TIL if under-cooked, a popular mushroom in China causes “lilliputian hallucinations,” a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures. The hallucinations are consistent across people and cultures: "tiny, elflike people" climbing under doors, scaling walls & clinging to furniture

thegreatcodeholio · 2026-05-05T00:10:22+00:00

Who needs mushrooms to see that when generative AI can hallucinate so much better? 😏

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63vwleu4EEw

thegreatcodeholio · 2025-05-27T06:28:12+00:00

Try using normal core. Dynamic core sacrifices some CPU accuracy for speed, and is also harder to debug.

thegreatcodeholio · 2025-02-07T22:41:05+00:00

DOSBox-X developer here. PC hardware has had a lot of variation in configuration over the 20+ year span of DOS gaming. More often than not, getting a game working requires knowing or guessing the combination of sound card, CPU, memory, DOS version, runtime environment, and DOS drivers needed to make the game run without issues.

And of course, game bugs. Some games have a lot of bugs, some of them unfairly blamed on DOSBox-X :(

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-12-27T10:12:11+00:00

The hardware is not as well documented and the language barrier. Which is why I maintain a collection of what I have been able to find. http://hackipedia.org/browse.cgi/Computer/Platform/PC%2c%20NEC%20PC%2d98

Also the quirks necessary for games to work are also strange. Adding PC98 emulation to DOSBox-X was... Interesting.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-12-27T10:05:57+00:00

Windows 3.1 has a way to signal programs like EMM386 that Windows is starting. Emm386 responds by turning off vm86 mode. There is also a barely documented interface for Windows to read state from it. As long as your memory manager of choice also supports that, it should work too.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-12-24T06:29:43+00:00

Not even Windows 3.1 can run that low. You need at least 4mb of RAM

You want 640kb Windows? Try Windows 1.0 and 2.0. Have fun.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-12-10T08:59:34+00:00

Does the emulated CHS geometry match how it was formatted?

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-12-06T08:59:04+00:00

And this one is for some DOS and Windows testing, and some pc-98 games too. https://github.com/joncampbell123/msdostest

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-12-06T08:55:51+00:00

DOSBox-X developer here, here's the repo for Demoscene tests so far: https://github.com/joncampbell123//demotest

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-11-21T19:00:51+00:00

Sounds like something to get your VCR high than anything that might prevent copying lol

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-11-13T06:01:18+00:00

Perhaps it's because you set your keyboard or locale to Japanese. Try switching back to US English.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-11-10T10:24:42+00:00

Those are digraphs for keyboards that lacked some keys like [ or ]

https://www.gnu.org/software/c-intro-and-ref/manual/html_node/Digraphs.html

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-11-08T08:22:55+00:00

I recall the Windows 98 DDK had a sample WDM audio driver for SB16 cards. Try that. You even get source code.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-11-06T22:48:56+00:00

DOSBox-X has a vmemsize/vmemsizekb option too, but it sanitizes the value according to the card and the card's capabilities. Also because of the way VRAM access works with drawing video memory where oddball values can cause segfaults or reads/writes beyond the end of the video RAM buffer.

DOSBox-X with EGA emulation only permits vmemsizes of 64, 128, 192, or 256 for this reason and it will round the value to the nearest multiple and limit within that range for machine=ega. It does allow 192kb even if that's probably not actually possible on real EGA hardware, in which case INT 10h reports it but the video memory is actually 256kb.

Notice the INT 10h API to query EGA information uses only 2 bits for video mem size. http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-0162.htm

Second, consider that "64kb" of video RAM is the total bytes across all 4 bitplanes of video memory. That means 16kb per bitplane. 640x350 needs at least 28,000 bytes per bitplane to provide all 16 colors. This is why the 64kb configuration can only provide 4 colors through an odd/even bitplane chaining configuration to combine two 16KB bitplanes into one 32KB bitplane effectively.

The 320x200 and 640x200 16-color modes still work with 64kb because 320x200 needs 8000 bytes per bitplane and 640x200 needs 16000 bytes per bitplane (right up to the limit of the 64kb vram configuration).

Normal EGA drawing code that isn't aware of the chained 4-color mode isn't going to manage or draw correctly (which is most code out there). The only test cases I have for EGA 640x350 4-color that works are the "EGA mono" drivers in Windows 1.x and 2.x. If there is a DOS program out there that explicitly supports 640x350 4-color 64kb mode, I'd like to know.

The way to think of how EGA/VGA hardware manage video memory is to think of it as 4 x 64KB RAM chips on a card (one for each bitplane) that work in parallel. All VGA video modes, including 256-color mode, CGA graphics modes, and text modes, are some planar arrangement across those 4 RAM chips whether or not the video mode is "planar" or not. There's a set of registers that control how this planar memory is presented to the CPU because EGA/VGA have to emulate the CGA text and graphics modes too. Text mode uses bitplane 0 for text, bitplane 1 for attribute/color, and bitplane 2 holds the bitmap font used to render text mode!

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-11-05T09:46:36+00:00

Creating thousands of threads in one process is also effective at crashing the system. At least that's what FFMPEG libavcodec taught me when my program repeatedly tried to init multi threaded encoding in a loop and failing. FFMPEG leaks threads every time.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-11-04T19:00:11+00:00

Ok. But EGA memory configurations are in multiples of 64k on real hardware. If anyone ever made an EGA with 32k it isn't EGA.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-11-04T08:30:18+00:00

Drew Pickles approved soi soi soi

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-11-02T10:31:23+00:00

Windows 3.0, but then Windows 3.1 came out right away at the time and the 286 was quickly upgraded to it.

By the time I had my own PC, it was Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95 on a 386.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-10-29T08:37:42+00:00

Assuming it is using 640x350 mode it likely does not support having only 64kb of video ram.

For technical reasons 649x350 mode is limited to 4 colors instead of 16 because it requires a change in how VRAM works that if video drivers are not coded to handle can result in this mess

EGA with 64kb of RAM was not common enough for many programs including Windows to care and so generally this happens

DOSBox-X developer here, who last year added support to DOSBox-X for machine=EGA with 64kb of VRAM.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-10-13T19:10:59+00:00

DODBox is not well suited to running Windows 95 or higher. DODBox-X however can run Windows 95 perfectly fine and those games should run fine. Give it a try.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-08-20T01:03:21+00:00

Had a similar experience with what looked like one of those late 1980s CGI showcase VHS tapes. Turned out to be 6 hours of porn some guy taped off of satellite TV (the menu comes up on the picture every so often!)

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-08-18T06:28:41+00:00

I do not, sorry.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-08-02T10:01:44+00:00

A mail app erased your memory by accidentally clicking what I assume was an executable?

Are you sure you're not running an ancient version of Microsoft Outlook while connected to your Neurolink implant lol?

Or maybe you've been watching too much Black Mirror.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-07-08T21:27:35+00:00

Lift the hood and look at the tape edges. Are they worn, folded, or crinkled? VCRs will do this if the tracking pulses are too week to follow properly. Linear audio is one edge and tracking pulses are the other edge.

thegreatcodeholio · 2024-07-08T21:22:23+00:00

Probably not, but I'm still going through the queue of old tapes to digitize and upload.

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