author: Tyson Liddell
tags: 8088 IBM-PC
Start with the original IBM PC (5150) running with MDA display (no pixels, no colour, just characters).
Switch from MDA to CGA graphics when the I need to start addressing individual pixels. I might also play around with the Hercules video card to get pixels on a monochrome monitor too.
Move to the IBM XT when I need more processing power.
Move to the IBM AT when I need more processing power.
Go through the 268,386,486 when I need more processing power.
I've run into a small issue when trying to use a 160K disk image with the
original IBM PC (5150) running PC DOS 1.0, which did not occur when running
FreeDOS on an IBM XT (5160). I create a raw 160K floppy disk image using
mtools in Linux and put my binaries on it. When I load this disk into the
5150 and run DIR I get a bunch of trailing zeroes in the output like this:
TODO: ADD GIF
If I then format the disk from within the 5150 I lose the ability to mount it in Linux, but the trailing zeroes go away and the disk functions as normal. I have this same issue with the image file for the 160K disk containing PC DOS 1.0. It runs fine on the 5150, but I can't mount it in Linux.
My first task is to build a tool that can manage the FAT 12 filesystem in the same way that PC DOS 1.0 does, as it seems to be slightly different from later versions of DOS like FreeDOS. It should allow me to create a new 160K raw disk image and read/add/delete files to/from it from my Linux environment.