easy - the PCjr keyboard interface.It is insane because IBM wanted a wireless keyboard. If you&#x27;re not familiar with the PCjr keyboard, it has two IR transmitters (they are electrically the same, just having two gives you a better transmission path). The PCjr system has an IR receiver.Now, a normal keyboard cable is a standard two-wire serial protocol with clock and data. Being wireless, you have no clock, so you have to synchronize clocks, or have clock recovery built into the protocol. The PCjr does the former, using the 8253 timer chip.The keyboard has no way of knowing if the system has received a keystroke, so the system must receive every keystroke - they can&#x27;t be stored in a fifo, they can&#x27;t be resent if the CPU missed it.This rules out the possibility of using system interrupts - so when you type a key on the CPU and the IR receiver gets the start bit - the NMI line is raised, the 8253 is programmed to time the clock bursts from the IR receiver, and the CPU reads out every bit of the scancode.In software.

What&#x27;s your favorite &quot;What the FUCK were they smoking when they designed this?&quot; moment?

Angry people gonna angry. Don&#x27;t take criticism from people you wouldn&#x27;t take advice from.

People will generally get angry no matter what you do. People are also angry it is MIT licensed.But honestly I wanted to learn the Rust programming language and I thought writing an emulator was a good a project to learn as any.I have been working on a emulator in C++ in collaboration with a friend, it is also cycle-accurate. It is called XTCE-Blue.

Many people are very angry that you used Rust. Did you expect this choice to cause such an uproar?

Hi, thanks for checking out MartyPC.
I&#x27;m the developer if there are any questions.

To add on top this, the author wrote multiple blog posts on their setup [0, 1, 2]. The project itself is hosted at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dbalsom&#x2F;arduinoX86" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dbalsom&#x2F;arduinoX86</a>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martypc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;hardware-validating-emulator.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martypc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;hardware-validating-emu...</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martypc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;exploring-dma-on-ibm-pc.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martypc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;exploring-dma-on-ibm-pc...</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martypc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;bus-sniffing-ibm-5150.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martypc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;bus-sniffing-ibm-5150.h...</a>

One of the amazing things about this project is that the author built physical harnesses for real early CPUs so that he could build test suites against the real hardware and ensure the emulation is 100% correct, down to every timing and quirk of the original hardware.

besides the fact that it was written in rust, rust happens to be a really nice language to write emulators, you don&#x27;t have to think much about threading and not much abut memory management, rust makes that easy =&gt; you can concentrate on your pixels. Moreover LLM grasp it very well so that you can get a bit more spare time for your emulator-side-project.It was very long since I wrote any sort of C++ and using rust was pretty refreshing.Second &quot;besides&quot;: marty&#x27;s PC may not have a lot of breadth in terms of supported hardware, but it gets the accuracy totally right. It&#x27;s a very special kind of achievement.(I&#x27;m not a rust fanboy :-) I just appreciate the language for writing my emulator)

All my friends had Soundblasters; I had a self soldered Covox. Fun times.

Yeah and eventually Adlib was gone.From Wikipedia,&quot;Not long after its introduction, Creative Labs introduced its competing Sound Blaster card. The Sound Blaster was fully compatible with AdLib&#x27;s hardware, and it also implemented two key features absent from the AdLib: a PCM audio channel and a game port. With additional features and better marketing, the Sound Blaster quickly overshadowed AdLib as the de facto standard in PC gaming audio. AdLib&#x27;s slow response, the AdLib Gold, did not sell well enough to sustain the company.&quot;

I haven&#x27;t implemented the Soundblaster card yet, although it&#x27;s quite high on my list of things to do.

But Soundblaster came with Adlib, so surely complete support for SB should mean Adlib support as well.. ?

Adlib support! At least someone else remembers it wasn&#x27;t only Soundblaster.

The name is a reference to the 8088 MPH scene demo, it was the first emulator to be able to run it.

Ironically, and unfortunately, this doesn&#x27;t actually emulate the FM Towns Marty (or even the regular FM Towns PC) like I assumed it would.

How did DOS era software handle this anyways? I can&#x27;t imagine it would be fun to be a dvorak typist in the DOS era.

I&#x27;ve built out a full keyboard-remapping system, to support any keyboard layout. I need help building these files.Are you using DVORAK? If you are willing to help, please open a Github issue with some info about your keyboard, and I&#x27;ll build support for it.

But it&#x27;s written in Rust! Who cares about non-qwerty!&#x2F;s

Doesn&#x27;t seem to support non-QWERTY keboards :(

That&#x27;s keyboard code [1] vs. Keyboard key [2].[1] Physical location of a key <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;w3c.github.io&#x2F;uievents&#x2F;#keys-codevalues" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;w3c.github.io&#x2F;uievents&#x2F;#keys-codevalues</a>[2] Mapping of a key <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;w3c.github.io&#x2F;uievents&#x2F;#keys-keyvalues" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;w3c.github.io&#x2F;uievents&#x2F;#keys-keyvalues</a>The naming is terrible and I have to look it up every single time

Key is Scancode 0x2B, or as a VKEY code: VK_OEM_5 (0xDC)Javascript says the key I pressed was keycode 220 (same number as 0xDC) or key &quot;\&quot;.I had Tandy 1000 as the selected machine. When I look at the onscreen keyboard, I don&#x27;t see a backslash key underneath backspace, but I do see one next to left shift. For keyboards that have the alternate backslash there, it is listed as having a scancode of 0x56 and a VKEY code of VK_OEM_102 (0xE2). (I haven&#x27;t actually checked information specific to the actual Tandy keyboard)

What keyboard layout are you using? I can&#x27;t reproduce on a US layout.

This is about early IBM PCs, not apple computers. And the non-working key is the Backslash key \ , not the backspace key.

I don&#x27;t think Backspace as a key was standard internationally until 1994. Apple still doesn&#x27;t use it, just Delete.

Old terminals had this shenanigans going on too. Backspace was not backspace and so on

Mysteriously, backslash has been mapped to backspace for some reason.

they&#x27;re planned at some point. I need to write a utility or custom controller rig with a pico that can step the head on an MFM drive in patterns i can record, then model stepping to cylinder in the hard disk controller.

great emulator and nice guy too. maybe i should ask him if i can use his HDD sounds

IBMulator has HDD sounds: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibmulator.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibmulator.org&#x2F;</a>

probably in the minority but i want the screeching and grumbling hard disk sounds

What would you say is missing or not working well?

It is indeed a Marty McFly reference. The original demo I was trying to run was called 8088 MPH and is full of Back to the Future references.I was trying to Run Back To The Future, so I figured I&#x27;d call my emulator either Marty or McFly.Unfortunately I found out about the FM Towns later, so I renamed it from Marty to MartyPC so you could google &quot;MartyPC Emulator&quot; properly.

I assume it&#x27;s called MartyPC because it Marty McFlies?

When I started writing MartyPC over four years ago, writing an emulator in Rust was still somewhat novel. The development of the &#x27;egui&#x27; immediate-mode graphics framework made it possible to make one with an advanced interactive debugger.By mentioning Rust people have been able to more easily find MartyPC as an example of how (or how not to) write an emulator in Rust.Perhaps the tag as outlived its usefulness, especially if people find it pompous or something. I&#x27;m not trying to be Rust cultist, I swear.

But if it&#x27;s written in rust and with llm then they both implode and we get really insightful comments

I suppose it makes a change from complaining that the post was written by an LLM.

This comment is itself a meta comment but here we go I guess...How is it possible that half the comments in this thread are about the title itself? It’s not even a made-up title, it’s taken straight from the project’s README...I keep seeing people complaining almost aggressively that others are touting Rust as a useful tool (which, to me personally, it certainly is). Does someone have a financial stake in opposing Rust’s development, or what?

Oh, holy crap. I haven&#x27;t thought about EGATREK in at least 30 years. I&#x27;m going to go dig it up right now. Thanks for causing me to recall that memory!

Yet another avenue to play EGATREK in a browser. For that, its work it.

&quot;Hax – a minimalist, terminal-native coding agent written in C&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49273175">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49273175</a>but I see your point.

I believe a true engineer should love problems not only languages. But it seems like majority of Rust devs only love the language and try to convert all the problems into Rust problems.If you have problems in C&#x2F;C++? Write Rust.If you have problems in Python? Use Rust.If you have an issue with your product? Rewrite it in Rust.Is your company in pinch? Launch a new product in Rust.If you burn your finger while you’re cooking? Write Rust.If you have a mental problem? Read a Rust book.You don’t have a girl friend? You have Rust next to you.If you hate yourself? Writing Rust will solve your life problems.

&quot;It&#x27;s not a feature, it&#x27;s a bug&quot;

I flag all these “written in Rust” posts.

The main feature of apps written in Rust is that they are written in Rust.

Because their following is not cult-based.(To clarify: I like Rust. I use it every day. But this is going too far.)

Because they predate HN, and aren&#x27;t hip languages any longer.There was a time for CoffeeScript, PureScript, Elm, Ruby and whatever else you can think of.Naturally Lisp has to have monthly entries.&#x2F;s

Not really true, I&#x27;ve had LLMs write hundreds of thousands of lines of C just fine, including stripping out Rust deps out of projects I use. :)

Because nowadays &quot;written in Rust&quot; means &quot;written by AI&quot;, as Java or C are not so sexy for LLMs &#x2F;s

Why never seeing a title “written by C” or Java or js

the other week i wrote a program in python, and ive been thinking of upgrading my cpp knowledge from v11, wish me luck

how to use this fossil computer era ????? I cant type shhiiii

<pre><code> Written in Rust™</code></pre>

What does the &quot;written in Rust&quot; contribute to the title, exactly?

When I started this emulator four years ago, this was the first PC emulator written in Rust so it was novel.I&#x27;ve heard the comments here loud and clear :) You all don&#x27;t think Rust is novel anymore and I should lose that bit.

Yup, I have private forks where I&#x27;ve had Claude&#x2F;Codex rip out Rust for that reason.

&quot;cross-platform&quot; and Rust, as advertised in the current title&#x2F;link label, is incompatible for sure. Can&#x27;t get that to run on my older OS X machine nor my Amiga. :)

Not specific to this project, but nowadays when I see &quot;written in rust&quot; I hear &quot;written by Claude&quot;.

Is that something people believe? I can’t say that’s a myth I’ve ever heard.

Early PCs were made of steel which can rust

MartyPC is a cross-platform emulator of early PCs written in Rust