Browsed by
Category: Retro computing

Snark Barker – open source SoundBlaster 1.0

Snark Barker – open source SoundBlaster 1.0

Comments 1 comment

My first video card was the original 8-bit Sound Blaster card. Besides upgrading to VGA graphics, nothing changed my gaming experience back in the day more than this one upgrade.

Enter the Snark Barker. It’s an open source project that gives you a complete bill of materials, circuit diagram, board fab files, and tons of other information you need to make your own. Yes, MAKE your own Soundblaster clone. It looks like a very doable project for those a little handy with a soldering iron.

Links:

Recreation ISA Sound boards

Recreation ISA Sound boards

Comments 1 comment

David Larsson makes a bunch of clone ISA audio boards such as the Gravis Ultrasound, 8-bit ISA Soundblaster, MCA Sound Blaster, Disney Sound Source. He sells them on Tindie for pretty reasonable prices considering the ebay prices for the original boards.

Here’s a good review of his 8-bit Soundblaster card:

These aren’t the only sound card clones. Turns out there are lots of others too:

Links:

Attaching a ST-225 hard drive

Attaching a ST-225 hard drive

Comments 0 Comment

Here’s a collection of all the tools you’ll need to set up an old MFM style hard drive in a XT/286/386/486 computer.

Hardware you’ll need:

Software

Informational links:

Using Greaseweazle to make bootable DOS disks

Using Greaseweazle to make bootable DOS disks

Comments 0 Comment

Have written previously about my experiments with the very excellent Greaseweazle; but that was reading things like my old Kings Quest 5.25″ floppy disks from my modern 12th Gen Intel PC running Windows 10.

Recently I acquired some old pc hardware and put together a retro 486-DX pc. To that end, I needed to create a DOS boot disk for this old system. That meant I needed to write a 1.2mb DOS boot disk.

Previously I used some boot disk images to create an old DOS virtual machine running Windows 1.0. For that, I used a bunch of archived boot disks images from WinWorld archive.

But how do I write these little beasts?

I floundered around with greaseweezle’s command line but this guide from Tech Tangents really helped out. There’s clearly a lot more I need to learn, but this got me a bootable 5.25″ 1.2mb floppy disk. I was able to test it on 2 different drives, and both worked. So, that’s pretty sweet!

Greaseweezle command line samples

How to write DOS 6.22 image to a 5.25″ 1.2m floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the cable twist:

gw write --drive b --format ibm.1200 Dos6.22-5.25.img

To write a DOS 3.30 image to a 5.25″ 360k floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the twist:

gw write --drive b --format ibm.360 DOS330-360k.img
DREM – MFM/RLL hard drive and Floppy emulators

DREM – MFM/RLL hard drive and Floppy emulators

Comments 1 comment

Connecting old floppy disk drives to modern hardware is not easy. Resurrecting old MFM and RLL hard drives is even harder. The primary method would simply be to get an old PC with the legacy hardware to read the hard drives. But now there’s a few soltuions.

DREM:

DREM is based on the high performance FPGA platform and does not require the use of a PC for any file encoding operations. DREM is equipped with an VGA output, PS/2 keyboard input and file manager software. A user can browse the SD card and insert DSK images into virtual drives.

DREM uses DSK disk image files, which contain the raw dump of a disk. The raw image consists of a sector-by-sector binary copy of the source medium.

If you’re just looking for floppy emulation, I recommend GreaseWeazle or other solutions.

https://www.drem.info/drem

MFM Board Emulator:

Also available, but doesn’t seem quite as well baked, is the pdp8online MFM board emulator.

Early AI was more like a therapist

Early AI was more like a therapist

Comments 0 Comment

ELIZA was an early ‘AI’ created by MIT scientist Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 to 1967.

He created it to explore communication between humans and machines. ELIZA simulated conversation by using very simple pattern matching and substitution that gave users an illusion of understanding – but it had no representation that could be considered really understanding what was being said by either party. Something you can easily discover by playing with it for a few minutes.

Fast forward to 1991, and Creative Labs was having amazing success with their SoundBlaster add-on sound cards. On the driver disks that came with the SoundBlaster, there were programs showing off different capabilities. One of these capabilities was voice generation. To show off the ability to voice synthesize text, Creative Labs included a little program called Dr. Sbaitso (SoundBlaster Acting Intelligent Text-to-Speech Operator).

You interacted with it like a pseudo-therapist; but you can clearly see the connections and similar pattern/substitution methods that Eliza used. I remember being wowed by it when I played with it for the first time – and experimented for hours with it. It quickly shows its limitations, but the speech synthesis was very good for the time.

It doesn’t hold the test of time, but it is pretty neat and you can even check it out here:

https://classicreload.com/dr-sbaitso.html#

ISA over USB

ISA over USB

Comments 2 comments

Plugging in old ISA cards is something that hasn’t really been possible since 80486 days. This makes plugging in cool things like Sound Blaster, Adlib, Monster3D and other ISA cards pretty much impossible for modern computers. It also means things like attaching 5.25″ floppy drives and old MFM/RLL drives are also off the table. Well, maybe. 🙂

There have been a few efforts to enabling plugging in ISA boards to modern pc.

  • dISAppointment that I wrote about before is a USB plugin that exposes an ISA interface.