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A Multi-Format Cross-Platform Floppy for 5.25" Floppy Day
25 May | 21Something I’ve wanted to do for several years is to create a cross-platform 5.25” floppy, one that could be used on two different incompatible computer systems. Not by making a “flippy” disk with data for one system on one side and data for the other on the back, but instead with everything all on a single side. This may seem like it would be trivial, but back when the 5.25” floppy was king every computer system had its own idea of how data would be encoded at a...
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Booting a 486 From Floppy with the Most Up-to-Date Stable Linux Kernel
06 Jul | 20Back in August of 2019 I had a Sing-Along Week contest on RetroBattlestations with the challenge of playing a MIDI file synchronized to a speech synthesizer singing the lyrics. In my stash of cards I found an MQX-32M MIDI card (Roland MPU-401 clone) which I wanted to use for converting MIDI signals to interface to an Apple II+ with an Echo II speech synthesizer, but ended up using a laptop with a USB MIDI interface. The Pizza Week contest made me more interested in...
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October Brings Horror
27 Oct | 19October 1st started off like a normal day. I went to move a 20 year old Celeron-based iPaq near my Teletype in order to finish setting it up for the party I was having a few days later. After getting everything plugged in, it refused to boot up insisting that /sbin/init and many other files were missing. I booted into a rescue Linux via PXE and sure enough, the files were missing. Since I had had so much trouble getting it setup I didn't think much of it and wiped it and started over with...
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Retro Computer Day was a Success! Mostly
21 May | 19Saturday morning I woke up early excited about my planned experiment. I took care of all the online stuff I needed to and rushed to prepare a boot disk for the Apple II Plus as an intro for Retro Computer Day . A couple of pictures, a little bit of image conversion on "the timeshare", and a quick transfer of files to floppy using an Apple IIe with an AppleTalk link. I then went around and turned off all the Macs and I was just barely ready at 8am. To try to keep myself from...
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A Retro Computer Day Experiment
15 May | 19Not long after I started RetroBattlestations I started contemplating spending an entire day using only a retro computer, even possibly lugging it to work and using it there as well as at home. The idea of seeing whether or not an old computer could still be usable in a modern world sounded somewhat interesting, at least to me. After all, as much as computers have changed in the last 40 years, they also haven't. I often find myself using knowledge I acquire from tinkering with these old...
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