Cheap Hack Gets PCI-X Card Working In PCI Slot

February 1, 2024 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

PCI and PCI-X are not directly compatible, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that means you’re out of luck if you need to use a PCI-X card in a machine that only has basic PCI slots. And yet, that needn’t be the case. As [Peter] shows us, you can work around this with a cheap hacky hack. Our favorite kind!

[Peter] had a PCI-X RAID card that he wanted to use on his Socket 7-based computer. The 3ware 9550SX PCI-X card is 3.3 V only, and doesn’t fit in a typical PCI slot. It’s not compatible mechanically or electrically. Enter a PCI-X riser, which gets around the missing notch that would normally not let the card sit in the slot. Other than that, it just took masking off some pins to avoid damage from the 5 V rail. Throughput is good, too, reportedly sitting at roughly 60-70 MB/s.

The hard part is probably finding a PCI-X riser; PCI-Express stuff is far more common. Few of us need to deal with PCI-X anymore, but if you’re working on some ancient industrial hardware or something, this hack might just save your beans from the roast pot one day.

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How To Build Your Own 16-Bit System-on-Spreadsheet

January 30, 2024 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

Back in the hazy days of the early home computers, many of us would rejoice at running our first BASIC applications, some of us even built our own 8-bit system from a handful of ICs and felt elated the moment the connected LEDs, screen or other output device would show signs of life. It is this kind of excitement that [Inkbox] has managed to bring to the bane of every office worker: spreadsheet programs like Excel. How, you may ask? Why, by implementing a completely functional 16-bit system with 16 general purpose registers, 128 kB of RAM and a 128×128 pixel color display, all inside an Excel spreadsheet, making it conceivably the world’s first System-on-Spreadsheet (SoS).

Perhaps the most tantalizing aspect of this approach is that it provides a very good visual way to indicate what is happening inside the system using color codes and clearly segregated and marked functional elements. Not only can it be programmed manually, but [Inkbox] also created an assembler for the CPU’s ISA – called Excel-ASM16 – all of which is available from the ExcelCPU GitHub project page. The ASM is assembled into a ROM.xlsx file that can then be run by the CPU.xlsx file by triggering the Read ROM button. After this you are confronted with the realization that although it all works, it’s also incredibly slow, at about 2-3 Hz.

Still, with all the elegance of an IMSAI 8080 front panel, we cannot help but give full points for this achievement. Plus it gives many of us something to do during those exceedingly dull meetings where only serious applications like office suites are allowed.

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Bringing An IBM Butterfly Laptop Back From The Dead

January 28, 2024 by Jenny List 8 Comments

Among all the laptops produced over the last few decades, there is one which rises above the rest and which has retained an appeal long after its meager computing resources became obsolete. It’s the IBM 701c, the famous “Butterfly” laptop, whose fold-out keyboard still gives it star quality, and [John Graham-Cumming] has documented the restoration of one from the tattered remains of two scrap examples.

The two laptops in question were someone else’s never-started project, and were in a sorry state. The flexible cables were in poor condition, and the 1990s Ni-MH batteries had leaked and damaged both circuits and case. We were unaware that NiMH leakage could damage plastic, but the parts of these machines were significantly damaged.

One had a working mainboard, the other a working modem card. One keyboard was in pretty bad shape, the other was complete. Of the pair there was a double super twisted nematic (DSTN) display and a more contemporary thin film transistor (TFT) panel. Be thankful if you have never had to use a DSTN laptop, as they were truly awful. From this pile of parts a working machine could be made, and with a new CMOS battery, that cable repair, and a repaint, he was ready. Or at least, as he says, ready for 1995.

This isn’t the first 701c restoration we’ve seen, and within reason, it’s even possible to give them a retro processor upgrade.

A ZX Spectrum Raytracer, In BASIC

January 26, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 12 Comments

[Gabriel Gambetta] knows a few things about ray tracers, being the author of Tiny Raytracer, a raytracer written in just 912 bytes of JavaScript. As a long-time fellow sufferer of the UK-designed ZX Spectrum, could these two love affairs be merged? Could the Tiny Raytracer fit on the ZX Spectrum? In BASIC? The answer is an affirmative, albeit with our beloved speccy’s many limitations.

Ray tracing with only 15 primary colours

The story starts with [Gabriel]’s Computer Graphics From Scratch (CGFS) raytracer algorithms and an existing code base that was ported to the ZX Spectrum’s very limited BASIC dialect, using VSCode for editing, BAS2TAP to generate a tape image file (essentially an audio track) and executed with FUSE. With the toolchain sorted, [Gabriel] adds just enough code to deal with the ray intersection equations of a sphere, and renders a three-sphere scene to a 32×22 pixel colour image, taking a mere 15 minutes of runtime. Fellow sufferers will remember the spectrum had a 32×22 block attribute array (or colour array) with two colour values for foreground and background pixels. Each attribute block contains 8×8 pixels, each of which could be foreground (on) or background (off.) The next stage was then to expand the code to handle pixels as well as blocks, by simply expanding the raytracing to the full 256×176 resolution, and for each block simply determine the two most common colours, and run with those for the whole block. It sort of works, in a very spectrum-esq ‘attribute clash’ kind of fashion.

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Laptop Memory Upgradable Again

January 14, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 38 Comments

For some computing components, the bottleneck to improved speed and performance hasn’t been power consumption or clock speed but physical space. But a new memory standard may provide all of the power and space-saving benefits of soldered memory modules without losing any upgradability.

The standard is called compression attached memory modules (CAMM) and provides a way for small form factor computers to have upgradable memory without needing dual in-line memory module (DIMM) slots. Unlike DIMM, though, CAMM modules allow for modern high-speed low-power memory to be used and can take advantage of dual-channel properties even if only one memory module is installed. CAMM modules are held in place with small screws, similar to modern M.2 drives, and don’t have the massive footprint of a DIMM slot. This allows laptop manufacturers to save nearly as much space as having soldered memory.

While this won’t solve the problem of computer manufacturers offering only soldered memory as a cash-grab, hopefully, some take the new standard under their wing for those of us who value the upgradability of our hardware. There are of course some problems with newer standards, but right now it seems like the only other viable option is soldered modules or slower, heavier computers. Some may argue that these soldered-on modules can be upgraded in theory, but not without considerable effort.

The Hobbes OS/2 Archive Will Shut Down In April

January 10, 2024 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

The Hobbes OS/2 Archive is a large collection of OS/2 software that has been publicly available for many years, even as OS/2 itself has mostly faded into obscurity. Yet now it would appear that the entity behind the Hobbes OS/2 Archive, the Information & Communication Technologies department at the New Mexico State University, has decided to call it quits — with the site going permanently offline on April 15th, 2024.

Fortunately, from a cursory glance around the comment sections over at Hacker News and other places, it seems that backup efforts have already been made, and the preservation of the archive’s contents should be secure at this point in time. Regardless, it is always a shame to lose such a central repository, especially since IBM’s OS/2 operating system is still anything but dead. Whether for hobbyist, industrial or commercial use, there is still a vibrant community around today, as we noted in 2019 already in relation to the NYC’s subway system.

Beyond downloaded copies and boxed CDs bought on EBay, you can even get a modernized version of OS/2 called ArcaOS, which even comes with commercial support. Whatever the fate is of the Hobbes OS/2 Archive’s data, we hope it finds a loving new home somewhere.

Two pictures of the mobo side by side, both with kapton tape covering everything other than the flash chip. On the left, the flash chip is populated, whereas on the right it's not

Enabling Intel AMT For BIOS-over-WiFi

January 5, 2024 by Arya Voronova 28 Comments

Intel ME, AMT, SMT, V-Pro… All of these acronyms are kind of intimidating, all we know about them is that they are tied to remote control technologies rooted deep in Intel CPUs, way deeper than even operating systems go. Sometimes though, you want remote control for your own purposes, and that’s what [ABy] achieved. He’s got a HP ProDesk 600 G3 Mini, decided to put it into a hard to reach spot in his flat, somewhere you couldn’t easily fetch a monitor and a keyboard for any debugging needs. So, he started looking into some sort of remote access option in case he’d need to access the BIOS remotely, and went as far as it took to make it work. (Google Translate)

The features he needed are covered by Intel AMT — specifically, BIOS access over a WiFi connection. However, his mini PC only had SMT enabled from the factory, the cut-down version of AMT without features like wireless support. He figured out that BIOS dumping was the way, promptly did just that, found a suitable set of tools for his ME region version, and enabled AMT using Intel’s FIT (Flash Image Tool) software.

Now, dumping the image could be done from a running system fully through software, but apparently, flashing back requires an external programmer. He went with the classic CH341, did the 3.3 V voltmod that’s required to make it safe for flash chip use, and proceeded to spend a good amount of time making it work. Something about the process was screwy, likely the proprietary CH341 software. Comments under the article highlight that you should use flashrom for these tasks, and indeed, you should.

This article goes into a ton of detail when it comes to working with Intel BIOS images — whichever kind of setting you want to change, be it AMT support or some entirely different but just as tasty setting, you will be well served by this write-up. Comments do point out that you might want to upgrade the Intel ME version while at it, and for what it’s worth, you can look into disabling it too; we’ve shown you a multitude of reasons why you should, and a good few ways you could.