Does anyone else read old eproms you buy off ebay?

Posted on Yesterday, 02:10

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I always scan through old eproms/eeproms I pick up off ebay out of curiosity. Seems like 80% are old 2000's VCD players. I found one that's interesting, whatever it belonged to had a menu item for Tetris and Pac Man. Have you ever found anything interesting? Am I the only one who does this?

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-15, 03:06

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Everything was recovered. Earliest tape was simply a tar archive, second tape I recovered by dd on all the tape files, concatting them together, and converting to a tar with mtftar. I also now have about twenty new dds3 tapes and a brand new dds4 drive setup in one of my linux servers, might as well …

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-14, 19:35

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by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

DDS4 tape drive seems to be what I needed. First tape I checked is apparantly windows backup: Windows NTbackup archive NT, with file catalog, soft size 0*512, name: PICTURE ARCHIVE 08/08/08MTF Media Label|1.0|Seagate|NTBackup5.0|2008/08/08.02:00:24|Seagate 2008/08/08.02:00:24|1|{BF163C5F-3C4, label: …

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-12, 21:38

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah that was a test tape, not one i created. My tapes are labelled TAR format so i am optimistic they are simple tar archives.

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Re: Reconfigure Backpack parallel port tape device as a floppy drive?

Posted on 2021-09-11, 03:11

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by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Driver reports that no floppy is found. The board only has three chips, a floppy controller, a 256mbit dram, and what I'm guessing is a proprietary microsolutions chip labelled: MicroSolutions 50772a 9338MVa39 I think that IC is the issue and probably not something easily bypassed on the hardware …

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Reconfigure Backpack parallel port tape device as a floppy drive?

Posted on 2021-09-11, 02:40

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've got a MicroSolutions parallel port tape drive and a MicroSolutions 2.88mb floppy drive. I've examined both of them and they seem to be identical other than one has the tape drive attached and one has floppy. I was hoping I could repurpose the tape drive as an external HXC enclosure but there's …

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-11, 01:39

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Documentation I found specifically mentions dds3 support. Is it possible the dds3 drives were detected and written as dds2 in my existing unit? I have only ever had a single tape drive and a small number of tapes...

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-11, 01:06

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Just found a sealed new-in-box DDS4 tape drive on Ebay for $60, that ought to be able to read these tapes. I'll check back in next week after it arrives I suppose.

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-11, 00:52

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by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Interestingly this drive doesn't seem to want to accept DDS3 cartridges; DDS2 work fine. I'm POSITIVE I used this drive to make the backups I'm trying to recover, so this is very strange to me. It's an HP C1539 which a web search reports is in fact a DDS2 drive...

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-11, 00:08

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think the 32kb is just the first file, there's multiple files on the tape I guess.

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-10, 23:56

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by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah I was just looking at the devices. I'm using Debian. nst0 nst0a nst0l nst0m st0 st0a st0l st0m I'll see if google can help me out there with the a/l/m designations, but st0 is rewinding device and st0m is non-rewinding device, that's all I know right now.

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-10, 23:30

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It's successfully formatted a spare tape, so I assume the drive is OK. I can't quite figure out how to get a raw tape dump; dd if=/dev/st0 of=somefile just dumps 32kb. What it dumps LOOKS like good data from the tape (pre-erase): 00000000: 4845 4144 4552 5149 4331 3133 0700 0100 HEADERQIC113.... …

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Re: DRDOS 7.03, SHIFT+PRTSCR to Laserjet possible?

Posted on 2021-09-10, 17:14

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by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

well that was a quick fix. I was in the MSDOS 6.22 folder when I was running setver, so I was never actually updating setver for DRDOS 7.03. After I ran the right setver msdos 6.22 graphics.com works perfectly.

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DRDOS 7.03, SHIFT+PRTSCR to Laserjet possible?

Posted on 2021-09-10, 17:09

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Looks like graphics.com on DRDOS 7.03 only support IBM compatible printers, with MSDOS 6.22 it supports a number of printer types. I can't seem to get msdos graphics.com to work with setver. Any idea what i can do to enable this?

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Ditto 3200 parallel port tape backup reliability?

Posted on 2021-09-10, 13:47

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I picked up what seems to be a perfectly working Ditto 3200 drive and a tape. Any idea how reliable this device was/might still be?

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Re: Is there a version of USE!UMBS.SYS that doens't require manual patching? Seems like this guy is referring to one...

Posted on 2021-09-10, 00:17

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Using dr-dos himem.sys with /CHIPSET=EMSALL I now have 64kb of upper memory blocks. That's pretty good tbh.

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Re: Is there a version of USE!UMBS.SYS that doens't require manual patching? Seems like this guy is referring to one...

Posted on 2021-09-09, 18:55

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thanks, both of you! My 1000tl now sees 64kb ems page as high memory but I'm unable to turn that into umb or load dos high yet, small steps. I had it working some time ago but lost the configs.

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Is there a version of USE!UMBS.SYS that doens't require manual patching? Seems like this guy is referring to one...

Posted on 2021-09-09, 17:00

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

https://github.com/Astrowallaby/PaleozoicPC-s … fig.sys.example REM Enable upper memory and load DOS high device=c:\tandy\use!umbs.sys C800-DFFF To the best of my knowledge use!umbs.sys has to be manually patched and has no command line options?

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Re: Gamewizard32 installed but hanging when saving current game to disk

Posted on 2021-09-09, 00:57

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by keenerb

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Hoping to use the game save state feature of Gamewizard32 on my Tandy 2500SX/20 playing some old RPGs. Everything seems to work well except it hangs when saving current program to disk, at "Please wait while saving to disk..." dialog. Anyone experienced this? Not sure what is going on. This is with …

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Re: Recovering data from old DDS3 tapes; I have a tape drive, but usability questions

Posted on 2021-09-04, 03:09

by

by keenerb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Modern Linux should still support something like a dirt common AHA-2940 card (AIC-78xx). DDS3 is pretty new as far as DAT drives are concerned. If you have a machine with PCI slots, throw it in and try a modern Linux distro. Hopefully your tapes are direct TAR, makes restoration easy. Yeah that's …

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