There are still BBS you can access via telnet (and actual dial up if you really want), after the fifth one asks you for your full name, street address and phone Humber it gets a little old.

There's definitely been success in using generative AI for vintage Computers. Just the other day I got it to produce a bootable floppy for my Amiga 1200. It loads the network driver, uses BOOTP to get an ip address, connects to a server and then downloads code via UDP that it will then execute. I doubt you'll get it doing amazing graphical scenes like you see in the demo scene though.

I really meant in the coding realm, but it's interesting that it created a bootable floppy. That wouldn't be trivial.

Questions: 1) Which AI platform did you use? 2) Did it create a binary image of the floppy disk (an ADF perhaps)? If not, what form did it take?

> That wouldn't be trivial.

INSTALL DF0:

Just type that and your disk is bootable.

What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest. "Loads the network driver" - ok, which one? There's no standard network driver, only a specification for writing drivers (SANA-II). Was it a driver for SLIP/PPP over the serial port, or a PCMCIA Ethernet adaptor, or something else? Was it a copy of a driver someone's already written?

Also, it would be madness to try doing this in a bootblock, or insinuating that the bootblock did it. Demo bootblocks take over the hardware and start using their loading routines, eschewing the main AmigaOS, and that's the implication of saying something was done in the bootblock (you have under 1KB of space so the first thing you need is your own loader).

What's much more mundane and normal is a standard bootblock which returns control to AmigaDOS and lets it run the startup-sequence, whereupon you can use normal files, libraries, devices, including a full suite of other people's networking software, including BOOTP (AmiTCP comes with a client) and TFTP (see Olaf Barthel's tftpclient: https://github.com/obarthel/amiga-sana-ii-tftpclient). But it stopped being the "bootblock" that did it as soon as it started AmigaDOS.

> INSTALL DF0:

That gives you a standard OFS bootblock that returns to AmigaDOS. Mine is a custom bootblock, same DOS\0 magic and checksum format so Kickstart accepts it, but it never enters AmigaDOS.

> What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest

Fair, I should have been more specific. The network driver is the popular cnet.device which is compatible with my PCMCIA ethernet card. It's loaded from fixed floppy sectors.

> it would be madness to try doing this in a bootblock

Agreed, and I don't. It's a multi-stage boot that stays at exec level throughout, AmigaDOS is never started, no process is created, no startup-sequence runs, _DOSBase is explicitly NULL.

The disk is a standard 880K ADF with no filesystem at all, it's just raw binaries at fixed sector offsets. The only ROM libraries used are exec.library, intuition.library and graphics.library for a debug display. Everything else is self-contained on the disk.

So you're right that it isn't the bootblock doing the networking.

I used cursor with a mix of Gemini 3.1 and opus 4.6.

It referenced the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual, appendix C to create a boot block in assembly. It's a raw sector-mapped image, the build process creates a blank adf, which then writes everything at it's fixed offsets and we go back with another tool to patch the bootblock with the right checksum so the kernel accepts it.

I copied that adf to the A1200 so I can then write it to a real floppy.

I've never had great luck getting iodine running anywhere. The one and only success I've had was on an aircraft where, after numerous attempts at different things, the best I could do is connect to an SMTP server and send an email manually.

Not in Australia!

I've found compactation kills the whole thing. Important debug steps completely missing and the AI loops back round thinking it's found a solution when we've already done that step.

I find it useful to make Claude track the debugging session with a markdown file. It’s like a persistent memory for a long session over many context windows.

Or make a subagent do the debugging and let the main agent orchestrate it over many subagent sessions.

Yeah I use a markdown to put progress in. It gets kinda long and convoluted a manual intervention is required every so often. Works though.

For me, Claude was like that until about 2m ago. Now it rarely gets dumb after compaction like it did before.

oh, ive found that something about compaction has been dropping everything that might be useful. exact opposite experience

Falcon 4.0 BMS is probably the best F16 simulator out there right now and it's 'free'

> Similar to how modern railroad track widths can be traced back to the wheel widths of roman chariots

This is repeated often and simply isn't true.

I based that on seeing the BBC Science TV series (and books) Connections by science historian James Burke. If it's been updated since, then I stand corrected. Regardless of the specific example, my point was that sometimes modern standards are linked to long-outdated historical precedents for no currently relevant reason.

Awesome. I've just designed and built my own z80 computer, though right now it has 32kb ROM and 32kb RAM. This will definitely change on the next revision so I'll be sure to try it out.

RAM is very expensive right now.

I just removed 128 megs of RAM from an old computer and am considering listing it on eBay to pay off my mortgage.

I wonder what year past 128M ram would pay off mortgage. Maybe 1985

Yeah, even an average household can afford 40k of slow DRAM if they cut down on luxuries like food and housing.

Maybe the rich can but not all retro computer enthusiasts are rich.

If you can afford to spend a few dollars without sacrificing housing or food, you are being financial irresponsible.

Busy cut down on the avocado toast!

Then I can afford eggs, ram and a studio appartment!

Maybe in Ohio

No apartment then, maybe just green, eggs, and RAM.

Yeah but just liked an overclocked gpu, there's errors on those boards so you have to throw them away and wait for the for the next revision.

It's so fucking bizarre that there are multiple versions of the same thing, that are called the same thing but aren't the same thing!