Nice, I'll have to try something like that at some point (though I have no roland card or real GuS). What's the resource management like, is it using the original software or something like unisound?
I bought an untested NEC Versa V/50 laptop the other week which had essentially destroyed its hinge, not plural, it only has a right hinge, the left just holds it in place:
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It has no power supply which was stated in the auction, but it didn't state that no hard drive was included. This NEC needs a special caddy and the pinout is unknown, there are a couple of them on ebay but they cost 5x what I paid for this computer, no thanks.
The power supply part is relatively easy - I got an NEC Versa 4000C recently too and in the service manual for that it's got the dock pinout listed.
Ground was easy to find, just see which pin beeps against a port's metal shield. To find positive I ran a multimeter in beep mode across the dock pins. In the service manual the pins it beeped with match up where it's got "12v-sys" compared to "12v-charge" on the other possible pin.
Cut up some LCD inverter plugs since they're a good fit for this size of pin and decently conductive, jammed them in and now I have a PSU adapter:
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To repair the hinge / LCD panel corner, which had broken up into 5 pieces and destroyed every screw mount; thankfully enough plastic was still attached that it could be repaired by:
- Superglue the parts in the way they fit best
- Melt some metal pins / staples into the plastic with a soldering iron (with ventilation, heating superglue makes bad fumes). Did this on front & back
- Using a wedge tip on the soldering iron, melted some shapes into the flat areas on the inside, all around the broken bits. My thinking is that this gives much more texture for epoxy to grip onto.
- Taped off where epoxy shouldn't go, then poured on epoxy to the inside of the LCD panel corner and installed the LCD hinge bits
- Put some tape over the clip corner of the front facia and installed that so the epoxy would set around where that clip goes and the display still goes together nicely later
- For where the hinge attaches to the top case I first got some longer screws (this laptop uses m3) and put some extra threaded inserts onto the longer screw, then melted that all into where the hinge plate used to screw into
- Taped off and blutack/taped an area for epoxy go in the hinge area of the top case, then poured in epoxy around where the screws were
- Once that had partially hardened I took the screws out and flattened the area where the hinge plate screws to
- There was one standoff for the topcase that had sheared off where the top surface was accessible and not part of the palm-rest, so I melted in a threaded insert to that post. Then melted a hole through the top-case where that mounts and put in a countersunk screw
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Creepingnet's post on VCF made me aware that the hinge is so tight that it probably destroyed that plastic, so I loosened the hinge off slightly with some pliers and washed out the original grease stuff with some PTFE lubricant. It's a little floppy but the plastic now feels decently solid so it's operable and the screen works okay in this state.
I discovered that it could boot and the screen was good, but what to do with no fixed disk? It has an NEC floppy drive which is a really early and nice direct-drive floppy, no bad belts! And the system can boot off that, so I've set up DOS 6.22 with PCMCIA services on a floppy disk and I have a PCMCIA ATA flash card that is otherwise not used:
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This method actually works surprisingly well, DOS refuses to install on it through the installer - but Windows 3.1 will happily install onto whatever drive you point it to. It very likely would not be able to run Windows 95 though.
There's still one free PCMCIA slot so getting files on and off is easy, so I'm not sure I'll actually bother trying to get the hard drive caddy for it.
It can run Windows 3.11, and even ran DOOM but it has no soundcard (yet??) and with only 4mb of RAM, DooM must've been running from the Windows swap-file 😀
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One problem I do have is that the screen is sometimes flickering quite badly and that doesn't seem to be the backlight, but seems to change depending on what the computer's running, it's bad in DOS but looks fine in Windows. Weird, I wonder if it's capacitor related?