Similar to: IBM PS/2 Model 30 (1987)

USB flash drive

The surest way to make it work is to write a 1.44M floppy image to the flash drive:

mkfs.msdos -C floppy.img 1440
sudo mkdir -p /media/floppy
sudo mount -o loop,rw,umask=000 floppy.img /media/floppy
...copy content to /media/floppy/...
sudo umount /media/floppy
sudo dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/sda

It needs to be plugged in when the device is powered on. It will be mounted as drive D:.

To be seen:

  • what is the size limit
    • 8 MB works, maybe 32 MB then (limit of FAT12), or 504 MB (1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors)
  • if the USB controller (CH375) is flexible enough to implement support for other devices: mice, card readers, MIDI keyboards… or even make the 8086 show up as a mass storage device to a PC

BIOS/driver replacement

FPU emulation issue

It seems that code compiled with Open Watcom using floating-point instructions with fallback emulation (the default; -fpi) locks up the CPU instead of using the fallback.

HW mods

See also