There is now a second BluMach alpha, 0.1.0-alpha.2. The first one brought the Olivetti PCS desktops; this one adds five portable or transportable machines: two Olivettis and three Toshibas.
They’re still experimental. They will fail, and a machine that boots isn’t necessarily a machine that works well. On each machine’s page I’ve noted what I’ve tested and what is still an approximation.
Before you download: BluMach does not include ROMs, BIOS files or operating systems. You’ll have to obtain them yourself; they are not distributed with the program.
What this release includes
- Olivetti M15 (1987): reflective green LCD, two 720 KB drives and 256 or 512 KB of RAM.
- Olivetti M15 Plus (1988): backlit LCD, 512 KB, and either two floppy drives or one with a 20 MB disk.
- Toshiba T3200: 286 at 12 MHz with an orange plasma display, EGA and up to 4 MB of memory with the expansion card.
- Toshiba T5100: took the series to the 386, at 16 MHz, with EGA and a four-level plasma display.
- Toshiba T5200: 386DX at 20 MHz with VGA and a sixteen-level plasma display.
There are also two new family pages, Olivetti M and Toshiba T-series, with the history of each line and a table of models. The table is a first version and I’ll expand it as more machines are added. For now, besides the PCS machines, only these five can be created. And there’s no T3200SX or T5200C, yet :-).
What has been checked and what hasn’t
“Checked” means I’ve seen it work myself, not that the emulation is exact. I tested almost everything with the previous development build; I haven’t yet repeated every test by hand with this one.
| Machine | Checked | Pending |
|---|---|---|
| M15 | POST and resident diagnostics, booting from a 720 KB floppy with 256 and 512 KB, and the Starter Kit's graphical tutorial | The external 5.25-inch drive, and how the four display levels map to the six shades in the specification |
| M15 Plus | Resident diagnostics with 512 KB, MS-DOS 3.20 boot, the memory, board and LCD tests, and FDISK on the 20 MB disk | FORMAT and booting from the installed hard disk, the disk's physical SCSI bridge (an approximation), the exact LCD response and the board logic |
| T3200 | BIOS 4.61 and Toshiba DOS 3.30 with 720 KB and 1.44 MB floppies, both 4 MB memory extremes, full floppy formatting and installation on an MFM disk | PEGA2 timing, AGS capture/NMI and the memory card's physical decoding |
| T5100 | Readable Setup, POST, booting Toshiba DOS 3.30 from disk, the TESTCE3 menu, and extended and LIM memory | The original AGS ROM, the 4 MB option, the full diagnostics, writing to floppies and upper EMS memory |
| T5200 | Toshiba MS-DOS 3.30 with the internal plasma and with external VGA, 720 KB and 1.44 MB floppies, and TEST3 with 2 to 14 MB of memory | Conner disks, the external drive, the regional CG-ROM and the timing of the Toshiba chips |
Some parts are approximations and are marked as such on each page. The T5100 is the clearest case: I don’t have the original AGS video ROM, so it uses an IBM EGA ROM patched in memory. It works, but it isn’t faithful.
Display and keyboard
All five displays respond to controls in View → Screen controls…, and those controls really do change what is drawn. They don’t reproduce each panel’s real optical response: the colours and curves are approximate, not measured on the machines; I went by photos and videos of the real machines.
| Machine | Controls | Pending |
|---|---|---|
| M15 | Contrast. Reflective LCD, no backlight | It emulates 4 shades and the documentation mentions 6; how they correspond is still unclear |
| M15 Plus | Contrast and backlight ON/OFF, with 8 levels | The optical response and the colours |
| T3200 | One brightness slider for the combined contrast and brightness knob, with 4 levels of orange | Geometry, fonts and part of the AGS behaviour |
| T5100 | Separate contrast and brightness, with 4 levels of orange | The least complete: the original AGS ROM is missing and the 400-line display is approximate |
| T5200 | Internal plasma contrast, with 16 levels | The regional CG-ROM, the orange curve and part of the switching protocol |
Some controls are missing on purpose. On the M15 Plus, turning off the backlight dims the light but doesn’t turn off the image, and there’s no separate brightness dial because the guide doesn’t document one. On the T5200 the brightness depends on the firmware, and I didn’t add a separate physical control without documentation. None of the Toshibas has an LCD backlight, they’re plasma!!!, so none is offered.
Both Olivettis keep the olive background and the greenish blue-grey characters, and there are automated tests for the palette and the interface.
M15 and M15 Plus keys. The special EDIT/SHIFT key is there:
- F11 (or the left Windows key) turns it on and off. It’s a toggle; you don’t need to hold it down.
- With it on: ← is Home, → is End, ↑ is Page Up and ↓ is Page Down.
- F1–F10 switch to the alternate bank of functions.
- Num Lock turns on the built-in numeric keypad.
Contrast and backlight have no shortcut: they’re set from View → Screen controls….
Toshiba keys. On the T3200 and T5100, the right Ctrl key acts as Fn:
- Right Ctrl + Home: internal plasma.
- Right Ctrl + End: external display.
- Right Ctrl + ↓: toggles between the 350-line and 400-line display.
- Changing the font with Fn + → is still pending on the T5100.
On the T5200, Ctrl + Home (with the left or right Ctrl) brings back the internal plasma if it was off. There’s no reverse combination to turn it off.
On the T3200, Ctrl + SysRq opens XCHAD if the resident utility is loaded. It isn’t a BluMach menu.
Which ROMs you need
Each machine asks for its own firmware, and if any is missing the program tells you instead of replacing it:
- M15: BIOS 1.08.
- M15 Plus: BIOS 1.10.
- T3200: Toshiba BIOS 4.61 (two ROMs) and the AGS ROM.
- T5100: Toshiba BIOS V2.30 and a compatibility IBM EGA ROM.
- T5200: Award BIOS V1.30 and Toshiba’s 1988 VGA BIOS.
How to try it
- Download version 0.1.0-alpha.2 from GitHub. There’s only a package for Windows x86-64 (64-bit). Next to the ZIP there’s a file with its SHA-256 so you can check the download.
- Unzip it into a new folder and run
BluMach.exe. The package includes aFIRST-RUN.mdwith the first steps. - Get the ROMs for the machine you want to try and your own copy of MS-DOS, and set the ROM folder in Tools → Preferences (by default,
%LOCALAPPDATA%\BluMach\roms). The file names each machine asks for are on its page. I used Olivetti’s MS-DOS on both M15s and Toshiba MS-DOS 3.30 on the Toshibas. - Create the machine with its default configuration and boot from the MS-DOS floppy.
- If a ROM is missing, BluMach will tell you which one.
Windows may show the “Windows protected your PC” warning (SmartScreen) the first time, because the program isn’t signed. If you downloaded it from the release page on GitHub, click “More info” and then “Run anyway”.
What I know fails or haven’t tested
- I haven’t tested sound on any of the five. The two Olivettis don’t take add-on cards, only the internal speaker.
- On the M15 Plus with the 20 MB disk, FDISK now works: I fixed a bug that made the BIOS’s DMA wait time out on every sector. FORMAT and booting from the installed disk aren’t certified.
- The external 5.25-inch drive is missing on both Olivettis.
- The timing, the displays’ brightness curves and part of the board logic are approximations.
- I haven’t done any extensive software compatibility testing. If you try something, I’m as interested in what works as in what doesn’t.
If something fails
Open an issue on GitHub or write to me at [email protected]. It helps if you tell me which machine and configuration you chose, what you did, what you expected and what happened, and a screenshot if you can.
And if you have or had one of these machines, any information about the real one is worth its weight in gold: photos of the board, manuals, floppies.
Code and licence
BluMach is an independent project and isn’t affiliated with Olivetti or Toshiba. It’s distributed under GPL-2.0-or-later, and the code for this release is in the repository’s v0.1.0-alpha.2 tag.