@foone@digipres.club avatar

foone

@[email protected]

Hardware / software necromancer, collector of Weird Stuff, maker of Death Generators. (she/they🏳️‍⚧️)

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foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

ahh, that fun feeling when you're like "damn it, I need a tool to do X"
and then you realize there is one
and you wrote it
18 years ago

foone,
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hey look it worked perfectly
this 2005!foone knew what they were doing

foone, to random
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I got 3 cheap Toshiba Satellite laptops at the electronics flea market this weekend.

This one... well, it boots more than the first one, but I'm not sure I'd call it usable.

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

me: hey look an old thinkpad! I should see if I can get it to work
me: oh good the hard drive still works! it's got windows 98 installed on it
me: and there's the owner's social security number. great.

WIPE YOUR FUCKING HARD DRIVES, PEOPLE

RangerRick, to random
@RangerRick@redwombat.social avatar

@foone Does each key have a GPS receiver in it, and it detects a keypress whenever you push one in ~5 meters?

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@RangerRick nah. it's got only one button, and it types the letter for the key you're inside.

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

terrible idea: GPS-based mouse.
It has no optical sensor, just a GPS locator.
You move the mouse around, and it transmits that movement back to the PC, over a built in 5G modem.
You may have to move it a lot to click on anything

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Don't mind Steve, he's from the alternate universe where USB was implented with TRRS connectors

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

What size?

1/4" at first. Later they switched to 3.5mm for mini usb.

foone,
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Anyway he's still annoyed at us for thinking USB-C's flippable nature is neato. He's had that functionality in USB since 1997

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

oh MY GOD.
so I can't inject a file into the fallout 1 DAT file, because the file I need to overwrite is in the ART\INTRFACE folder.
You'll note the folder appears on the right. It doesn't on the left.

So I can't select the correct folder

foone,
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WHY ARE MY ATTEMPTS TO HORRIBLY HACK OLD GAMES ALWAYS STYMIED BY BUGGY TOOLS!?

foone,
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okay I think I vaguely fixed it: the trick was to extract the entire art\INTRFACE directory, then re-inject the whole folder.

foone,
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and it fails because it tries to set a progress bar to 101%

foone,
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COMPUTERS WERE A MISTAKE

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

you know that saying about how a compiler made by N teams will contain N+1 passes?
like every big program contains a replica of the organizational structure that created it?

It's fun sometimes to see big programs made by one person, because they're a sort of inverse mold of their brain structure.

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

apparently the "what do you do if snap refresh crashes?" is "don't do that".
A snap in updating mode can't be removed or updated, because it's being updated. you can't abort the update, because it already aborted itself in failing. and you can't use the app from the snap, because it's marked as being updated.

this does not give me confidence in this software distribution method

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I like how quickly a non-project can spiral out of hand. I have a Packard Bell 386 here with a dying hard drive. So I get my roommate to buy me an IDE drive, but it turns out it's also dying and I have to back up a bunch of files off it. so I get a CF to IDE adapter, but then it turns out it needs a 3.5" floppy power adapter, and I don't have one on hand. so I build a cable, then it turns out I can't easily mount the CF card in the hard drive slot, because it's bottom-mounted, not side-mounted

foone,
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so now I'm in Fusion360 designing a custom Packard Bell hard-drive-to-CF-adapter doohickey

foone,
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so now my BIOS battery is dead, my floppy drives are not working, and my CF adapter isn't working

foone,
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apparently all that happens when the IDE cable is backwards.

also, the IDE cable has pin 0 marked on the wrong side

foone,
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and now I've unlocked Piss Mode in FreeDOS

foone,
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IDEINFO.exe my beloved
https://archive.org/details/msdos_IDEINF_shareware

foone,
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BTW these Packard Bell BIOSes (although they're supposedly a pretty standard Phoenix BIOS) are weird.

Guess what key you press during boot to get into the BIOS?

Well, unless there's an error, there isn't one.

foone,
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instead you boot to DOS, and only THEN can you press "ctrl-alt-S" to get into the BIOS

foone,
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and since it's using the BIOS keyboard routines, it means it won't work if you're in a game or windows

foone,
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but at the DOS prompt? sure

foone,
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this is also how the turbo switch is implemented. CTRL-ALT-PLUS for on, CTRL-ALT-MINUS for off

foone,
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PRANT IT

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

and now despite looking reasonable on the temperature readout, my printer reported thermal runaway and aborted.

WHY CAN NOTHING BE SIMPLE?

foone,
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Reattached and re-secured the thermistor and it seems more stable.

foone,
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Print completed with no issues.

foone,
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after all that: just about every dimension was wrong.

time for version 2.0, aka print #4!

foone,
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So I had to abuse the screw holes into being the right size, and I need to make some cut-outs so that the CF adapter will lie flat, but hey, it's at least USABLE now!

foone,
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Better, but not perfect. The bottom side is slightly too short, so there's a little gap there. It's supposed to support the PCB.

foone,
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It's hard to tell from that angle, but in this version the print is C-shaped to not bump into all the pins on the bottom of the board.

image/png

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

it'd fit a bit better in the case if I moved the CF adapter attachment point down and back a little. But I think at this point I'm just gonna call it quits and say it's done enough for now... as soon as the PCB-supporting-adjustment version finishes.

foone,
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Finished the modified version. Now the PCB is nicely supported.

image/png

foone,
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now I just need to reinstall freedos

foone,
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this takes a surprisingly long amount of time, installing freedos off 3.5" floppies onto a 386

foone,
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finally!

foone,
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it boots kinda slow, because it's trying to initialize a "mouse" and "CD-ROM" that I don't have.
but that's easily fixable.

foone,
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weird! it seems freedos can't reboot this computer. neither CTRL-ALT-DEL or "reboot" works.

foone,
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so if I do an "emergency no-drivers" boot, it CAN restart with ctrl-alt-delete.

so now the question is: which driver is breaking it?

foone,
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I think it's JEMMEX/JEMM386

foone,
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having ctrl-alt-delete not work on a system with no reset button is weird

foone,
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yeah it's jemmex. I edited the config to just not load it (but load everything else) and it can reboot again.

weird. I'm gonna have to look into the jemmex source and figure out what's going on there

foone,
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yeah there's some reboot hooking in it, but it's too early in the morning for me to do x86 assembly

foone,
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in the meantime I can at least confirm VGAPride works on FreeDOS!

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