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