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Comment by haxxorfreak | Hacker News Reader

I love the hard drive sound emulation! I find that modern restorations of vintage hardware using SD cards to emulate drives are missing an important part of the nostalgic experience when they just start up completely silently.

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The floppy disk usually made this straight up honking noise . I had a V20, but at 10Mhz. Never had a problem, except for formatting floppies. The V20 has a few tricks up it's sleeve, with a few less clock cycles on some instructions, and a Z80 mode to run cpm.

But,the real trick was to put real IBM roms in a clone board and run Xenix. When the clone roms are back in it still booted. Helped a lot to have a 2:1 Rll controller. Xenix was just pollute and delute - system V with some BSD thrown in and a slightly altered portable C complier that was later admitted to be wrong endian.

Did this Board have a FPU socket? Made turbo pascal run much faster. ( The 8087 version we got from the physics lab...) Especially the Hilbert matrix. And FFTs.

Why original IBM BIOS was requried for Xenix?!

We found out after the third try, that both the IBM and one of the clone BIOSes would run the install, and all of them would boot. ( And an OMTI Rll controller, supported... Dual hard disks too. ) I needed an assembly language program to much the speed up to 10mhz, and it still ran fine, right up to the 'make nethack' then 4 hours later...beeeep beeeep beep. OS not found. We never figured out weather it was a out of memory error or a temp file error ... But the OS was gone.

The Roms it came with did not work, also the disks had to have perfect media. Everything bad to be formatted beforehand. So, I got IBM ROMS and it worked, then got some other roms so the keyboard speed switch would work, while the IBM ROMS were installed there was a simple program that would kick up the speed, and turn wait states off. It was slightly faster than a 6mhz AT for DOS and we did not have Xenix 286. Got me through K&R and passed the class, but do useful work? No.

Z80 mode to run cpm

8080 mode, not Z80. Did run CP/M, and I used 22nice for probably longer than needed. Unfortunately over time lots of cool software assumed a Z80, sooo...

Xenix was just pollute and delute - system V with some BSD thrown in

Which Xenix? It was originally V7 based, and 'upgraded' to System III around version 3. I forget what it looked like between version 3 and version 5.x, where it became System V based (+ stuff).

Yeah, for me there's something about the sound of the power supply, CPU and (sometimes) graphics card fans, coupled with the ticking of an old school hard disk that takes me right back to the nineties.

I know spinning disks were a thing for a lot longer than that, and were still pretty commonly used up into the 2010s, but they were in general much quieter than hard drives from the 90s.

I was about the comment the same. It adds a lot of authenticity to the whole game loading process!

I actually still have an original 8088 sitting in a closet. I need to figure out something to do with it some day.

Pull the CMOS battery. Recap before you put power to it...make sure the power supply is healthy. Do those things and it'll run 40 years from now.

The attention the author paid to these little details really raises this project above the typical (XT) hardware clone. Put another way: I absolutely love this feature.

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