Monthly Archives: July 2020

X7DBE WTF

Several years ago I got two Supermicro X7DBE boards at a bargain price. These are nice dual Socket 771 boards of circa 2007 vintage, built around the Intel 5000P Blackford chipset and using FB-DIMMs with up to 32GB memory supported. … Continue reading

Posted in PC hardware, Supermicro, Xeon | 18 Comments

Well Hello

So after some furious disassembling, assembling, and linking, things got this far: It took longer than it ought to have because although IDA is great, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work with GW-BASIC’s bizarre segment usage. The … Continue reading

Posted in Compaq, Microsoft, PC history, Source code | 7 Comments

How Old Is OMF?

The Object Module Format (OMF), used by most DOS development tools, and eventually displaced by COFF/ELF in the 32-bit world, is quite old. It is a somewhat strange format because of its age, and it is quite complex, both because … Continue reading

Posted in Development, Intel, Microsoft, PC history, x86 | 8 Comments