The first release is now out! github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x

I've been working on a built from ground up Windows 98 driver for VGA cards.

My ultimate goal is to create a driver for at least one video card that is better than what was released by the manufacturer at the time. That may not be possible but I'm keen to try. Based on my reading the best card I can improve on will be an ATi Rage Pro (R3).

That is going to take a lot of work and I have no idea what I'm doing, but so far I've got basic Direct3D working on an S3 Virge. I picked the Virge as it is very well documented and supported.

Most of this has been written by ChatGPT/Codex Sol 5.6 model with some planning and help from Claude/Fable.

It's been a lot of back and forward and as part of the process I (AI) wrote a small Win98 background task so AI can drive the machine (upload files, take screenshots, move the mouse etc), this reduced the manual testing required. I've released the agent here github.com/michaeldale/V9x-Remote-Agent

We will see how it goes but has been a fun little project!

Upgrading the OS this site (and a few others including https://www.vogonswiki.com) runs on was one of my goals for the Christmas break this year.

Unfortunately there is a lot of old scripts running on it; making it difficult to move past PHP 7.0.

I've finally fixed a lot, most were pretty easy (including this site), mediawiki was the worst so far.

• Bluetrait Blog now works on PHP 8.2!
• Media Wiki upgraded (ish, still a super old version, extension hell there)
• The Board (old recipe tracking system)

I've been able to switch over to PHP 7.3 now which is great. Hopefully I can get to 7.4 this year?

Also had to rebuild the raspberry pi zero running our gate recently. That was a pain. The SD card died so I replaced that and upgraded to Raspbian/Debian 12, that broke all the GPIO libraries I was using :/

Isn't upgrading fun? Actually I'm pretty happy how well things are working considering I ignore them for years at a time.

Next I'm actually thinking of upgrading this blog to replace the theme with something new, although not sure yet.

When I get time, I've been doing various retro computer hardware videos on youtube. As the ads get worse and worse, I feel I should host them somewhere else. This seems like the best place, maybe not the best technically, but logically! I'm not sure if this will work, I may need to convert them.

If it works, time permitting, I might upgrade the site to handle videos better....

EDIT: It's not working currently, haha, now I need to find the repo for this site to fix it, It may still be running in subversion, need to migrate it to git, oh wow this just became a big job.

EDIT: Success! Repo was already moved to git so that was good, just needed to work out how to get video allowed in library I use to whitelist html. I've also used ffmpeg to convert to mp4.

I have a small solar setup in the shed outside to power some lighting and a couple of raspberry pi's.

Normally if I go into the shed during the day and start using power the Victron solar charge controller will automatically feed power in to cover the load (where possible). I noticed today that it wasn't.

I did a bit of googling and connected the controller to my laptop and couldn't find any issues. The load output was still working but no power was being taken in from the solar panels. The lights on the controller still seemed to indicate that it was trying to charge.

I have an amp meter on the solar side so I knew there was no power going in.

So I disconnected the panels and battery to restart the controller and it just starting working again. I assumed that it crashed or something (which was disappointing as I really like it and want another).

After I left it to top up the battery I tried again and noticed the same issue.

Looking at the shed temperature I found it was just hitting 40c when the issue occurred.

This time I didn't reboot the controller and left it.

This afternoon once the temp dropped below 40c the charge controller automatically kicked in again without any intervention on my part.

So good news it seems that the controller didn't crash but simply limits the charging if above 40c. I'm happy with that and now know for future.

1. Stop SickBeard
2. Backup .db SQLite file
3. Get a SQLite viewer/editor. There is a Firefox plugin that can do this.
4. Run this command on the database: UPDATE tv_shows SET location = replace(location, "/old_folder_path/", "/new_folder_path/");
5. Done.

http://www.vogonswiki.com/

The wiki is an extension of vogons.zetafleet.com

CPU is sweet, just need more ram........