Sound Blaster 1.5 with CMS upgrade.

What's a nice sounding game/demo to test this sucker out with? (Particularly the CMS part)

Very nice!

Lucasarts and Sierra have some CMS games. Monkey Island, Loom, Last Crusade, Prince of Persia, Space Quest 3, Police Quest 3 and likely some others.

Monkey island (start with the g command line parameter)
Silpheed
Ultima 6

Many Sierra Quest games

😀

Silpheed was considered a good CMS game I think, and most Sierra SCI0 adventure games supported CMS. I think that Zeliard may have sounded decent on CMS.

Most games that support CMS sound better on OPL and even better on MT-32, but it's fun to test out different technologies 😀

Yeah, the Sierra SCI0 games sounded pretty ordinary.

Silpheed and Thexder 2 sounded pretty good in the LGR video, so I might give those a go tonight.

My problem at the moment is getting software on to that portable. It has no room for a network card, only serial and parallel ports. It has a HD floppy drive, but that's a pain!! 🙁

That is a pain, since modern machines have neither floppy drives nor serial/parallel ports.

I keep my PIII-550 around mainly because I can plug in 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives.

Yeah, my Pentium 4 has been infinitely useful for servicing my older PCs as it has a floppy drive, and it's the only machine downstairs where my old rigs are that I have connected to the internet. Perfect for downloading drivers and freeware games. I've been meaning to get all my old systems on an offline network together, which would make file transfers a lot easier. Even got an ISA lan card for my 386.

I have plenty of Internet-connected machines with floppy drives, that's not a problem, it's just that all these games are bigger than one floppy disk, so you have to take the time to split the files up across floppies, or create ZIP volumes, or whatever...

I have a solution in mind though, wait and see. 😀

I remember it being fairly easy to do multi-volume ZIP archives (and even easier to do multi-volume RAR ones, which is probably why RAR is still around).

Unzipping stuff takes an age on the poor little 286.

I have a plan though. 😀

Speaking of ZIP, I should hook up my Zip drive... that'd be way better than floppies at least.

SquallStrife wrote:

Yeah, the Sierra SCI0 games sounded pretty ordinary.

Silpheed and Thexder 2 sounded pretty good in the LGR video, so I might give those a go tonight.

My problem at the moment is getting software on to that portable. It has no room for a network card, only serial and parallel ports. It has a HD floppy drive, but that's a pain!! 🙁

Think a parallel ZIP drive might work??

HunterZ wrote:

That is a pain, since modern machines have neither floppy drives nor serial/parallel ports.

I keep my PIII-550 around mainly because I can plug in 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives.

This is what I keep my "work computer" for. It's an Athlon 64 3500+ which has all my backup stuff. It's got a 2.88 meg floppy drive and a USB 250MB ZIP drive right next to it. This way, I can transfer files to my retro computers (I don't usually network my retro boxes).

Zip drive should work well!

I also purchased a USB floppy drive. Sometimes it's just he quickest way of doing things.

Well, I got my alternative solution working, but er, bit slow, floppies are probably going to be faster...

Parallel port ZIP drive sounds like a good option too... off to eBay! 😀

Could you comment on your solution? I bet everybody is curious. How does it work?

btw, my solution is MicroHub/8 TP1008C with 8 Ethernet ports, one of which can work as coaxial.
http://darudar.org/var/files/img/3e/d7/3ed773 … e24bb89_600.jpg

I'm going to build a whole network this summer, it's going to include a Core i5 Notebook, a Core 2 Duo Home PC, 233MMX-based glide machine and a 386DX-40 beast with 20MB RAM 😀

The small board on the left is a Raspberry Pi, a small embedded Linux computer (700MHz ARMv6), with ethernet connectivity. It has some GPIO pins, two of which provide a high speed UART (115,200kbps+). The board on the right is a piece of perfboard with a MAX3232 chip, to convert the TTL-level signals from the Pi's UART to RS232 level signals for a PC serial port.

On the 286, I run Telix and log in to the Pi via the serial interface. Then I can surf for files or whatever using "lynx", a text based web browser, and then have the Pi send the files by Zmodem using the "sz" command.

The downside is that being a 286, the UART is quite slow, it wont handle anything above 19.2kbps.

So, back to the drawing board, parallel port ZIP drive looks like the ticket though.

I wonder why some haven't tried using a standard ide drive in a hotswap cady and when the retro box isn't running take the drive then hook it up to a usb/firewire enclosure on a modern rig. That is what I am planning on doing but got to hunt down the cables to my parallel port zip drive if all else fails.

nforce4max wrote:

I wonder why some haven't tried using a standard ide drive in a hotswap cady and when the retro box isn't running take the drive then hook it up to a usb/firewire enclosure on a modern rig. That is what I am planning on doing but got to hunt down the cables to my parallel port zip drive if all else fails.

I actually do something similar. I have a 2gb Bigfoot drive that I use as a benchmarking drive. Its loaded with speedsys, cachecheck, 3dbench and some others. When I'm done I just plug the drive into a $5 Chinese IDE/USB converter and pull the .pcx images off. I don't care if either breaks but it is fun to actally use a Bigfoot. ^.^

Ooh, a Raspberry Pi in action!

Any chance you could program it to do some kind of parallel protocol like laplink or interlink?