retrocomputing

Review of the ZuluIDE and PicoIDE optical drive emulators! These awesome ODEs can replace your old CD/DVD-ROM drive with a MicroSD card solution for loading ISOs, including support for Redbook CD digital audio! Among other features between the two, like WiFi, virtual hard disks, and Iomega ZIP drive emulation.

(Thanks to /u/O_MORES for posting this elsewhere)

There's a brand new HD audio driver for Windows 98/Me called WDMHDA.

Since it's a WDM driver, it will play nice with the Sound Blaster Emulation Layer built into Windows 98/ME (sbemul.sys).

And it actually works. Here's Windows 98 and this codec tested on a Ryzen 9 PC: https://youtu.be/uhWyH0TsrCc

You can get an IDE to USB bridge from all the usual sources, but you may find those fail on the older drives in your collection– apparently they require drives using logical block addressing, which did not become standard until the mid-1990s. Some while some older drives got in on the LBA game early, you were more likely to see Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) addressing. That’s why [JJ Dasher], a.k.a [redruM0381] created ATABoy, an open-source IDE bridge that can handle the oldest drives that fit on the bus.

The heart of the build is an RP2350, which serves as both IDE and USB host controller. To computer, after a little bit of setup, the drive attached to ATABoy shows up as a regular USB mass storage device. A little bit of setup is to be expected with drives of this vintage, you may remember. Luckily [JJ] included a handy BIOS-themed configuration utility that can be accessed through any serial console. He says you’ll usually be able to get away with “Auto Detect & Set Geometry,” but if you need to plug in the CHS values yourself, well, it’ll feel just like old times. Seeing is believing, so check it out in the demo video embedded below.

The Interim Computer Museum (ICM) and SDF.org have made 28 vintage computer systems accessible online for free. There’s a plethora of old but gold - some legendary - systems available, so your visit should be like entering a living museum of computing.

All you have to do is point your browser at connect.sdf.org and login by typing ‘menu’ to gain guest access to the systems. Typing ‘1’ toggles between pages, revealing the full 28 choices.

I feel like I'm kind of alone in this. I was born in 2004 so the two retro computers I tinker with the most (a C64 and a 486 clone) are way older than I am. Are there any other younger retro enthusiasts who never grew up with the hardware but are into it now?

Also this is my first post on Lemmy, so I'm sorry if this is out of place here.

Does anyone know how I can cross-compile software for a 1999 iMac G3 with a PowerPC processor? Are there resources on how to develop for this CPU and is there any community around it?

TL;DR: .. hosting a website on a 25-year-old Sun Netra X1 SPARC server running OpenBSD 7.8. The setup includes: Noctua fan mods for quiet operation, httpd serving static HTML/CSS, OpenBSD’s pf firewall with default-deny rules, and Cloudflare tunnels to expose it safely without port forwarding. The server pulls ~55MB of RAM and serves pages from my garage. Check it out live at sparc.rup12.net - because why not?

Well, the guy licks Cloudflare’s boots. Fuck that. He doesn’t understand the problem with that. So perhaps the real answer is NO, if he depends on Cloudflare Inc.

This poor broken mess of an 80s laptop has been rebuilt and it's better than ever! The rare Chaplet Halikan LA-30A is an interesting machine on its own, but this one's story of breaking into a thousand pieces and being restored by the talented PolyMatt takes it to another level. His video went into the rebuild process, but this one dives into using the PC itself, its odd quirks, the company behind it, and its small but fascinating place in computer history.

The current CPUs use 3 or 5 nm transistors and run at MHzs and I was thinking how small and fast would be a 6502 or a Z80 with current tech?

If you have been warming up to the idea of owning physical media or preserving your existing collection before it fades away, then PicoIDE should interest you.

The work of Polpotronics, this is an open source IDE/ATAPI emulator meant to replace aging tech like CD-ROM drives and hard disks. If you don't know what those are, you probably weren't around back then. ☠️

The job of the PicoIDE is quite simple; it can take in disk images (e.g., ISO, .bin/.cue, .vhd) from microSD cards and present them to your vintage computer as real IDE hard drives or ATAPI CD-ROM drives.

https://picoide.com/

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33498885

I'm quite late to finding out about this, but it's quite awful to learn. I was hoping he'd be able to complete his documentary of Gary Kildall, but that may never happen now.

He died on December 28th of last year from the flu.

Rest in peace, Stewart.