86Box has an awfully big and empty toolbar for not having a "insert new disk in drive A" button.

some of us have operating systems to install, damn it! this should be one click, not Media->Floppy 1->Existing Image.

@Lili honestly I didn't even see the floppy icon down there. I think the DPI scaling for it is broken.

@foone You can also click the floppy icon in the bottom right to get a menu for that!

for posterity, the floppy disks requested when installing Microsoft Excel 4.3 off a Microsoft Office 4.3 disk set are:

1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 22, 23

@foone instant “what comes next test” panic

foone-ass problems: I have to shut down my VM every time I want to pull the exported CSV off my Excel 4.3 spreadsheet

@Lili too lazy to make a blank image and format it, tbh

maybe I should install trumpet winsock and FTP off my spreadsheets

@Lili oh does it? neato! that makes it a good deal easier

wait, I can emulate a printer and print my CSVs!

can it emulate the sound of dot matrix too? where do I enable that setting

bad idea: CUPS proxy device that emulates the sound of a dot matrix printer. You configure it to point to your real printer, and it MITMs your printouts to calculate what they'd sound like to print on an Oki Microline 320 Turbo, which it then plays back at the correct calibrated volume (which if I recall correctly is around 140 dB)

@foone You'll probably have to write that function. Bonus points if you actually emulate the sound of each dot rather than just play a generic dot matrix sound.

@foone There's going to be a sound accurate driver with reverb filters soon, isn't there?

seeing that 86Box can emulate at least one protection dongle gives me a great idea:

someone should hire me fulltime to locate PC dongles, reverse engineer them, and implement emulation of them into 86box

@foone something something real people use an IBM line printer without the cover on something something

@foone This idea sounds crazy until you remember that the “taking a photo” sound your smart phone makes is a short audio recording of a mechanical camera shutter and film advance motor drive.

@foone

Dot matrix printers were specifically designed to be so obnoxiously loud that it was impossible to ignore. This was the same design philosophy employed by modem makers at the time.

UGH I have to go get my windows 3.1 install disks back out to install a printer!

@foone another bad idea: make a website about dot matrix printers with the url:

dotmatrix.matrix

@stfn slashdotacular!

@foone For proper nostalgia, I also want an Epson RX 80 version.

okay it works. printing the spreadsheet straight from excel gives me weird errors with missing data, but saving it out to CSV and opening it in notepad and printing from there? perfect.

@zero hey, I'll have you know I'm one of the top 1% of font havers in the world

@foone cells the wrong size for bounding box? If i understand windows printing, it renders an image then prints instead of sending postscript. Worth trying maybe.

Edit to clarify, resizing columns so it doesn't hide things, empty cell, make that column a hair bigger.

@foone insert <"shut up and take my money"> here.
(Printed on a dot matrix ofc)

@zero oh yeah. I'm all about the bitmap fonts. I'd marry them if that was legal.

@foone Star NL-10 please!

@foone How about using a modem + phone line to transfer files with Kermit or Xmodem? Also a very pleasing sound experience.

@kater_s I don't think I've got a terminal program though, so I couldn't send them. I guess I could find and install some windows 3.1 terminal program

@kater_s maybe I'll reverse engineer an ancient AOL and use that

@foone Plus, for the real experience you’d need two modems. Only V.24 would be rather boring 🙃

@foone It's so bad I love it dearly.

@foone

First of all: Not a bad idea, more like a badass idea!

But why bother with the additional printer?
This just needs to be a dummy printer to produce the right printing sounds instead of paper.
Just “print out” the useless email your boss sends you and listen to them being printed… 😃

@foone I can’t get on board with this unless it also emulates my childhood Panasonic KX-P1123.

It hits the just-right volume level of the whole home hearing it, but no risk of hearing damage.

@foone FWIW, given that Michael Sweet (the driving force behind CUPS) worked for Apple until 2019, I wonder if you might get more traction with an ImageWriter soundtrack. If he hasn’t already written such a beast for his own amusement.

@foone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8I6qt_Z0Cg