securitybreach Posted November 23, 2020 Share Posted November 23, 2020 Quote If you’ve scrolled through the list of boot options offered on any PC’s BIOS, it reads like a history of storage technology. Up top we have the options to boot from disk, often a solid-state drive, then USB disk, optical drive, removable media, and down the bottom there’s usually an option to boot from the network. Practically no BIOS, however, has an option to boot a PC from a vinyl record — at least until now. Clearly a project from the “Because why not?” school of hacking, [Jozef Bogin] came up with the twist to the normal booting process for an IBM-PC. As in the IBM-PC — a model 5150, with the putty-colored case, dual 5-1/4″ floppies, and one of those amazing monochrome displays with the green slow-decay phosphors. To pull off the trick, [Jozef] leverages the rarely used and little known cassette tape interface that PCs had back in the early days. This required building a new bootloader and burning it to ROM to make the PC listen to audio signals with its 8255 programmable peripheral interface chip. Once the PC had the right bootloader, a 64k FreeDOS bootable disk image was recorded on vinyl. [Jozef] provides infuriatingly little detail about the process other than to mention that the audio was sent directly to the vinyl lathe; we’d have loved to learn more about that. Nonetheless, the resulting 10″ record, played back at 45 RPM with some equalization tweaks to adapt for the RIAA equalization curve of the preamp, boots the PC into FreeDOS just fine, probably in no more time than it would have taken to boot from floppy. It’s may not be the first time we’ve seen software on vinyl, but it’s still a pretty cool hack. Want to try it yourself but lack a record-cutting lathe? Maybe laser-cutting your boot disc will work.... https://hackaday.com/2020/11/23/booting-a-pc-from-vinyl-for-a-warmer-richer-os/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted November 23, 2020 Share Posted November 23, 2020 It was bad enough loading programs with a cassette player on the old Commodore Vic-20. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted November 23, 2020 Author Share Posted November 23, 2020 Yeah, its not really feasible but still neat stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goretsky Posted November 25, 2020 Share Posted November 25, 2020 Hello, What was interesting to me is that the record sounded like a modem data stream (the part after the handshake, that is). Regards, Aryeh Goretsky 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted November 25, 2020 Share Posted November 25, 2020 It's not too crazy. Some DJs these days don't use actual vinyl audio records but play files and have a vinyl record with a timecode recorded so they can do scratching and beat matching and stuff. Most of them use what appears to be a pseudo CD player to do the same thing though. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted November 25, 2020 Author Share Posted November 25, 2020 1 hour ago, sunrat said: It's not too crazy. Some DJs these days don't use actual vinyl audio records but play files and have a vinyl record with a timecode recorded so they can do scratching and beat matching and stuff. Most of them use what appears to be a pseudo CD player to do the same thing though. I didn't know that but I guess it makes sense. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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