I was actually recently thinking about some sort of "sound emulator" of old drives. Just record various sounds into one of those cheap Chinese sound player modules, add an Arduino to trigger proper sound at proper time... I never got past the idea, and didn't really do any checks of IDE timing. I'm …

That was usually BIOS for 53c810 PCI SCSI controller, but it's a good idea to check the motherboards as well!

As for the system slowing down with more memory - I'm guessing it's a cache issue. Don't expect MVP3 motherboards to be able to cache the supported 1GB of RAM, in combination with the L2 cache sizes and Tag RAM chips that will be used on most MVP3 motherboards, expect cacheable memory areas to range …

Folks, does anyone happen to have a SCSI BIOS for NCR / Symbios 53C416? I've found a number of BIOSes for other chips, but this one looks like there was never a BIOS equipped card with it. (I had an idea about reusing those old "scanner" cards for booting off an external SCSI device).

While waiting for the XT-IDE, you should also purchase the IDE-CF adapter from your favourite Chinese seller. It's easier to pull the CF card and shove it into a USB reader than messing with HDD. This one should plug directly into the XT-IDE. I hope you've ordered the XT-IDE with power connector, …

I cannot verify that, but I assume it should take HD floppy and format it to 720kB. Or, you can format the floppy on a regular machine, but then don't forget to cover the hole (upper left corner) to mark it as DD floppy, and use proper command line parameter. Also, some newer USB floppy drives don't …

I've used the second link (http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/misc/ps2cache/) and it was rather painless, it took me just a few hours to mod four SIMMs. If you're nearby (Germany/Europe), I can send you some modified 1MB ones. I'll send you a tool to dump BIOS later, I don't have it at hand. The …

As for the "special" SIMMs needed for Model 30/286, it's relatively simple to mod regular SIMMs to work in PS/2 machine. Trident ISA cards usually work in 8bit machines (I use one of them in Commodore XT) - there are usually jumpers that can configure the card for 8bit support: http://www.vcfed.org/ …

Repaired a "broken" IBM 300PL. The device didn't start, and the root cause turned to be the microswitch popped out of its socket, so that the power button rod couldn't press it 😀 Opened a broken C64 "pedal" power supply and soldered some cold joints.

The quick method I use when sorting out PS/2 memory sticks is: - first, throw away everything that doesn't have "6 pins in a group". The chips on the picture above have 24 pins which means this is either 16MB (single side) or 32MB (double side) SIMM. I don't care about anything with 20 pins only - …

The image is too small and blurry to find out what exactly was done to those SIMMs. I'm guessing this is mod for some sort of not-so-standard computer 😀 I've done something similar to 30pin SIMMs to make them work in IBM PS/2.

It's still morning so nothing yet, but yesterday I've fixed an 386SX board that couldn't recognize any keyboard (trace ate up by leaked battery) and recapped one spare Mac IIcx board. Today, I'm planning on testing (and modding if necessary) some memory in my PS/2 55SX.

Folks, does someone accidentally have a backup copy of BIOS for this machine? I'm getting BIOS checksum error on boot and boot process stops, so I'm guessing it's just single bit flipped somewhere after all those years 😀 Thanks!