Viewing profile — GloriousCow

Thanks for checking this out. I've uploaded all the binaries to GitHub if you're struggling with copy & paste. There's also a new example in Braille. https://github.com/dbalsom/exe…

For the 'hello' program, you need to use DosBox-X with the 'cpu cputype=8086' parameter. You can use 86Box or MartyPC as well but those take more effort to set up and get the execu…

Try copying from the links provided after each emoji block. That goes to my disassembler which should independently verify the md5. I think blogpspot unfortunately mucks with the e…

having the emojis survive copy & paste from a browser is surprisingly frustrating. I would have expected there to be well-defined semantics for this, but a lot of things insert var…

The actual output of microcode disassembly is just a text file - a line of code for each microcode word, in essentially a a new dialect - a type of static assembly language. reenig…

We also had decoded the 386's match-decoder PLA, so we knew roughly the locations of different opcodes were in the microcode itself, which was very helpful. Some opcodes have very …

Intel had given us some clues - they had written somewhere that the 386 had 2560 microcode words. The microcode array has 37 banks - each bank resolves one bit from the 37 bits tha…

I worked a bit on the extraction process so I can chime in here a bit. The first part is to just mark the x,y locations of where all the bits are, generally by the intersection of …

nand2mario has made a Verilog implementation from it. It currently runs DOOM, but some of the more fiddly protected-mode bits prevent it from running full operating systems (beside…

Replacing the RAM would probably be straightforward - on the CGA its only 16K, so only twice as big as the font ROM. It's slightly trickier, considering the address lines are row a…

Funny you mention that, I'm actually friends with twvd and we share a discord server and trade UI ideas as we both use the same GUI toolkit. Snow actually uses the disk image libra…

MartyPC brings cycle-accurate IBM PC emulation to your web browser. Run Area 5150 at 60fps on your phone! Almost every feature from the desktop version is present if practical: - V…

This isn't necessarily a new technique, as black and white art has been put on floppies before: https://github.com/bzotto/picturedsk But the new wrinkle here is support for graysca…

For the ones that I make to look pretty, the data is colored in buckets of 8 bits, using the bit-count per byte to select a shade in 8 steps from 0-255. So there's at least 8 times…

Or when you win solitaire!

In this post in a series on PC copy floppy protections, we take a look at XEMAG duplication's "Xelok" scheme. Xelok was quite devious on the Apple II, implementing "fat tracks" tha…

An investigation into the infamous 80's copy protection scheme PROLOK that involved burning holes on diskettes. Also included is an interview with Quaid Software founder, Robert Mc…

EA's INTERLOCK protection (Marble Madness) uses deleted address marks.

An in-depth dive into the Macintosh floppy drive system, including the fascinating IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) custom floppy controller. The level of fidelity to properly emulate …