Hacker News Reader

I tried booting to this with QEMU 2.6.1 with `qemu-system-x86_64 -sdl -fda nasa-spoc.img`.

It does boot but it uses some graphics mode that isn't properly emulated with QEMU, and only about half of the screen contents get displayed in the window.

edit: I got virtualbox to boot it but it's slow as molasses. Perhaps I don't have the right virtualization enabled. And I can't get the ALT (or CODE) key to work, so I can't get past the first screen.

View on HN

Try mine: https://github.com/robertely/SPOC-VirtualBox

It's basically a stock VM with very low memory,minimal peripherals, and a CPU priority of 1% (even at 1% it's blazingly fast compared to the 80s)

I was using your .vbox file from GitHub. I have no idea why the ALT key isn't working. I tried changing to US keyboard layout but to no avail. I'm under Linux / x11 and I don't have any hotkeys on ALT.

The speed is perhaps 1/100th of what QEMU was putting out. May be related to not having correctly set up the virtualbox modules or something?

For speed try increasing the cpu execution cap here: https://github.com/robertely/SPOC-VirtualBox/blob/master/SPO... (out of 100) incromentally till you have a reasonable speed.

Sadly I can't explain the alt problem. I suppose I could rebind that to something like the space bar and upload a modified floppy image. I will poke at that later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com