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    640x400 256 color mode on standard VGA

    So I was looking at the VGA registers the other day and I thought, hey why isn't a 640x400x256 color mode possible? I'm talking about a standard VGA, non-VESA, Of course it would have to be unchained (aka mode X), but you could get 4 planes of 64,000 bytes each, of course you would only get one...
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    OPL clicking sound when triggering notes quickly

    Hey all, While Ive been working on polishing up Adlib-Host V1.2, I've been noticing an annoying issue with my Adlib(OPL) music player, it seems that whenever I trigger a note immediately after releasing a previous note I get an audible clicking noise. Doing more testing I was able to determine...
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    Best way to read/write to the serial port on MS-DOS hardware

    I wrote some code to send binary data back and forth via serial between an app on DOS PC and an app Windows PC. Initially I simply used Watcom's fopen to open com1 and fread/fwrite to send/receive data. Unfortunately while this works ok on DosBox, it is both unreliable and horrendously slow on...
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    Anyone seen this trackball before? I can't get it to work

    So using serial monitor I managed to verify that the trackball was not sending any bytes when moved, but I did receive bytes for the buttons. So I opened it up can cleaned out the dust but still no dice. I was able to confirm using my phone camera that the IR leds were actually lighting up...
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    Anyone seen this trackball before? I can't get it to work

    I saw this "PC Accessories" serial trackball at a surplus store and having not really done anything with trackballs before I decided to grab it and give it a shot. I first tried it on a windows 2000 PIII machine and it was recognized as a standard microsoft mouse, the buttons all seemed to work...
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    Is it safe to mess with the PIT timer modes?

    I'm messing with different ways to get high resolution timing in DOS, only now did I just realize you can simply read the counter from the PIT (good example here). However I don't need THAT much resolution (ticks at approximately 1.19 MHz), so I figure I'll just read the high byte from the timer...
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    My variation on masked blitting in Mode X

    Hey all I've been experimenting on different ways to implement transparent sprites in mode X and I came up with a method that I haven't seen before so I thought I might share. The image is stored in a standard planar format, with palette index zero representing a transparent pixel, and blitted...
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    Demo of Chuck Jones: Space Cop of the Future now available

    Hey All, as many of you know, I have been working on an adventure game for DOS for what feels like an eternity. Finally a shareware demo of it is now ready for y'all to play. So without further ado you can download it here: https://pgram.itch.io/chuck-jones Should run on well a 286 or better...
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    VGA timing for NTSC output with Mode X?

    Basically got it working, the line counts just need to be about half of what they would be with regular Mode-X. There is some over scan but I think that's just the TV, I'm gonna try on my other Sony monitor which has adjustable height and see if everything is being displayed. I'm gonna do...
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    VGA timing for NTSC output with Mode X?

    Hey all, I've been experimenting with getting a VGA card to produce an NTSC compatible signal, right now I'm using a box called TelevEyes. The box came with a little program to reprogram the VGA registers to output a 15khz signal, I have also tried using a utility called VGATV. The only problem...
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    color problem with IBM p70 workstation monitor

    Hey I recently got a nice IBM workstation monitor (a sony trinitron underneath) but it is having some issues displaying color correctly. When I feed in a VGA signal via the included 13w3 adapter it fails to display properly. Here is the result: If I disconnect the red channel from the input I...
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    What are you guys using for retroprogramming?

    Hey guys, I feel like I don't hear enough about how other retro-programmers work, I was wondering what you guys were all using for your retro-programming needs. What hardware are you targeting? What kind of compiler/interpreter software do you use? Do you program on old-school systems...
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    IBM model m spurious key presses

    I was cleaning my 1996 Model M the other day and after I put all the keys back in It started randomly acting as though the 'n' key is stuck down with no apparent pattern. The n key seems to work fine when I press it, at which point it stops acting as though its held down. Upon further inspection...
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    NEW tool "Adlib-Host", use your opl equipped PC as an external midi module

    As I work on making new DOS games I occasionally come up with a tool that I think other people might find useful. I re-used the adlib/midi code from Chuck Jones: Space Cop of the Future to create Adlib-Host, a program that you can run on your 16-bit PC with an Adlib and MPU-401 UART card (so it...
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    Strange horizontal interference in Mac SE screen

    Hi all, A little while ago I dug out my Mac SE FDHD and replaced it's dying hard disk with a much newer model. Afterwards as I was playing around with it, I noticed some strange horizontal lines in the video image, that look to me like an messed up sync signal. I made a video below which...
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    Setting the VGA border/overscan color.

    Hi all, I've noticed that all VGA card's I've tried seem to set their border color to palette index zero. I'd like to set the border color in my game to black however for various reasons I'd prefer to use palette index 0 for something other than black. Black is still in my palette it's just not...
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    what has happened to my hard disk?

    that's what we get from fdisk
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    what has happened to my hard disk?

    Hi everyone, Today I tried hooking up my 40MB Seagate ST-157a from my AST 286 up to my modern Win10 PC to copy over some files. To my surprise this worked just fine, windows recognized the disk and was able to read and write to it. I reattached the drive to my 286 and everything was working...
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    Whats the going price for an original adlib card these days?

    I was thinking of going after a genuine adlib card for use in my 286 and of course for testing my code on, but I'm not sure if one of these is within my reach so I figured I'd ask here as I know Ebay prices are often inflated. If any of you guys recently bought or sold one I'd be interesting in...
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    FAT12 minimum file size? saving space by merging small files

    Hi, As I've been working on my DOS game I've been trying a few different things to save disk space as keeping it on a single floppy would save significant money on release. I've already used some compression on data files which has been a big win (thanks Trixter for help with that). I started...
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