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PC booting from a vinyl record (earrape warning)

submitted by Zawash

3 years 11 months 3 weeks ago

boginjr.com:
Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh? Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?

So this nutty little experiment connects a PC, or an IBM PC to be exact, directly onto a record player through an amplifier. There is a small ROM boot loader that operates the built-in “cassette interface” of the PC (that was hardly ever used), invoked by the BIOS if all the other boot options fail, i.e. floppy disk and the hard drive. The turntable spins an analog recording of a small bootable read-only RAM drive, which is 64K in size. This contains a FreeDOS kernel, modified by me to cram it into the memory constraint, a micro variant of COMMAND.COM and a patched version of INTERLNK, that allows file transfer through a printer cable, modified to be runnable on FreeDOS. The bootloader reads the disk image from the audio recording through the cassette modem, loads it to memory and boots the system on it. Simple huh?

4 Comments

kir_mokum

says...

i remember a super niche chiptune 12" from a long time ago that had a C64 program on it. had to be recorded to tape and use the tape drive though.

surfingyt

says...

bad. ass.

ReverendTed

says...

There is no reason for this to exist. It's so esoteric. I love it.

smr

says...

I work in IT. I troubleshoot and optimize incredibly complex systems using a wide range of toolsets. There is zero chance I could make something like this work without trashing my house in a frustration meltdown.