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Chinese 8088-based laptop system with pirated 8088 BIOS

jscipione said:
I have a Book 8088 (I’m a sucker for anything 8088) is there anything I can do to help? Provide a ROM dump? Test with Sergey’s BIOS ROM?
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In fact I am working on adding the official Book8088 support. I can always use some help with testing. I'd recommend getting EPROM pin-compatible Winbond W27C512 Flash ROMs and a suitable EPROM programmer (alternatively, regular UV erasable 27C512 and a UV eraser would work)

There are a few questions that I might need a help with:
1. Understanding whether port 61h is read/write or write-only.
On an IBM PC/AT it mapped to 8255 PPI port B, which is configured as an output, and controls a few things. Most interestingly/importantly, bit #0 connected to the gate input of the 8253 PIT, and it enables/disables using the PIT for square wave sound generation, and bit #1 is connected to a speaker through an AND gate, and it allows direct control of the speaker. The behavior of 8255 PPI's output ports, is what they they read, they return the last value written. It is common for the PC software, including the BIOS, to read port 61h set or reset bits and write the value back. It is not clear whether Book8088 implements reading port 61h properly. From reading testing, it appears that bits #0 and #1 and maybe a few more are read back, the rest are always set to 0 or 1 or floating.
So the test would be to run DOS DEBUG on Book8088, and try writing values with "O 61 <value>" command and then reading them back with "I 61" and see what bits read back properly and what not.

2. I need a help and a recommendation on floppy support. As far as I understand, while the BIOS shipped with Book8088 has the floppy (and serial and parallel ports) boot/POST messages removed, it still has one 1.44 MB floppy drive configured. That is, a floppy disk controller is plugged into the ISA extender, it should work.
It would be nice to test if that indeed works. Also make a recommendation on the default floppy configuration - is the default (one 1.44 MB drive) good? Or maybe set the default to no floppy drives? Unfortunately Book8088 doesn't seem a way to set/save configuration, and it is almost impossible to auto-detect floppy drive type. The best I can do, is to try to detect whether an FDC is present, and if so enable a single 1.44 MB floppy drive?

Thanks for your help.
 
I'd be more than happy to help, FWIW. Apparently a Book8088 is coming my way, as after the change to the BIOS, I was curious enough to place an order.

- Alex
 
I can try to see what reading and writing to 0x61 does but I didn’t bother to get the ISA extender for the floppy test. :/

0x61 is definitely not read-write but depending on the value I specify I can get 0x34, 0x35 or even 0x36 out.
 

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jscipione said:
0x61 is definitely not read-write but depending on the value I specify I can get 0x34, 0x35 or even 0x36 out.
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That's great. Thanks for testing!
So, it appears that bits #0 and #1 are actually read-write. Other bits seem to be set to 34h, that is 001101xx, where xx are the previous values written to bits 1 & 0
 
keenerb said:
That's weird. I'll re-upload.
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Interestingly, there's a video from Adafruit, showing Book8088 boot:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1670874056206299136
It looks a bit different from the previous videos/screenshots.
It has even more terse output - no copyright message or computer name or anything. Just CPU type, memory test, and the address of the extension ROM... Still very likely based on my BIOS code.
Book8088-Boot_Adafruit.png
 
How this was made:
In 1978, came the birth of the famous 8086 cpu
in 1981, came the first personal conputer, the IBM 5150
in 1982, IBM5150 became the "Man of the Year"
....
And now in 2023, 42 years since PC was made, we design a complete compatible model based on IBM PC, in memory of the old time and enjoy the old technology in a brand new looking.
More surprises, waiting for you to discover!

Humph, they are already on Version 3.0? I'm holding out until Version 7 at least :)
 
syzygy said:
Humph, they are already on Version 3.0? I'm holding out until Version 7 at least :)
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Heh.

If someone wants to buy me one I'll promise to get off my lazy butt and lay out an as-small-as-possible combo board to plug into the back and give it a couple serial ports and some UMB (heck, even EMS if you want it) memory, I have a tube of 16552 UARTs that aren't spoken for lying around. Otherwise I'm still feeling like I'll pass. ;)
 
the3dfxdude said:
The comparison of Sergey's situation to JWZ's rant is kind of strange. For one, Sergey's authorship removal was done silently which appears as an attempt of deception.
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Not exactly. There are several copies of Sergy's copyright notice and the licence in the source distribution, which was sent unsolicited to at least some of the book8088 buyers.

As I said earlier, the impression I get is that the designer really just doesn't care that much to chase down all the little things he should be doing correctly. Which, while I don't approve, I certainly understand: I'm sure we all have chunks of code kicking around where it's apparently we just couldn't be arsed to do the Right Thing because we were too concerned about Getting the Job Done, whether correctly or not.
 
HeathenUK said:
The CH375B supports wider USB host modes, including HID, just not as flexibly at the CH376. So you could in theory use it for a mouse. I'm not sure if FreddyV's source is available? I know he's moved on to projects that use the Pi Pico on the ISA bus for a wider range of uses (see also ISABlaster and DirtyRat).
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What what ? You compare the PicoMEM with ISABlaster ? :)
 
This makes me livid--knowing the person here who made the bios and the MF chinese and their 'steal with pride' attitude just profiteering off his work.

I've created copyrighted works (photographs) and had them used without compensation or permission, and that makes me mad (especially since the print publications profited from my work).

But this is a whole new level of rage. Stealing and then selling it back and profiting? This is why I don't want any more relations with china or any manufacturing there. Bring it all home so we can live under the rule of law vs their ideas of 'rule by law'.

F the chinese makers of this thing and F every company in the western world selling it.

Honestly, depending on the amount of money everyone is making off of this, might be interesting to talk to an IP theft attorney--especially since they could go after all these people just for the hell of it without costing you a dime.
 
@Samir this has already been discussed. Suing Chinese companies is not worth the effort. You can see that because large multinationals (even Apple, who loves to sue) don't try to do it.

Also, this device is seemingly the creation of a single engineer and sold by a small company. There wouldn't be much point in suing them, even if you won, because they likely don't have much money.

- Alex
 
Samir said:
But this is a whole new level of rage. Stealing and then selling it back and profiting?...
Honestly, depending on the amount of money everyone is making off of this, might be interesting to talk to an IP theft attorney--especially since they could go after all these people just for the hell of it without costing you a dime.
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Well rage on the internet can be fun, rage at something that never happened is a bit pointless. I don't think you understand what's been done wrong here.

The original code is under the GPL. Thus, anybody is allowed to use it and profit from it however they like, so long as they stick to the terms of the GPL.

Legally, the only thing the vendor has done wrong as far as I can tell is removed some copyright notices and GPL license text from the source files, which the vast majority of people will never notice because they never look at them. And not from all the source files, just some of them. So it's pretty clear what the source of the BIOS is if you look in the source code he's sending out.

He's also changed the boot screen not to display a copyright notice, authorship info, or GPL info. Since this is not an interactive program at that point, that appears to me to comply with the GPL.

So no, lawers can't "go after after all these people...without costing you a dime" unless they happen to want to do it for free. There are no monetary damages here; full reparations would consist of adding the GPL and copyright notices back to a few files that most customers will never look at and then sending those files out to the customers that have previously received them. (And the new notices will not be news to the customers; anybody's who's looked at those files has almost certainly already seen the same notices in the files that do have them.)
 
Samir said:
This makes me livid--knowing the person here who made the bios and the MF chinese and their 'steal with pride' attitude just profiteering off his work.

I've created copyrighted works (photographs) and had them used without compensation or permission, and that makes me mad (especially since the print publications profited from my work).

But this is a whole new level of rage. Stealing and then selling it back and profiting? This is why I don't want any more relations with china or any manufacturing there. Bring it all home so we can live under the rule of law vs their ideas of 'rule by law'.

F the chinese makers of this thing and F every company in the western world selling it.

Honestly, depending on the amount of money everyone is making off of this, might be interesting to talk to an IP theft attorney--especially since they could go after all these people just for the hell of it without costing you a dime.
Click to expand...
Do you own an ipad. iMac or any other apple product? They are made in China.
 
I like the device and it's quite a neat little toy, especially with the ISA expansion bus. BUT, I would probably enjoy one of those nice aluminum 7" windows 10 laptops that are all over Aliexpress (running Dosbox) a little bit more...
 
HeathenUK said:
Nope, just noting that there are a range of projects now leveraging the RP2040 for ISA, and since we're talking about HID isablaster is relevant.
Click to expand...
USB HID is working on the PicoMEM, just a mater of hours to do a driver :)
 
I just wanted to pop in and say that I haven’t forgotten about this, I’m still waiting for 512k ROM chis to come in the mail. I tried to speed things up by reusing the BIOS ROM from my micro 8088 but it has too many pins to fit. Will hopefully have an update before July 4 mail is just slow right now.
 
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