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1993_toyota_camry 1993_toyota_camry @beehaw.org
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Comments 45

Running old operating systems using 86Box

I've seen a couple conversations about older or more esoteric operating systems, so I thought I'd make a post about 86Box and why I like the project.

86Box (a fork of PCem) is a low-level emulator for a wide variety of hardware from old PCs. Unlike most modern emulators which prioritize speed, it prioritizes accuracy of hardware emulation. This means it has all the quirks and features (and bios screens) you'd expect in old hardware.

It can emulate a variety of systems from the first IBM PC up to the Pentium era. It has a surprisingly large variety of motherboards, storage controllers, disk drive models, network cards, graphics cards, etc.

To test it out, I set up something close to my first PC:

  • 486 DX2 66
  • ASUS PVI-486SP3C Motherboard
  • S3 Trio64V+
  • 234MB 4500RPM HDD
  • Novell NE2000 ISA network card

I set it up with Dos 6.22, Windows 3.1, network drivers, mTCP, winpacket, trumpet winsock, and I'm on the internet in both dos and windows.

While something very similar could be accomplished with dosbox, virtualbox or qemu, I enjoyed the experience of using the 'actual' hardware. I also imagine it will support old quirky software more reliably than the alternatives.

I think a Windows 9x system with a 3dfx Voodoo card will be my next build.

So, Anyone else used 86Box or a similar emulator? What for? How did it go?

0
Reddit's in-jokes and overall sense of "humor" are lame and I don't want to see them migrate to Kbin.
  • I think active moderation is about the only way to discourage bad behaviour on the internet.

    Allowed to run free, trolls and racists quickly take over any online space by discouraging decent people from participating.

  • Reddit's in-jokes and overall sense of "humor" are lame and I don't want to see them migrate to Kbin.
  • tildes, which has a very interesting voting system where you can attach a tag to your upvotes or downvotes, such as ‘noise’ or ‘off topic’ or ‘joke’

    Oh wow. I didn't realize they were using the slashdot system.

    That's the first thing that makes me slightly tempted to try out tildes.

  • Mates, today without warning, the reddit royal navy attacked. I've been demoded by the admins.
  • Yeah I realized after posting it they started using that strategy. I really hope it works for them.

  • Mates, today without warning, the reddit royal navy attacked. I've been demoded by the admins.
  • IMO the option here would be to open the sub, but implement new rules.

    Nowhere does it say the sub needs to be on topic. There are many off-topic subs out there (that news sub that's mostly porn, marijuanaenthusiasts).

    From now on, only text posts containing a punchline to the joke "why did the chicken cross the road" are allowed.

  • Electric cars
  • I think you're arguing points that weren't made.

    Individually owned automobiles and the systems required to support them are wasteful and polluting no matter how you power them.

    Electric cars are better, yes. But their popularity is in a large part because they allow us to mostly maintain the status quo.

    Do you think they are a sustainable long-term solution? Should we be planning our future around paved roads made almost exclusively for personally owned mostly single-occupant vehicles?

  • Feature Request: vote reasons, e.g., +1 funny -1 troll, etc.
  • I hope I described it well, I didn't expect it to become a post :)

    I'm not sure how applicable much of this would be to lemmy though. The federated nature of the software makes things like meta-moderation a lot more difficult.

  • I signed up for lemmy.world because I don't want to write an essay. Shout out to the lazy people.
  • For sure, if you want the raw unadulterated experience of the fediverse, that's definitely the right choice.

    Personally, I'm not looking to engage with the type of people who flock to 'uncensored' spaces, so I appreciate the admins filtering them out.

  • YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
  • Unpopular opinion around these parts, I imagine, but I bought a family sub.

    Me and 5? 6? other people get ad-free viewing, the creators get a little more for our views, and no worries about finding ad-blocking youtube viewers for my in law's smart-tvs or my idevices.

    edit: after reading the rest of this thread the opinion isn't so unpopular

  • I Hope Rexxitors Tone Down the Low-Hanging Comment Chains on Lemmy.
  • Yeah, their layout is dated, but the scoring system doesn't take much room (once you accept the idea that a reply can have a subject line):

  • I signed up for lemmy.world because I don't want to write an essay. Shout out to the lazy people.
  • I don't think you're missing out on much. Most aren't even lemmy instances.

    I received this reply about this from Alyaza:

    this is because we started using a heavily curated blocklist for the worst mastodon instances (they can interoperate with us). we didn’t expect any trouble from any of them, but any instance in the new batch of banned instances can be safely assumed to be quite bad and it’s better to be proactive than not.

    link https://beehaw.org/comment/176651

    edit:

    checking into a few of the listed blocks now... most of them don't seem to be operating anymore.

  • I signed up for lemmy.world because I don't want to write an essay. Shout out to the lazy people.
  • yeah they stopped accepting new signups for a bit, i think they said they're like 3500 behind ATM

  • Are you guys looking forward to Thunderbird Mobile?
  • Not really since I'm on IOS now.

    That said, K9 was my favourite android mail client, and I used it up until recently. It was good but always felt like it needed a little extra love to help with bugs. So I think they'll end up with a good product.

  • Lots of interesting birds on my lunch walk
  • I think the joke is that they mostly all have a name that start with 'Common...'

  • I Hope Rexxitors Tone Down the Low-Hanging Comment Chains on Lemmy.
  • this was something I loved about slashdot moderation. When voting, people had to specify the reason for the vote. +1 funny, +1 insightful, +1 informative, -1 troll, -1 misleading, etc.

    That way you can, for example, set in your user preferences to ignore positive votes for comedy, and put extra value on informative votes.

    Then, to keep people from spamming up/down votes and to encourage them to think about their choices, they only gave out a limited number of moderation points to readers. So you'd have to choose which comments to spend your 5 points on.

    Then finally, they had 'meta moderation' where you'd be shown a comment, and asked "would a vote of insightful be appropriate for this comment" to catch people who down-voted out of disagreement or personal vandetta. Any users who regularly mis-voted would stop receiving the ability to vote.

    I don't think this is directly applicable to a federated system, but I do think it's one of the best-thought-out voting systems ever created for a discussion board.

    edit: a couple other points i liked about it:

    Comments were capped at (iirc) +5 and -1. Further votes wouldn't change the comment's score.

    User karma wasn't shown. The user page would just say Karma: good. Or Excellent, or poor, or some other vague term.

  • Megathread for Reddit Blackouts and News - Day 2
  • Yeah i had that yesterday where i was reading a thread, and then the topic changed while I was reading the page. The comments from the original thread remained, but the original post was replaced.

    Weird bugs :)

  • On Politics and Forking
  • They are able to edit the code they deploy.

    They've removed the donate link now.

  • On Politics and Forking
  • The donate link has now been removed.

  • Let's leave [proprietary] Discord too
  • I knew you'd all be back!

  • Reddit down amid major protest
  • Interesting. I was getting that earlier in the day, but it's pretty much instant for me now.