Crossposted from https://ibbit.at/post/217882

Although Windows 95 stole the show, Windows 3.0 was arguably the first version of Windows that more or less nailed the basic Windows UI concept, with the major 3.1 update being quite recognizable to a modern-day audience. Even better is that you can still install Win3.1 on a modern x86-compatible PC and get some massive improvements along the way, as [Omores] demonstrates in a recent video.

The only real gotcha here is that the AMD AM5 system with Asus Prime X670-P mainboard is one of those boards whose UEFI BIOS still has the ‘classic BIOS’ Compatibility Support Module (CSM) option. With that enabled, Win 3.1 installs without further fuss via a USB floppy drive from a stack of ‘backup’ floppies that someone made in the early 90s. [Omores] also tried it with CSMWrap, but with this USB to PS/2 emulation didn’t work.

Windows 3.1 supports ‘enhanced mode’ by default, which adds virtual memory and multi-tasking if you have an 80386 CPU or better. To fix crashing on boot and having to use ‘standard mode’ instead, the ahcifix.386 fix for the responsible SATA issue by [PluMGMK] should help, or a separate SATA expansion card.

For the video driver the vbesvga.drv by [PluMGMK] was used, to support all VESA BIOS Extensions modes. This driver has improved massively since we last covered it and works great with an RTX 5060 Ti GPU. There’s now even DCI support to enable direct GPU VRAM access for e.g. video playback, with audio also working great with only a few driver-related gotchas.

From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed

Ah, I was just about to ask around whether anybody has some advice on how to burn some music for my walkman.

An implementation of sudo for DOS, to run the given command with full privileges. It can be used to edit important system files, run disk partitioning tools, and so on!

Former Xbox community chief Larry Hryb, aka Major Nelson, has joined the company behind the Commodore 64 revival as Community Development Advisor after he was laid off from game engine Unity in January.

Commodore reemerged last year after being acquired by Peri Fractic, current CEO and President, and released its first new piece of hardware in more than 30 years, the Commodore 64 Ultimate. IGN loved it, awarding it a 10 in our Commodore 64 Ultimate review. “The Commodore 64 Ultimate lovingly recreates the best-selling personal computer of all time with smart modern tweaks and pixel-perfect 8-bit joy,” we said.

To celebrate MARCHintosh, today we're restoring a very special Italian-market PowerBook Duo 230.

Review of the ZuluIDE and PicoIDE optical drive emulators! These awesome ODEs can replace your old CD/DVD-ROM drive with a MicroSD card solution for loading ISOs, including support for Redbook CD digital audio! Among other features between the two, like WiFi, virtual hard disks, and Iomega ZIP drive emulation.

(Thanks to /u/O_MORES for posting this elsewhere)

There's a brand new HD audio driver for Windows 98/Me called WDMHDA.

Since it's a WDM driver, it will play nice with the Sound Blaster Emulation Layer built into Windows 98/ME (sbemul.sys).

And it actually works. Here's Windows 98 and this codec tested on a Ryzen 9 PC: https://youtu.be/uhWyH0TsrCc

You can get an IDE to USB bridge from all the usual sources, but you may find those fail on the older drives in your collection– apparently they require drives using logical block addressing, which did not become standard until the mid-1990s. Some while some older drives got in on the LBA game early, you were more likely to see Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) addressing. That’s why [JJ Dasher], a.k.a [redruM0381] created ATABoy, an open-source IDE bridge that can handle the oldest drives that fit on the bus.

The heart of the build is an RP2350, which serves as both IDE and USB host controller. To computer, after a little bit of setup, the drive attached to ATABoy shows up as a regular USB mass storage device. A little bit of setup is to be expected with drives of this vintage, you may remember. Luckily [JJ] included a handy BIOS-themed configuration utility that can be accessed through any serial console. He says you’ll usually be able to get away with “Auto Detect & Set Geometry,” but if you need to plug in the CHS values yourself, well, it’ll feel just like old times. Seeing is believing, so check it out in the demo video embedded below.

The Interim Computer Museum (ICM) and SDF.org have made 28 vintage computer systems accessible online for free. There’s a plethora of old but gold - some legendary - systems available, so your visit should be like entering a living museum of computing.

All you have to do is point your browser at connect.sdf.org and login by typing ‘menu’ to gain guest access to the systems. Typing ‘1’ toggles between pages, revealing the full 28 choices.

I feel like I'm kind of alone in this. I was born in 2004 so the two retro computers I tinker with the most (a C64 and a 486 clone) are way older than I am. Are there any other younger retro enthusiasts who never grew up with the hardware but are into it now?

Also this is my first post on Lemmy, so I'm sorry if this is out of place here.

Does anyone know how I can cross-compile software for a 1999 iMac G3 with a PowerPC processor? Are there resources on how to develop for this CPU and is there any community around it?

TL;DR: .. hosting a website on a 25-year-old Sun Netra X1 SPARC server running OpenBSD 7.8. The setup includes: Noctua fan mods for quiet operation, httpd serving static HTML/CSS, OpenBSD’s pf firewall with default-deny rules, and Cloudflare tunnels to expose it safely without port forwarding. The server pulls ~55MB of RAM and serves pages from my garage. Check it out live at sparc.rup12.net - because why not?

Well, the guy licks Cloudflare’s boots. Fuck that. He doesn’t understand the problem with that. So perhaps the real answer is NO, if he depends on Cloudflare Inc.