Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-08-02, 03:44

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I repowered my Tecmar expansion chassis over the past few days and hooked it up to my Zenith Z-157. I had to wait a year for a pc-side Tecmar bridge card to appear on ebay first, and the old power supply was dead. The old PSU was bespoke, uncovered, and worked along a 110v cooling fan that was …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-07-28, 04:46

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I finished my pink core Duo machine, and snagged the missing card I needed to install and use my Tecmar 8-bit ISA expansion chassis. Been on the lookout for that for a year now. Is the case pink as well as the components? I have a lovely glossy pink case from around the Core2 era. Not perfect for …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-07-18, 02:58

by

by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I finished my pink core Duo machine, and snagged the missing card I needed to install and use my Tecmar 8-bit ISA expansion chassis. Been on the lookout for that for a year now.

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2024-07-13, 14:30

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Only half jokingly I wonder if a future hardware revision could include Voltage Blaster (optional) functionality and make this even more useful than it already is. Using a Voltage Blaster takes up a whole slot and uses only a few 'pins' of the ISA slot to provide that voltage, which is one reason …

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2024-07-01, 13:20

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Ah yes, I did read that, and I certainly understand why it's closed source to keep there from being "too many cooks in the kitchen". 😀

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2024-07-01, 11:15

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

So reviewing the card, I guess you can use the USB for devices but not memory sticks. That's too bad, I guess I'll have to take up a slot with the ISA-USB card after all. The reason this matters is that it's just not easy to get a larger-than-floppy file onto the pc using picomem. You have to …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2024-06-30, 02:59

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I liken building computers to shipbuilding. You put a ship together piece by piece, add and test systems, and finally one day everything has come together and the ship takes its first cruise under its own power. It may not be completely fitted out, a few things to tune up or fix or change, but its a …

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2024-06-30, 02:10

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I tried plugging a USB stick into the USB port on the pico (which is the USB hub for the Picomem) and of course nothing happened. I'm sure I should be able to use it to read a USB memory stick, but I'm not sure how that works here, it doesn't just automatically recognized the USB stick as a drive. …

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Re: The comprehensive list of all modern reproductions of vintage sound cards

Posted on 2024-06-29, 02:20

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Does Picomem including Adlib emulation if you add a DAC to it count here? 😁 https://github.com/FreddyVRetro/ISA-PicoMEM Semi-related: Picogus https://picog.us/ (?) whoops, missed it the first time I went thru the list.

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2024-06-29, 00:58

by

by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Moved the Picomem back to the Zenith Z-157, the machine I originally bought it for, and figured out the Zenith Z-157's memory parity error - I disabled parity checking of the memory with a dip switch setting on the motherboard. The one piece of documentation I've found on the whole net for the Z-157 …

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2024-06-28, 18:53

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

woo I'll take it on just one drive.. but I see it's limited to only 32 floppy images. Sounds like a lot but when installs take multiple disks that fills up fast. Flashfloppy on a Gotek still maintains a significant edge there, with the number of images only being limited by the USB stick size. And …

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2024-06-28, 15:23

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

One thing I notice though is that unlike flashfloppy, where you can swap floppies by spinning the knob on the Gotek drive, there's no function on Picomem to swap floppies without rebooting. At least as far as I can tell. Am I wrong there?

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2024-06-28, 14:07

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Sorry didn't see your response before I crossed out the disk issue - I shorted the 13 character file name down to 8 characters and that fixed it. I'm sorry about that, was dumb of me. Question since I haven't found a diagram of the Picomem yet: there are two USB interfaces on the card, the mini and …

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2024-06-28, 12:57

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've had some issues with the picomem card... 1) on my 8088 Zenith Z-157 mod2/3 machine, when I install the card the Zenith BIOS complains about 'memory parity failures' ... so I've moved it to my 386 machine. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/772873705628893285/1256010669992443924/20240627_ …

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Re: Weird BIOS issue. or perhaps just that old? only 4 digit HDD info? 128MB (not GB) SD card too big? DTI 386 SBC.

Posted on 2024-06-25, 19:47

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

And another update: I installed a NIC card with IDE-XT BIOS on the 386 SBC machine and it succesfully searched for hard drives, but didn't see them... but I replaced the Winbond multi-io board with a Holtek one and the problems with the SD-IDE drive and Flashfloppy disappeared. Thanks to someone on …

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Re: Weird BIOS issue. or perhaps just that old? only 4 digit HDD info? 128MB (not GB) SD card too big? DTI 386 SBC.

Posted on 2024-06-23, 19:26

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Spoke too soon! The BIOS seemed to work, but in fact it wasn't seeing the extended 4MB RAM on the board, just the base 640k. A second BIOS which turned out to be just another version number of the same AMI BIOS acted the same way. I learned from another server that W27e257 are direct replacements, …

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Re: Weird BIOS issue. or perhaps just that old? only 4 digit HDD info? 128MB (not GB) SD card too big? DTI 386 SBC.

Posted on 2024-06-23, 17:14

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm not so sure here - check this article out - its for a different system but the same chips are involved. I got a pair of 27256's on the way today from Amazon - if the storms don't cancel the delivery or keep me from going out to get them - so I guess we'll see: https://electronics.stackexchange. …

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Re: Weird BIOS issue. or perhaps just that old? only 4 digit HDD info? 128MB (not GB) SD card too big? DTI 386 SBC.

Posted on 2024-06-23, 13:37

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

New question: I've been trying to put a new BIOS on this 286 board and it gives me an error saying BIOS checksum error check ROM (27256?) .. well I've been using 28c256 eeproms. The board starts to boot on the various bios but eventually all hit that error. Does this mean the bios will only work on …

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Re: Weird BIOS issue. or perhaps just that old? only 4 digit HDD info? 128MB (not GB) SD card too big? DTI 386 SBC.

Posted on 2024-06-22, 23:52

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How old is that 386 BIOS? Is it from the 80s? If so, there might be other compatibility issues besides lack of LBA support. ATA-2 and ATA-3 standards changed certain things the HDD routines in the 386 BIOS perhaps can't handle. Personally, I'd try to use the floppy verson of XTIDE and see if it …

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Re: Weird BIOS issue. or perhaps just that old? only 4 digit HDD info? 128MB (not GB) SD card too big? DTI 386 SBC.

Posted on 2024-06-22, 16:06

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by NHVintage

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

As to whether anything has worked on the Winbond card (386 project): no floppies, even a 5 1/2 inch or flashfloppy - they all give a Drive Seek Failure almost immediately. For hard drives... maybe. The only small early 90s Hard Drive - a WD caviar 3300 - that I have is pretty much dead, platter and …

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