exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Before we know it it can boot DOS ;)

Not sure Microsoft produced an MSDOS-68K variant ;-)

I think DR did ;)

But Anders great to see this card as well running.
Never seen it in the wild in a PC. Seems to be pretty fast and interesting as well when I google it.

Oldskool wrote: 15 Dec 2024 21:52 Before we know it it can boot DOS ;)

You know, it would be pretty interesting to make some kind of special DOSBox build.
With a direct passthrough to the ISA bus so it wouldn't have to emulate graphics or sound..

stephen_usher wrote: 15 Dec 2024 22:48 Not sure Microsoft produced an MSDOS-68K variant ;-)

MS no, but DRI yes GEMDOS ;)

agranlund wrote: 16 Dec 2024 09:43

Oldskool wrote: 15 Dec 2024 21:52 Before we know it it can boot DOS ;)

You know, it would be pretty interesting to make some kind of special DOSBox build.
With a direct passthrough to the ISA bus so it wouldn't have to emulate graphics or sound..

Dosbox on the Amiga is really really really slow even on a Vampire or Pi. But if you could get fast XT, low end 286 performance somehow it would indeed be a awesome way to use the various ISA cards “natively”.

Oldskool wrote: 16 Dec 2024 11:59 Dosbox on the Amiga is really really really slow even on a Vampire or Pi. But if you could get fast XT, low end 286 performance somehow it would indeed be a awesome way to use the various ISA cards “natively”.

Yeah if it could do low end 286 it could be quite useful.
Not so much for games, but being able to run card manufacturers utilities could be useful.
For the GUS I ended up writing my own "ultrinit" equivalent but if I would have had the ability to go "x86.prg ultrinit.exe" I may have done that instead :)

Absolutely something for the list of cool things to play with!

Never tried it myself but the Amiga had PC-Task which seemed to do a pretty good job of emulating a PC in software on m68k:



PC-Task became PD but I don't think its sources ever got released.


I've seen a few people posting this meme recently so I felt obliged to share it here to seeing as there aren't many raven memes

There are a few software PC emulators for the Atari. PC Ditto and Soft PC. The latter might work as it was designed for the TT if memory serves. But that's just nuts. I like it.

Toying with graphics hardware is fun but being restricted to mono in the desktop is not, so I've been exploring how to make screendrivers for the available VDI's.

fVDI was easier than expected to get going.
And even NVDI thanks to the incredible work by @shoggoth77 for those Supervidel & Vampire.

Here's a Western Digital WD90C31 gfxcard comparing NVDI agains fVDI.
NVDI is clearly the faster of the two here.


Like most of the late ISA cards this one too has hardware acceleration but the hardware-level driver is still the "generic" dumb framebuffer one and I haven't made any proper card-specific stuff yet.


From a users perspective it's all a bit rubbish compared to Nova with W32i/Mach32, but from my own perspective I think this is really cool and very satisfying getting a colored desktop with random gfxcards. Tinkering with old and new ISA stuff is what the machine was made for :)
Perhaps a future motherboard revision should have a VLB slot.