Love the WP51 screen, so much time spent looking through the formatting editor view trying to work out why the documents looked wrong. And who could forget it was the master of all function keys combos!

OK – PC Emulator for the PI?
Cold six-pack>
Copy of “Leisure Suit Larry In The Land Of The Lounge Lizards”? !!

Ohhh, I still have SOP somewhere….

I can remember there was a DOS-Emulator (can’t remember its name right now) for the Acorn Archimedes on which I used to play “Leisure Suit Larry” probably 22 years ago…

I guess that emulator would still run on the RiscOS for the Pi…

OMG, where are my Wordstar disks?

Caution, this news may be bad for your health. The last time I went into the loft to retrieve my floppies the ladder broke, I fell to the floor and cut my head open, spending the rest of the day strapped to a board in A&E whilst the medics decided whether I needed my head scanning. Will Microsoft Arcade run on it ?

Deluxe Paint 2? Guess I’ll be installing Deluxe Paint 5 later on my Amiga 1200. :)

Awsome, has so much potential especially if it can manage timing accurate emulation of an 8086.

Whoo – anypone got a pinout to connect a 5.25″ floppy to gpio ? ;-)

Funny how things got around itself! The PI really can end as a classical PC alternative for many people and businesses, esp. if someone releases a IO box for PI for providing the original IO ports of the PC (e.g. AT keyboard, serial and parallel ports, FDD, HDD). I still have around the LaserJet 4MP in perfect condition, and the 8086tiny + the proposed IO box will surely provide my nostalgia dose. :)

Here’s how difficult graphics were to implement in hardware back then, and how much development work was required even three-and-a-half decades after the first dinosaur computers such as the ENIAC roamed the Earth: the IBM PC Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA – black-and-white graphics only, of course) had more logic circuitry than did the PC motherboard. The Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) couldn’t start being shipped for months after the PC started shipping because of the volume manufacturing and software complexity for the time (they were caught flat-footed sourcing parts for the PC products, resulting in backlogs rivaling those for the Pi in its first six months).

IBM thought that PCs weren’t really serious computing platforms (and they actually weren’t, in the beginning) and thought that they would just eventually be used as data terminals connected to their mainframes (System 360, 370 … 3090) and office systems (e.g., AS/400). As such, they were developed and manufactured by the IBM Data Entry Systems Division – the folks responsible for keyboards and displays, i.e., data terminals. They were so confident of this that they offered a Token Ring Adapter card, for connection of PCs to their “real” computers, before the CGA was made available and didn’t think about developing a modem card. However, they weren’t aware of the rapidly-growing popularity of modem-accessed on-line services such as the Well, Compuserve, GEnie, etc., used by hobbyists and small businesses via S-100 and Apple ][ customers. They were also so unconvinced that the PC would be a big seller that they contracted out development of PC-DOS to Microsoft, giving the option for Microsoft to develop its own version, MS-DOS, which was unheard of within IBM up to that time, as they always controlled every aspect of their commercial products.

Just be careful Out There – you’ll have to cram everything into 640K (minus space for hardware drivers), even if Bill Gates never said “640KB ought to be enough memory for anyone”, or words not to that effect ;)

mmm I wonder if I can fit a PI in the original IBM keyboard?

Now the Pi has finally completed the pass to the dark side ! Its features, software and feelings reminds me my early days when I was trying to figure out what I can do with my first real PC-clone. Nights spent on Borland (or MS) C compiler, new programming languages, x86 assembler for graph stuff, hacking games, dos hidden keys and esoteric tools, ICE, my first dual-head (hercules+cga), norton commander/pc tools and stuff like that. All these things and skills learned in those days (mostly nights…) are a part of my first tech background and were a starting point for the job that still gives me a regular salary after nearly 20-25 years; today there’re different things involved in my activities but that’s where everything started (for me)

Go team pi !
… and a really big thank you to Adrian Cable

Wonder where I have a copy of the venerable Borland Turbo.Pascal 3,0, it was so easy to use, one of the first IDE:s. I may even have some code somewhere.

And now I know why I still hang onto all that PCjr software (as well as the PCjr itself).

Cool. In October 1981, I bought an IBM PC for about $3000. Without any floppy drives or other data storage, and 16KB of RAM.

As somebody who grew up on the “Amiga side” rather than the “PC side”, could somebody explain the differences between 8086tiny, DOSemu and QEMU ?

Get the serial port running and I can fly this :-)

Well, if DOS was good enough for Robocop it’s good enough for a weather balloon tracker :-)

DOS is much easier to write graphics programs for than, for instance bare Linux. I still have graphics library primitives made after reading zen graphics book by Michael Abrash just in case ;)
Network side in DOS is not so good as in Linux to say the least. Yet you can always try IPX/SPX, as if this is good enough for DOOM and Netware, it may good enough for everything :)

What I’d like to see now is a shoot out between this PC emulator running Windows 3.1 and the Apple Mac emulator that was demonstrated a while back – let’s re-enact the Microsoft vs Apple battle on the Pi!

There might be a new life for my copy of Visual Basic For DOS with this.

Have people been able to write to the C: drive after it is mounted? I can’t see how to get permission to do this. (Sorry to post here instead of in the forum but I have had no response in there…) I have some DOS stuff I an impatient to try.

Is it coincidence or intended that the final file size (4043) was half of 8086?

There are no coincidences in life!

-Adrian

Oh I loved WP5.1 I was given a copy of the windows version by WP to beta on the first windows. I loved making macros to print out and create the forms that we used at the council saved us a fortune in sending off for specific forms when I could just design the forms and macros for the office staff to use still have it somewhere on 3.5″ floppies. What about SmartWare ?

Maybe 8086tiny could emulate the Amstrad PC1512 (documented at http://www.seasip.info/AmstradXT/1512tech/ ). It had an extended CGA-mode with 16 simultaneous colors. PC1512 was my second computer but I soon replaced the Intel 8086 with a NEC V30 CPU (similar to 80186 but also with 8080-mode) and added 128KB RAM, 30MB HDD, 720KB FDD, and 1200BPS modem.

Hi, 8086tiny ran very slowly on my computer:

CPU: intel Core 2 duo E8500
RAM: 2GB ddr2
GPU: Nvidia GTX 470
OS: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

It took 5 minutes (maybe more) to load FreeDos then it freezed ( i could not type in and excute commands)

Do you know why it was slow? Please help.

And I only just got around to throwing out a WP5.1 keyboard overlay a couple of weeks ago…..

Hmm. Wonder if a mouse body could be made for the Pi.

A few people are wondering the same thing I am. Is it possible to somehow attach an ISA backplane to the Raspberry Pi so that you can add cards to this system. I realize this is an emulator, thus emulated hardware, but what would it take to connect physical hardware and get 8086tiny to recognize it?