Mastodawn

need to catch up on posting, way behind on the Saga of Running a Citadel-86 BBS over here

struck out on the 386, next up on the bench is the Pentium 266 MMX

i previously installed Win98SE but neither cardbus or USB are working and i'm pretty sure its because the BIOS battery is stone dead

lets get it apart, i even have a service manual this time

a travelstar, nice

and not at all foreshadowing

listening to the kids obsess about 3dfx cards just made me nostalgic for all the great times i had on my Pentium 200 before i ever dropped a Banshee in it...

THE CMOS BATTERY IS UNDER THE HEATSINK

this mobile Pentium 266 MMX was the fastest classic pentium core intel ever sold

...dang was hoping i could shuck it into a desktop maybe

nope

thank god its a little cell and i don't seem to have any other battery bombs in here

a trip to mah nards it is, $6 for a single 1220 cell? save big money my ass

#retrocomputing #repair

Show thread

Space Hobo Mar 22

@Seg All of this feels like overkill, as most of us ran our Citadel BBSes on XT or AT-class hardware!

Show thread

GEM is truly truly outrageous

@spacehobo its wild, yeah this would have been a top end laptop in 1999 towards the end of Citadel-86's life

when did the 612 Citadel's go down? not sure anyone documented it and i was lost in the internet by then and didn't notice :(

once you're at a 486+ running Cit86 in the background becomes very feasible

as much as people bag on Windows 9x it was super good at multitasking old DOS stuff

i gotta do a stunt where i play blood while someone posts on the board

the board gets a little sluggish but blood has framerate to spare

Hue Jr. was known to run the original Test System under DESQview on i believe a 486 for a time and there is indeed code for yielding the CPU in there, i slotted support for DPMI in there right beside it 🫡

https://github.com/SegHaxx/citadel-86/commit/69f3e9d68a7c29480657ff46f86461e4c10d2016

DPMI covers every windows ever and it falls back on raw HLT which is the only thing that works on mainline dosbox and also saves a good ~10w on my 486 that otherwise predates all power management beyond the CPU itself lol

Yield CPU time · SegHaxx/citadel-86@69f3e9d

This is a continuation of the Citadel-86 BBS software, as published by Hue, Jr. We are attempting to maintain this software so it can continue to be used by BBS Sysops wishing to install a simple, straight forward room-based message board/discussion based system. For more information on the Citadel legacy see: http://anticlimactic.retrovertigo.com/ - Yield CPU time · SegHaxx/citadel-86@69f3e9d

GitHub

Show thread

Space Hobo Mar 23

@Seg I was in the 206, and a couple managed to move to Cit+'s TCP/IP version for a while. I think Slumberland stayed up into the 21st century, even!

But we had a massive history of less "pure" Cits in Seattle, with a bunch of Cit86 forks adding colour and MCIs and other silly features for fun.

Show thread

GEM is truly truly outrageous Mar 23

@spacehobo yeah i was poking around where to go next, slumberland is back up (perhaps inspired by my efforts) and Citadel+ sure seems to be the "modernized citadel" that runs on current OSs and is TCP/IP native, already done

i recommend people take a look at Citadel+ for that

it even seems to be C++-ified 🫠

so i will continue to push at the low end, i wanna look at bringing fnordadel back up and i also dug up some later Citadel 68k source

they should have already addressed the vexing portability issues im running into in Cit86, supposedly fnordadel was compiled with gcc by the end, i wanna distill out a "Citadel Classic" that runs on the smallest machines i can manage, modern ESP32 and such, perhaps even backport to Z80 and 6502 machines with modern tools. 🤔