MiSTer FPGA Forum

That is seriously weird. Would using MOSLO from vanilla DOS help to correct this one in plain DOS.

Try mine?

https://www.area536.com/dosk8s/disks/mnkyvga.zip

Those are different for each VHD unless they are all the exact same size every time. A properly generated VHD contains the geometry in a footer field so DOSBox should be able to detect it. Not sure though, I don't use DOSBox a lot.

I'd be happy to host the whole lot. My uplink is 1Gbps from an actual datacenter.

Not yet but I'm certainly interested. And I'm following along with this collection as you seem to be doing the games while I'm building scaffolding from the other side in. At some point these worlds will meet and that'll be a huge load of awesome in a very short time.

The Bash thing was more of a proof of concept. It uses GNU Mtools and dd to create the disk + partitioning. When the Rust base is done, I'm looking at a GUI to hide the YAML step.

I wrote a whole script for that in Bash.. see the top of the DOSContainer thread. Insert YAML, get a baked-off VHD. Currently rewriting this exact thing in Rust so you get this as a single executable on all platforms.

That's what always happens when I curl into a tearful ball of desperation on the floor in front of my computer: it gets unstuck. I just generated my first FAT12 file system from scratch with a file on it, and not even Norton Utilities finds it suspicious anymore. To be continued!

Anyone here up to speed on how to exactly compose a FAT12 allocation table? I'm sooo very close right now to getting PC DOS 2.00 booting correctly, but my implementation is ever so slightly off..

I'll dig into the code for a bit.. If there really are things in the core that are unreachable from SYSCTL, I'll submit a PR to get that rectified. The C program looks simple enough. I'll just have to hunt for the twiddly bits in the core's code fore a bit because I don't know any HDL.

Something I noticed is that these settings only flip once from within DOS and I need to reset the the core for them to work again. Not something I spent a lot of time on though so I may be wrong and I usually reset my core anyway because of the single game VHD's I use. I haven't had any real issues developing DOSContainer.

Those presets are just combinations of clock and cache settings. Those are all available from SYSCTL.

Both the length and the contents of the sequence are different every time. I guess it's a bit late to report a bug to IBM now, but this does seem to be one. This may become a thing when the disk gets filled to near capacity.

Norton Utilities doesn't like these disks much either. Ah well, the things we unearth from the depths of digital archaeology.

Flynnsbits's answer from a year or 2 ago is still as valid as it was when he posted it. VESA won't work on this core in its current state.

More historical computers would still be very nice.. like the actual PDP11, early IBM mainframe, VAX, heck.. Burroughs or Data General big iron would fit easily and be interesting to run ALGOL60 on. But I guess that's just me being interested in computing and conservation rather than only playing video games.

For anyone interested, I gathered A LOT of DOS stuff here:

ftp://ftp.area536.com/platforms/PC

Have you considered lending to a serious museum?

Those don't affect the sound. You can flip the device to emulate a General MIDI synth using SoundFonts. That's departing from the MT32 though. The original MT32 was what it was and sounded the same whenever you got it to work.

The Pi acts like an MT-32. If the game supports and detects it properly, there's nothing else to set. Some games expect a certain MT32 ROM version but that depends on the game.

Gearing up nicely. Builds are now generated automatically for platforms other than just my local laptop. Unfortunately I'm not (yet) able to do Mac builds from Linux due to licensing issues from Apple.

More info here: https://www.area536.com/posts/doscontainer-rust-cicd/.

That'll be "collateral" from the analysis part of the tool. Until then you could use GNU Mtools to do this.

Not that this will work with MiSTer, but some may find this interesting:

https://www.furygpu.com/

It's a complete GPU implementation that would equate a mid-90's graphics card.