Daily Blog #4 · 3:16am Jun 18th, 2017
Random Facts~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Atari recently seemed to hint that they are making a new console for the first time in decades. It’s called the “Atari Box”.
It’s relatively commonly known in retro PC enthusiast forums that socket 7 often does not play well with VIA-branded USB controllers. Because of this, many users are steered towards other manufacturers such as NEC for USB cards. In reality, it’s only certain USB chipsets manufactured by VIA that have this incompatibility, as proven by the fact that the USB card I found today has a VIA chipset and still works perfectly with an overclocked Pentium-133.
Microsoft has a pretty good track record in terms of compatibility. Using the NTVDM subsystem in 32-bit versions of Windows, it’s not only possible to run applications from as far back as Windows 2.0, (Windows 1.xx used a pre-Win16 executable that worked mostly off of direct DOS commands), but even DOS games could be emulated to a certain point.
While the MS-DOS line is most definitely dead, the FreeDOS project is basically an open-source binary-compatible clone of MS-DOS. Today, it is commonly found as a basis for retro gaming, recovery drives, and in rare cases, an everyday driver for basic computing.
For a time, upgrade cards were made for older PCs that allowed for basically the entire system’s replacement. These cards consisted of a fully-functional motherboard, complete with integrated graphics, CPU, RAM, etc. and utilized the original motherboard as a backplane instead, allowing for communication with existing cards.
Thoughts & Opinions~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Welp. Saved myself $8 with that thrift store USB card. Now I just need a replacement to the dying hard drive before it goes kaput for good. I’m hoping to get a cheap SD to IDE adapter so that I can just use SD cards as sort of a easily replaceable SSD. That way, I can just image the current drive, restore the image onto a decently large SD card, and boom. SSD in a computer from a time when 64 MEGABYTES of RAM was considered overkill.
Amazingly, the internet’s actually doing pretty well for once. Sure, it’s still mind-numbingly slow, but it’s only dropped out around ten times today, mostly around noon.
Just for the sake of being able to squeeze out a bit more bandwidth, I’m gonna see what a $2 USB wifi adapter can bring to the table. My current PC has a frankensteined laptop wifi adapter sitting in an adapter held together by wires and tape, and that thing only goes up to the Wireless-G spec. Not to mention the fact that using a USB adapter means that I can stick it on pretty much anything with a USB port and connect to the internet... including my first computer.
Speaking of which, I seem to have somewhat of an obsession over restoring and pushing my first computer to its absolute limit. Maybe it’s because it was the computer I grew up with and used up until I started getting homework assignments that required resources from the internet? Maybe it’s because I like the style of the beige case with a single black stripe running across the front panel? I have no idea. All I know is that I’ve already gotten far past the restoration part of the whole ordeal. After all, I am trying to figure out how to get Youtube to run on the thing. I’ve managed to load the video, but the lack of RAM makes it become a swap-zombie almost instantly after booting.
I don’t like how Windows 7 requires ACPI support to install.
Pretty much all high-end Socket 7 mobos I’ve heard of top out at 768 mb of RAM, while all the el-cheapo ones allow up to a measly 128/256 megabytes. The one I have sits right in the mid-range, supporting up to 512 mb + whatever else you add with the swapfile.
I really enjoy this new daily blog. It lets me spout my own little slice of life around the later times of day without just making a huge number of separate blogs.
Atari is still trying to make something. Wow.
And glad you were able to save some money and get good wifi.