Comptons Interactive Encyclopedia

What works

The program main windows (if the user select the g.exe file at the root of CD-ROM program) opens, and displays the text on the bottom status bar.

The winevdm.exe crash that affect on previous version, was somehow fixed.

What does not

The main window client is empty, instead the expected splash screen and interface buttons, making the program unusable.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Not so much.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Even many Tandy VIS softwares are playable on Wine, a dedicated emulator for this embedded Windows machine was finally available as part of MAME emulator.

It seems that a Brazilian collector of rare consoles, managed to dump the Tandy VIS firmware, and wrote the initial parameters of VIS emulations on MAME.

Using MAME, it requires only to download the firmware, and made an ISO copy of VIS software, then select the Tandy VIS machine, and play.

This encyclopedia runs much or less correctly on MAME 0.194, however, save states is not emulated.

When the firmware was finally dumped, some machine quirks was finally confirmed:

- It uses the MS-DOS 3.22, dedicated to embedded devices with a basic BIOS and MS-DOS kernel on ROM, like the HP 95LX, instead on floppy.

- There's no msdos.sys, io.sys or command.com, since it was packed on the BIOS sector.

- The control.tat acts as a autoexec.bat, and was a special customization make possible, since the MS-DOS 3.x source was partially available to OEM's make custom kernels.

- It uses the Matsuhita CD-ROM driver for MS-DOS.

- It contains the basic Windows 3.1 libraries (win87emu, gdi, user, kernel, mmsystem, ...), but no Program Manager, File Manager, or whatever.

- The bundled CD-Audio player was a Win16 program, where the ROM contains the system.ini and win.ini config files to start the program!

- All special multimedia Haiku's Runtime libraries (like HC.DLL), that someone managed to get to third sources was already the same on the original firmware.