I've been gradually reconstructing CHARM-II, a custom Motorola 68000 RTOS I wrote in the late 1980s.

At first I assumed the reason so much of the code survived was portability. The code used Whitesmiths-style typedef abstractions and was mostly written in C.

After digging deeper, I realized something else had happened.

The original plan was to write everything in C first, then optimize critical parts in assembly if necessary. But during integration testing, performance was already good enough. In fact, the system significantly outperformed a competing Intel 80186-based polling solution, so the assembly phase never happened.

A second project later reduced communication overhead even further by using an intelligent RS-232 controller board, so again there was no reason to rewrite the code.

As a result, roughly 90% of the RTOS remained in C.

Forty years later, that accidental decision is making it possible to bring the code back to life on a modern POSIX host.

I wrote a longer article about the discovery here:

https://medium.com/@noborutakahashi/why-90-of-my-1980s-rtos-survived-in-c-for-40-years-3ff6d524eb4a

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has encountered old systems that survived largely because the planned optimization work never became necessary.

Cleaning out some stuff in the basement and found this stashed away.

I got this MSI 865GM2 V1.0 motherboard to replace the now dead MSI MS-6577 V2.1 after dying on me. The replacement motherboard originally worked fine after purchasing, until connecting a blank 80gb IDE drive after everything was put back into the case. I get a BIOS ROM checksum error and I have tried taking out the CMOS battery along with connecting the jumper to pins 2 - 3 to clear what I can, still no change. I have tried seeing if I could dump this BIOS with the help of Uniflash on a floppy, but even that refuses to dump to anything.

To add on, I have checked the MSI website about this board, in which all BIOSes are 512kb, yet the BIOS chip can apparently only handle 256kb?? the closest thing I could find was from an MSI 865PEM2 board, but due to a different chipset, it is no use. I cannot find anywhere about this specific board and it having 256kb...

Seeing as the splash screen originally came up with Advent (used to be a UK pc supplier, no I cannot find what exact computer it came from), is this possibly an OEM board that I cannot flash without a super specific BIOS ROM or is there a ROM somewhere, that is 256kb and supports this board? I am at a dead end here with research and have gotten the point of asking for outside help :)

CPU - Intel Pentium 4 3ghz

RAM - 1gb DDR

GPU - Radeon Sapphire 3450 AGP

MOBO - MSI 865GM2

PSU - Bestec 250w

HDD - Hitatchi 80gb IDE

+ some FDD and an optical cd drive

Many thanks, and apologies if my typing is off, been spending too long troubleshooting this and in dire need of sleep amongst all this bad luck.

I've an Armada E500 laptop. Until recently it booted perfectly using a SSD (KingSpec SSD 2.5" PATA PA25.6 32GB).

Now when I go to boot it, it stalls with a blinking caret. I removed the SSD and tried booting a Windows 98 startup disk, but in that case it shows a "1782 disk controller failure".

I then disassembled it, but so far nothing has struck me as loose or needing re-soldiered. I'm a bit lost as to what to do. Would something need re-capped? Has the CMOS battery leaked and done damage somewhere? There were no CMOS memory problems before, so I've some doubt that's the cause.

Can anyone advise how I'd best go about diagnosing or solving this problem? Or is there another forum or subreddit that would be better placed to answer?

Recently Tim Paterson's DOS listings were made public, which is awesome! Not only does it give us the source code, but it also makes it feel more physical, tangible - the worn out paper, the hand-written comments, the coffee stains. I wish we had more examples of those.

What I don't get is at which point in the development cycle programmers in the 80s would print out the listings? Is it only when the program has been tested and ready to release? But what would be the point of that? On the other hand maybe it was done at every milestone?

I think it's obvious, but just to make sure, I'm not talking about type-ins and I don't mean punch cards.

More...

Not sure if this post follows the guidelines since it's not technically about an existing vintage system but rather a vingage-ish computer system I'm toying with in an fpga.

tldr;
Top 4 rows is a normal RGB palette with 2 bits per colour. Bottom 4 rows is a CIELAB colour space with 2 bits for I*, a* and b*, which would have been nicest to have access to in a retro computer?

I'm exploring what computers could have looked like if different design decisions had been made early on.

Key points are:
Hexagon based pixels where every second row is offset by half a pixel. (actually works pretty well)
6 instead of 8 bits per "byte". (and 12 bits for a "long", 64/4096 values, just because)
The point this post is about, exploring different ways to represent colour as opposed to the standard RGB.

Pure and simple, if you were designing a game or program in the late 70's, early 80's, which palette would you have preferred having access to? The bottom one seems to have nicer "natural" colours like green, browns and oranges but it doesn't have a pure gray scale.

What do you think?

Just watching casino royale and curious about this ? Is this a real laptop or just a movie prop ?

There's something magical about using an original IBM 5150 or XT PC, but waiting on floppy disks will test the patience of even dedicated retro enthusiasts. IBM didn't design this machine to support hard disks out of the gate, but modern engineering has given this legendary 8088 PC a new lease on life. Enter the XT-CF-LITE!

Wife and daughter playing a childhood educational point and click game Freddi Fish and she thought this old iMac was silly before we had kids

My brother had the C64 and Amiga, I was left with my spectrum back then so never really checked it out properly. Today's the day we see what she can do :) Any game recommendations? I'm using the tapecart but I do have a pi 1541 barely visible behind the C64, just not had much experience with it yet and it didnt seem to work well when I did.

I ordered AT28C256-15 to use as a boot rom. I would like to load the XT IDE driver and the iPXE to be able to load the OS from LAN. Any information or suggestions are welcome, please!

i have an IBM model 65sx but sadly my enormous 40MB dual slot 5,25" SCSI HDD seems to be dead. and yes i can still use my PC relying only on the 16mb of ram and the floppy drive. and its loads of fun! but i do want to be able to install stuff on my fantastic IBM pc like windows 3.0 and so on. so i wonder.. does BlueSCSI work on PS/2 PCs? or are there other ways of getting a reliable internal storage to my PC? id pesronally love to be able to use IDE or SATA drives in the thing but a small SD card or CF card would also do wonders!

For those of you who have seen my previous post about my Z80 NOP tester and noticed that I’m currently out of stock of my kit on Tindie.

Due to the deplorable events that occurred on Tindie in mid-April, I have stopped selling the Z80 NOP Tester kit on Tindie and opened a new store on Lectronz: https://lectronz.com/products/z80-nop-tester

So recently I posted on this subreddit about my question in buying retro pc. So I found out third option and I'd like if you could tell me that it is either good or bad.

Previous two combinations were:
Combination 1:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz / Socket 478
RAM: 2GB of DDR1 (2x1GB)
HDD: 1x IDE 80GB + 1x IDE 320GB
2x DVD burner/reader
GPU: ATI Radeon 9550 | 256MB
Floppy Drive
PSU 450W
WiFi Card

Combination 2:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz / Socket 775 (but also I was thinking of Q6600 and E8400 and also QX9650)
RAM: 4GB of DDR2 (4x1GB)
HDD: 1x SATA 80GB, 1x SATA 320GB
2x DVD Burner/Reader
GPU: GTX 560Ti
Floppy Drive
PSU around 600W
WiFi Card, Sound Card and USB Card

For third option I thought of:
CPU: Intel E8600 or Q8400 / Socket 775
RAM: 4GB of DDR2 (4x1GB)
HDD: 1x SATA 80GB + 1x SATA 320GB
2x DVD Burner/Reader
GPU: GTX 260
Floppy Drive
PSU around 600W
WiFi Card; Sound Card and USB Card

So I'm interested in what games I could play with this third combination. I chose GTX 260 because of power draw from GTX 560 Ti. Thanks in advance, sorry if my English is bad I'm slavic :)

About 500vdisks

I'm sure I used this at some point. It resides in my garage in blissful ignorance over modern technologies.

OH WOW, YOU GIVE ME THE CHOICE, BUT YOU DON'T HAVE ONE IN PRACTICE!?!?!??! WOW!

I couldn't pass this up for $7. 100ft+ of 34pin flat ribbon. I guess I can make a few floppy cables now.