luckybob wrote:

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Testing floppy drives. I need a working 360k drive for an upcoming project. sadly I think most of these are 1.2mb.

Wow, nice! I bought a few online last year and the genius that shipped them only separated them by a layer of newspaper... not even crumpled. So they were all slightly damaged. Thankfully, I got all three of them for less than the price of one good drive, and only really needed them to test a huge pile of old floppy disks I obtained. In the end, one worked (aside from making a terrible clunking noise when the system loads windows 98), and I was able to test all of my disks.

I like using these drives, because it reminds me of the first computers I ever used (I have fond memories of using a an Atari 65\130XE with an Indus GT floppy), but trying to get data off of old disks (copied disks) that weren't stored with preservation in mind... yuck. Its rewarding when you fiddle with things just enough to get a disk to read and you're able to save some probably useless but probably rare piece of data, but it can be very frustrating.

Wow that's a huge haul of fdds !

Some 1.2MB fdds can format in 360k properly : I've got one of these : I cheched the floppies it made with my 360k drive and everything was fine. This drive also a two color LED : it's yellow when accessing 360k discs and green with 1.2mb disks ^^

Deksor wrote:

Wow that's a huge haul of fdds !

Some 1.2MB fdds can format in 360k properly : I've got one of these : I cheched the floppies it made with my 360k drive and everything was fine. This drive also a two color LED : it's yellow when accessing 360k discs and green with 1.2mb disks ^^

what sorcery is this? I demand a model number at the very least. (At your earliest convenience, please.)

luckybob wrote:

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Testing floppy drives. I need a working 360k drive for an upcoming project. sadly I think most of these are 1.2mb.

Hoarding all the goodies! I need a 1.2 MB / 5.25" drive for some of my old games but the asking prices on ebay make me want to throw up 😜.

What are you building that requires a 360k drive?

I should be back home in 5 hours

Maybe I did something incorrectly with those though, I never really used 5"1/4 fdds before, most of my floppies were dead before finding a floppy disk haul 2 month ago. Here's what my procedure was : The disks were 360k ones, not 1.2MB ones. I remember formating those disks with the 1.2MB drive and being able to read them in the 360k one. And iirc, I could also write data on it using the 1.2MB drive and being able to read it in the 360k one as well

BeginnerGuy wrote:

luckybob wrote:

*SNIP*
Testing floppy drives. I need a working 360k drive for an upcoming project. sadly I think most of these are 1.2mb.

Hoarding all the goodies! I need a 1.2 MB / 5.25" drive for some of my old games but the asking prices on ebay make me want to throw up 😜.

What are you building that requires a 360k drive?

I'm building a proper "inbetweener". I need a dedicated system to properly format 360k drives. It is also going to double as a capture system as well. I'll make a separate post about it once its done.

Turns out only 1 of these drives was 360k. 3rd column, 2nd row. A Mitsubishi MF501B-347UA

Im going to need a 360k drive to go in my Pentium system so that I can make disks for the C64.

So the drive I was talking about earlier is the Mitsubishi MF504C-368U

I have an Epson SD-800 Dual Floppy Drive that reads and writes 1.44MB, 720KB, 1.2MB, and 360KB Floppies that I inherited from a friend of mine last year that passed away back in December of 2015. I almost took an old computer that had a floppy drive, CD drive, etc, but I ended up taking the sound card that was in it (Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro).

Both the FDD and Sound card are in my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus running MS-DOS 6.22/WFW 3.11 with a DX2-66, no L2 cache, 2GB CF Card, 48x CD Drive, 3Com EtherLink III ISA, Music Quest MPU401 card, and Conner Tape Backup drive.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Yeah the rampage motherboard should have given it away.
That aside whats up with the cache test?

Well, if you talking about spikes/drops in cache speed I think they are related to inclusive type cache of Nehalem CPUs (L2 + L3).
I tried switching off Prefetch (didn't help), tried locking CPU to NB clock and make NB clock 2x DRAM Effective clock - nope, drops are still there.
They only show up after L1 cache is full, and on both L2 and L3 (in certain intervals).

This chip has full 12MB of L3 cache available to it (on top of 32kb L1 and 256kB of L2) wish DOS could use it as "standard" RAM 😁

Score on 4,49GHz (NB=3906MHz + DRAM=1951MHz "192-bit").

Went thrifting and saw a 386 laptop. I hummed and hawed for quite a while before passing (I don't have much of an interest in laptops since they're harder to get parts for and harder to add things like sound and upgraded video, and this had a b&w passive matrix LCD). I'm sure someone will find it and be happy 😀

Grid Model 1660, 386 CPU(look it up as a 25MHz SX) with 8mb ram.

You never mentioned how much they wanted for it.

liqmat wrote:

You never mentioned how much they wanted for it.

$25. Now I'm doing that thing I do where I second guess my decision (even though I have no use for it...)

probnot wrote:

liqmat wrote:

You never mentioned how much they wanted for it.

$25. Now I'm doing that thing I do where I second guess my decision (even though I have no use for it...)

We all do that. I passed on an EVGA motherboard at a recycle center. Went back after a few days and it had already been stripped down. The list goes on over the years. I would offer $20 max for it though. I always find laptops with floppy drives handy. The worst you could do is put it up on Ebay for $900 like everybody else. 🤣

That's a really cool laptop, but your gut instinct was right. I do the same thing ALL THE TIME when I know deep down the computer / part would just sit and almost never be used. At best maybe you could have profited a few bucks on ebay.

probnot wrote:

$25. Now I'm doing that thing I do where I second guess my decision (even though I have no use for it...)

If you have dreams about it tonight, then go back tomorrow and get it 😀

Powered up my TL/2 after a long hiatus. This is one of my favourite machines, I think it's the monitor that makes it.

First up, installed an Intel 287XL co-pro. Shows up as a 387 in Norton for some reason.

The old 287 didn't want to come out of the socket though 😒

Also replaced the SB16 that was in there with a SB Pro 2. Routed the output of the SB Pro 2 to the mono speaker in the monitor.
Sounds exactly right for these kind of Tandy/EGA games! Looking forward to using it this winter.

This machine has a whole lot of other goodies, switchable EGA output, XT-IDE, EMS, HxC etc etc... there is a build thread on it here if you're interested.
Tandy TL/2

Very cool machine bjt - nostalgia coming off that thing from every angle. Where will you set it up? Front and center in the lounge room one assumes? 😜

I love that. Thanks for sharing.

badmojo wrote:

Very cool machine bjt - nostalgia coming off that thing from every angle. Where will you set it up? Front and center in the lounge room one assumes? 😜

Haha, would love that but I'll settle for anywhere out of the shed and in the house 🤣