Jolt Country

Today the machine booted for the first time. We had a nine hour power outage and in the middle of it, the Matrox Millenium 2D card showed up. So did the Gotek floppy emulator. I am not sure if it will work in DOS. How could it? I bought it so it would show up early, but I did not do my normal research.

At this point - with the 2D graphics card - I need the following to boot to DOS

- the DIN adapter for the keyboard, because the motherboard would complain that the keyboard isn't present
- A floppy cable
- A working electricity grid

The DIN adapter is at least in Colorado. The floppy cable (and, to be fair, IDE cable) should be here Monday. At that point, I should have everything I need to get going. Power outages aside, this has been a fun project.

My friend Darrin mines bitcoin and has very generously donated hardware to me over the years. I have a processor and motherboard in a box that I have not done anything with. I think I am going to see if I can make a computer of that too. I really want to redo my office and it'd be nice to have different computers doing different things.

I think I figured out the Gotek Floppy Emulator. There is software that lets you setup a USB drive to have a number of floppy slots.

I grabbed it here: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/gotek- ... lator.html

When I put in a flash drive that it recognized, I formatted it through the program listed there AND it had a radio button for making the first disk DOS 6.22. That is exactly what I wanted and needed. Boot to DOS! Yes! They know what you want to do with it!

I bought a USB IDE reader years ago and today I used it on an IDE hard drive - this one I pulled out of storage has two partitions on it, so I will have something to install DOS to, tomorrow. I loaded up a bunch of drivers and games and utilities on the other partition. This might all actually work!

Also, I bought 2 64MB DIMMs, on the RAM side. When I boot the computer, it is telling me it sees 32MB. Not 128. I am glad it boots, and I wonder if the BIOS needs to be programmed to allow for the larger RAM sizes. Which I kind of don't want to do because I won't really be able to know that I have the later BIOS for it, I'd just be going off what people post on the internet. But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

The IDE cable showed up! I cannot believe there isn't an IDE cable around here. I have the hard disk plugged in. I was able to copy COMMAND.COM to it, so here is hoping it boots up. We'll see.

I cannot believe the floppy cable is not in this house somewhere or the attic. It is simply insane to me.

Also, I am putting danzaland's mother's ashes in the attic because they have been just in the garage since she passed. I will go up one more time and search for a floppy cable (which is coming tomorrow).

Why do you have her ashes?

I distinctly remember throwing out three floppy cables, at least two hard drive cables and all the old useless but working drives when we got the XP computer and all I needed was a CD drive. Now, because of this thread, I'm thinking of asking for my old Pentium 3 machine at work. It's silly because I know it'll just sit in a box until I croak and my kid will throw it out one day...but I got that itch, that retrocomputing itch!

I will answer the ashes question momentarily!

I got the PicoGUS working tonight! It is running a MOD tracker. In DOS. This is one of the most fun things ever. I am so happy.

SUCCESS!

I have the computer built and the PicoGUS card working. I am able to listen to .MOD and .XM files (and other electronica songs) using CapaMod.

I have a wireless Bluetooth transmitter that goes into an 1/8th jack - which the PicoGUS has! I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones and I got them to connect!

So I have the Pentium computer in the other room playing 1990s electronica songs, being transmitted to my headphones. I don't know how to change the UI of Capamod once it starts running, but I threw a few dozen tunes on the (IDE) hard drive of the machine, and if it just plays one after another for a bit that is totally fine. I am ROCKING! OUT! with the machine in a different room!

Finally! This is everything I ever wanted out of retro computing!

I think the memory place sold me two 16MB pieces of RAM and not two 64MB pieces. It's not that I am mad they made a mistake, it's just I wish they didn't.

I flashed the motherboard's BIOS to the latest one I could find. 1999.

Rise of the Triad and Blood both run for a little bit and then the computer locks up.

The hard drive I boot to is very, very noisy.

I got help on the website called "Vogons" on how to make CapaMod play a bunch of songs. To do it is a *command line argument*. There is no way to do it in the UI. You can SELECT a bunch of songs. But not have it do anything but loop the first one you play. Insane. Insanity. Horrible. I love the player though. It does one bad thing.

It's cmod.exe /LOP0 for the record.

This post has a good autoexec.bat and config.sys setup:

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=635201#p635201

I patched Blood to the latest version. It took 10 minutes. I don't know what the hell it thought it was doing. I guess they couldn't just give you the new executable 25 years ago because you'd just get the game that way? It either just had sleeps in the code there or it was doing some sort of odd checksum.

The game was crashing after about 30 seconds at version 1.00 but it no longer crashes while PATCHED. I have the Gravis Ultrasound tunes coming from the PicoGUS and the thing going through the 3dfx driver maybe, who knows. But it still looks, sounds and plays great.

Here is an article about the PicoGUS card from the creator: https://makezine.com/article/technology ... he-masses/

The machine I have built is functional, I think, now. The eBay store that purported to sell me 64MB RAM sticks did sell me 16MB ones, but whatever, I now have 4 sticks at 16MB a piece for a total of 64MB. I can revisit that someday. The serial mouse now works. I don't have the ideal keyboard, but one is connected. I don't have any games taking advantage of the 3Dfx card yet. But that also seems like trouble to get going in DOS.

The last thing would be form, not function, and that is a case for it. I have some planks of wood left over that I am using to raise my monitors that I use every day, I am thinking of grabbing a couple of them to make something to put this thing inside. AT cases on eBay are expensive and filthy. So I don't really want to go that route, and I really do want it to be horizontal so I can have the CD-ROM horizontal while sticking its monitor on it. If I had known how rare baby AT cases were going to be...

I will try to take pictures this week of it all working correctly.

AArdvark wrote: Mon Apr 29, 2024 5:18 pm Why do you have her ashes?

She was living in Colorado in an assisted living center when she passed away. She had moved out to Colorado when her kids were 11 or 12, I think. She ahhh did not take her kids with her.

When danzaland was out here a few years ago, we all visited his mom and she passed away a few months later. I guess you can't ship ashes and we've forgotten to take them with us the last couple of times we have driven to NY.

There is a PicoGUS software update.

I need to mount this retro computer to something.

I am just jumping to the end of this, but:

I did get a Pentium computer built.
I did get the PicoGUS running perfectly with it.
There was another card that was made that I bought that did a whole bunch of things. Unfortunately, I had to make some room and I do not have a case for my motherboard and it takes a non standard case. Maybe I will just buy one off eBay for it.

Ian has made a ton of updates in the mean time. It now also works as a CD-ROM emulator!

https://github.com/polpo/picogus/releases/tag/v3.0.0