I kept remembering then forgetting this link each time I went to post here... a while ago I found
an interesting article which mentions how the AlphaSmart 3000 "portable keyboard" doesn't seem to radiate very much EMR
(if at all
), and that it was an option for people with
really bad EMR sensitivity/reactions. After a fair bit of digging I located
a sufficiently high-res motherboard photo showing the CPU... and found that it uses a
(16.58MHz
) Motorola MC68EZ328 - from the same processor series as used in the various Palm gadgets of old
(indeed, that particular chip was used in a notable handful of Palm devices
).
Taking this article into account, it would seem that this series of processors are appropriately low-powered enough for my needs; furthermore, my being "indefinitely fine" with my 36MHz Ericsson MC218 means I can probably run with
(excuse pun
) the faster 33MHz MC68VZ328, the processor used in the most popular Palm PDAs - so such a PDA
(or a few...!
) is
definitely on the todo list
(once I figure out which one to get... I've got my eye on several models, still figuring out some different ideas... heheh
).
Oh, and the AlphaSmart 3000 was
okay, but the AlphaSmart Dana was cooler: it ran *Palm OS*
(yup - and it was the bizarrest device to do so
), and it used the faster 33MHz VZ CPU too.
Rich Hawley:
Where would I start looking for underclocking software? That seems like the most interesting option.
Mjolnir:
That idea about underclocking a Jlime-based PDA is an interesting one, I'll have to look into that.
And, well, I said I'd come up with something interesting for that DECpc you mentioned, and I have two ideas
. The first one is Linux related but kind of "quaint"; you may find it amusing for 5 minutes nonetheless. The second isn't Linux-focused, but will likely prove intriguing for
slightly longer.
You kind of need "sleep" available for this to work "well"
(preferably as a shell builtin, which is obviously faster than launching a separate process
).
It's relatively easy to make the Linux kernel-level VT100 terminal emulator play "beep music" without anything external installed, like this:
echo -e '\e[10;f]\e[11;l]\a'
"ESC [ 10 ; <...> ]" adjusts the bell frequency, "ESC [ 11 ; <...> ]" adjusts the duration in milliseconds, and "\a" 'prints' a bell character.
By stringing these together with "sleep" commands in between, you can make music-ish stuff. This is what I hear when I take a screenshot:
echo -e "\e[10;680]\e[11;70]\a"; sleep 0.04; echo -e "\e[10;900]\a"
(
You might need to adjust the "sleep" command to take processing latency into account.)
I think this idea is slightly more interesting.
Windows version 1.01 is all over the 'Net, in YouTube videos and on dozens of old computers, and is generally considered to be "Windows 1.0" - but it isn't,
really. I've been looking for the "real" thing for several years.
I'm happy to say, I stumbled upon
several versions of real Windows 1.0 - completely by accident - on Christmas day 2013
(yea, the timing was awesome, and it was the coolest "present", lol... Jesus
does love me
). After some tinkering
(mostly involving figuring out which DOS version wouldn't cause large software tantrums involving spontaneous combustion
), I actually managed to get the seemingly random bunch of files to actually "
go" and do interesting things...!
The
Windows 1.0 Developer Release 5 would appear to be the earliest publicly available version of Windows on the 'Net. It was released on 11-04-84
(that's what the release archive says, pretty sure it's MM-DD-YY
) and was highly experimental. It had none of the "finished-ness" of Windows 1.01, and it ran in black and white. The similarities to the Macintosh System Software were quite notable, as were the similarities to the Visi On system also available around that period.
Now, Win1.0DR5 was *designed* to be installed on a hard disk, but I've managed to figure out what subset of files produce a workable demo which fits within the IBM PC-DOS 2.00 360KB floppy disk limit.
That's what the attached file is. Not everything's included on the disk, but what
is there seems to work
(
reasonably) well.
Notes/Trivia:
- I haven't tested this on many emulators (but I can say that QEMU will *not* run this; it simply hangs); I've been using PCE (http://www.hampa.ch/pce/) for all emulation work. Its configuration learning curve is almost a vertical wall, but its awesomeness is unsurpassed - what other 8086 emulator do you know of which you *have* to feed a disk controller BIOS ROM to?
- To start everything up (preferably on REAL hardware! ) -- hit ENTER at the date/time prompts, CD to \windows\test and run KERNEL to boot the system. WIN.COM didn't exist at this point.
- Based on how long this takes to boot with the PCE floppy drive controller set to "accurate" mode, you can expect to stare at a black screen for about 45 seconds, and a blank graphical desktop for a further 15 or so. The system takes about about a minute from the point you type KERNEL to become usable - at least on a 4.77MHz 8088, anyway.
- I've noticed that the system doesn't seem to like exit/reentry that much, so if you quit the session then restart, it will very occasionally hang.
- If double-clicking Notepad only makes the cursor flicker busy for a nanosecond, something's gone wrong and you need to reboot.
- It's a 360kB disk image, but it will write to a 1.44MB floppy disk just fine - it just occupies the first quarter of the disk.
Use
rawrite (for DOS
) or
RawWriteWin <
.ZIP file link> to write the image on a floppy disk, or use "dd if=win10dr5.img of=/dev/fd0"
(or fd1, fd2, etc
) on Linux.
ARGG... forum source code hax0rs, please make it possible to use MMBS code in lists!! lol
-i336