOS bug... the process (such as it was) involved unpacking the file, running it in the DOSBox debugger, setting it to break on INT 10h calls, isolating the last one before it exits...
  14. VileR

    IBM 5150 with Medley menu

    Ok, try the attached modification... it *seems* to work fine with the 10/27/82 PC BIOS. I hope I'm not breaking any rules providing a patched version of a 30-years-old free program. (It's unpacked, so slightly larger, but feel free to PKLITE it all over again if you really want to.) Technical...
  15. VileR

    Question regarding the IBM graphic card

    Now this has me wondering whether a SIMCGA-type tool has ever been written for EGA in its monochrome mode, so that modes 0-6 could be emulated. If it can be done on a Hercules (in several different ways), nothing jumps out at me that should prevent an EGA implementation of the same idea...
Back
Top