As a kid in 1998, I was given an old IBM PS/2 to play games on. It only had one problem: with no USB (naturally) and no optical drive in it, I could not add more games to the hard drive, since the floppy drive didn’t work properly. However, I was curious to see an orange light come on, instead of the more familiar green, and there was “2.88” written on its eject button. What… [more]
That’s right – the very first IBM Personal Computer, the IBM 5150 – a business-oriented machine and a hallmark platform that started it all, shipped along with an integrated cassette port. Too bad it could only be utilized through the cassette BASIC contained in ROM… Or shall we say thankfully? Yes, this interface was abandoned soon after, for obvious reasons.… [more]
This is a follow-up to my previous article about connecting old 8″ drives directly to a PC equipped with a classic floppy disk controller. Since there is a way on how to do it on a hardware level without paid or proprietary equipment, there still needs to be a free and available software solution that enables the OS to interface these drives, as they were not officially supported… [more]
Earlier this year I’ve got a cheap old Amiga 500 for tinkering purposes. Now, I never really had any Commodore paraphernalia around here, and my first PC was a 486 to play games on, but – some of my DOS favorites were actually ported from an Amiga, so I have decided to give this one a try… [more]
Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh? Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?… [more]
The BootLPT/86 project was created to allow booting of classic and vintage x86 systems through the parallel interface using a cross-over LapLink null printer cable. Originally inspired by Martin Řehák’s ROMOS project, it is defaultly provided as a ROM image for any PC-compatible systems, and can also serve as a fallback boot option, should all the other boot options fail… [more]
A third version to go with the third anniversary of CMOS De-Animator!… [more]
Derrick was a hybrid monolithic 16/32-bit kernel which I wrote in FASM in 2008, to learn myself low-level Intel x86 assembly along the way. Derrick can be executed on a machine equipped with at least an 80386 CPU, runs from a floppy disk and will execute everything in ring 0 to be as fast as possible… [more]
About a year ago I made a small project to see if I could make an old floppy controller chip, salvaged from a PC card, talk to an Arduino Mega board that I had left over from a 3D printer setup. With that being a success, I’ve extended the project to include 8-inch drives and 2.88MB PS/2 diskettes. One last step before I run out of RAM is to include ImageDisk support!… [more]
As a follow-up to my previous article about the IBM PCjr and its quirks and features, I have decided to create KeybJr – a small open-source project, that allows the PCjr to use a regular keyboard of the era, through both cable or the infrared link. This is because the system did not contain any provisions of connecting a normal PC keyboard… [more]
In other words, finding a more creative use for the Arduino Mega than a neon clock: to be able to read and write all sorts of old data storage media and send’em over USB, blending old technology with new.
Originally inspired by the ArduinoFDC project, I have decided to try a different approach: instead of using the Arduino to talk to a floppy drive directly, why not leave the hard … [more]
The infamous PC junior celebrates 40 years since its day of announcement, and for this “special occasion” I have decided to make a short re-visit to one of the experiments I did 3 years ago: booting from a vinyl record utilizing the cassette tape interface… [more]
As a teenager, I used to publish small freeware Win32 applications and system tools under the name ST-WARE Softworks. Because the original site is now defunct, I decided to put up a mirror for all of them here. Feel free to share… [more]
Triple333, or 333-333-333, is a Wolfenstein 3D-like first person shooter I’ve made, heavily inspired by -among others- the Wyoming Incident, a fake television hijack, the Max Headroom WTTW TV pirate, who was for real, Russian “Wyoming incident parody” БЕЗНОГNМ and the scary ВИD mask, which itself was a logo of a Russian private TV company.… [more]
I have once stumbled upon an interesting article from 2018 published on retrocmp.de, discussing about provisions on connecting an 8″ floppy disk drive to a PC. You know, those huge “boat anchors” that accept flexible disks just four inches shy of an LP record, in exchange of a couple of hundred kilobytes data storage. That sort of type.… [more]
The WKSW (Windows / Workstation Kill Switch) is a small, “anti-boss” system-wide utility, which allows you to set up a global hot-key to power down your Windows machine within seconds, making it handy in such situations, where locating the power button or a classic shutdown would cause more trouble… [more]