Dedicated modern legacy CSM box for TinyCore

[PDP-8]

I just realized that in my closet, I have a powerful modern machine I can dedicate to TinyCore with the ease of CSM or legacy usage.

Basically it is a mini-pc box that is not really sufficiently fast enough for Windows 10 or 11 for that matter.  Sure, I played around with 64-bit TinyCorePure64, but this is a possible solution for those who might find that frustrating or too advanced and seek the simpler classic setup.

Solution: for this dedicated TC machine, go into all the CSM / Legacy options, and enable those to Legacy / CSM only.

Chicken-and-egg:  But before you do, create a Ventoy boot disk, and place one of the 32-bit TC iso's on it.

Boot with the newly adjusted-for-legacy bios, and the Ventoy boot thumbdrive.  If you are using the larger TC "installer" iso version, so much the better.

Now you can create ANOTHER TC usb stick the old-fashioned way, with the gui and all that, and can leave Ventoy behind.

In my case, I had reached a technological level where even though the box was UEFI and all that for Windows, and some parts of TinyCorePure64 left me a bit frustrated (op errors, pebkac), forcing the minimal box back in time was the simplest solution for it.

And of course TC *flies* compared to the older 486/586 naturally!  Will it see more than 4gb? Nope.  Not worried for my use-case.  With the possibility of finding older Win10 boxes laying around later this year, this might be a neat solution if one doesn't absolutely have to have 64 bit.

[gadget42]

welcome back

[PDP-8]

Thanks!  I should mention that on these little boxes, I've learned to totally avoid any use of EMMC storage, in fact I disable it in bios.  Pretend it's not there - it's not just TC, but other distros too.

And the CSM isn't just one tick-box.  I go into all the CSM related entries in bios, and if there's an option for uefi / legacy, I'll switch it to legacy.  Haven't seen xvesa in years!

At least on this project.  On other machines, I'll run 64-bit TC in uefi.  I really don't have a problem with it, it's just this box I'm doing this too.

As always, aside from the main devs, TC is a community project, and I remember and use some favorites from the user-submitted extensions.  Good to be back.
 

[PDP-8]

Fun!  Now that the box is in total csm/legacy, I upgraded from 32-bit to Coreplus64 to another bootable stick!

It's all coming back.  Tce-ab etc.  Created a master corepure64 minimal gui installer with nothing but

xfbdev
flwm
aterm
wbar
tc-install-GUI

Kind of went around the horn to make a gui legacy Coreplus64 for a modern box with bios flipped to csm/legacy only.  Total fun.  Snappy!

[PDP-8]

That was fun.  I reset the bios to default (uefi only), and ran with the *latest* Ventoy and TinyCorePure64 again, manually setting up persistence with tce-setdrive.  Still left EMMC support disable in bios though.

The performance increase was noticeable, even with xfbdev.