Skip to content

Comment on MartyPC is a cross-platform emulator of early PCs written in Rustparent

Comments

The PCjr also famously has no DMA, so things like floppy drive transfers are both extremely slow and somewhat unreliable - the IBM floppy controller is somewhat additionally weird is that they disable interrupts as well. The only way the PCjr knows what the controller is doing is by polling its status register, and there is enough ambiguity that it sets a 555 timer that will reset the FDC and start everything over if things time out.

The combination of these two decisions means its inadvisable to type while your floppy drive is transferring data

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.