I went on one of my household hunts again... with getting the LS-120, the heft and length of it, stirred a memory of another floppy shaped drive matching those parameters, so I went looking for that. Also wanted to find the dimly remembered piece of maybe superdrive media I thought was around somewhere. What I found so far was zilch on the media front, and the floppy shaped, longer, heavier floppy drive, turned out to be... a floppy drive, just a regular 1.44 Samsung... IDK why they overbuilt them, think it was quite a late one too.

Checked out a nice little P60 (No FDiv bug) box on eBay, the price is a bit steep but the seller is right that these little boxes have a curious setup.

CPU Board

Motherboard Overview

The Processor and what looks to be cache are on a riser board, the price is 300 AUD for the system and its a bit high but its a unique little box and I wonder if I could slap a P100 on there or a Pentium Overdrive though Im not sure what overdrives were socket 5.

Call me curious, with 5 ISA and 3 PCI, it would make a nice little DOS box and I am super curios about the CPU card setup and just what it can handle CPU wise.

Should be a socket 4 if it's a P60.. there was an overdrive though.

My P60 had the fdiv bug, but oddly Win95 seems super stable on it.... wait a sec.... is that why? Dev boxes were fdiv bugged? 🤣

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-27, 05:58:

Should be a socket 4 if it's a P60.. there was an overdrive though.

My P60 had the fdiv bug, but oddly Win95 seems super stable on it.... wait a sec.... is that why? Dev boxes were fdiv bugged? 🤣

hmmm .. so that would be the PODP5V133 which is the 133 model .. or would the PODP5V120 model be better to match the 60mhz FSB ?

HWiNFO (for Windows or DOS) can quickly tell you if there are any common errata like the fdiv bug.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-27, 07:05:

HWiNFO (for Windows or DOS) can quickly tell you if there are any common errata like the fdiv bug.

Seller has confirmed these boxes dont have that bug, he said they would actually be more collectable if they did.

not sure why.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-27, 07:05:

HWiNFO (for Windows or DOS) can quickly tell you if there are any common errata like the fdiv bug.

Also windows calc counts wrong =)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

Got 2 60MHz with the bug.
First one I got accidentally, the other i found lurking in a pile of old CPU's I found on a local auction site.

Decided to recreate MS-DOS 6.22 labels from Scratch as the ones I found were really not that great.

Those turned out great. Are those just stickers sent through a regular laser printer?

Yes some Avery L7666 labels, a laser printer and fews hours on Photoshop 😊

Got the Portable 286 almost going all the way.

Installed a new foam and foil pad for the enter key and had to glue the enter key in place as a temporary measure until I source a new one.

Got the XT-CF installed (needs a refresh for the OS and that's getting close), Snark Barker 1.5 without the thumb wheel since that got misplaced somehow, and moved the floppy/serial/parallel card to a different location so the front LED that the old Miniscribe was connected to would be reachable for the XT-CF adapter.

It still needs a new battery for the time and date, yet the settings retain without issues (well, I'll wait 24 hours to go by that theory).

NyLan wrote on 2022-02-27, 22:45:

Decided to recreate MS-DOS 6.22 labels from Scratch as the ones I found were really not that great.

2022-02-27 23.33.45.jpg
2022-02-27 23.32.54.jpg

I need to do this for MS-DOS 6.2 - do you have label images anywhere? How did you manage to do these? 🙁

Found a box full of PC Magazine cd/dvds .. must be a couple hundred in there mostly from PC mags from 1995 - 2008, majority look to be from 99 - 02, going to take a while to filter through them and buff scratches out so I can read them in my P3.

Lots of utilities, games and importantly drivers from the era.

Seems to be a lot of free games in there too and software, IIRC I can buff scratches out with brasso, or I might invest in a CD/DVD buffing unit, these are worth saving, especially the DVD with thousands of games and utilities on them.

Bunch of Night Owl best of cds in there, looks like Ill need a DOS machine too .. doubt any of this DOS shareware will work on a P3 XP build 🤣.

I've never failed to read a disc due to scratches on the data side. But I've lost a lot of discs due to damage to the label and the reflective later beneath it.

On a similar note, I've also lost a lot of burned discs due to whatever material inside decomposing. I treat all burned discs as volatile now and unsuitable for archival purposes. From what I understand, this isn't a pertinent for DVD-RAM, but I've never owned any.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-28, 09:07:

I've never failed to read a disc due to scratches on the data side. But I've lost a lot of discs due to damage to the label and the reflective later beneath it.

On a similar note, I've also lost a lot of burned discs due to whatever material inside decomposing. I treat all burned discs as volatile now and unsuitable for archival purposes. From what I understand, this isn't a pertinent for DVD-RAM, but I've never owned any.

Yeah I found a few spindles of backup DVDs...I figure they had been in storage for about 15 years and pretty much every spindle had developed disc Rot, looks a little like rust at the edges but all the dye media has decomposed and either flaked off he disc or turned interesting shades of colour.

Looking at the names of the discs I wonder what a younger me was doing backing up all this data .. I never used any of it again.

I really hope I can rescue some of the worst PC mag discs, I want to grab the drivers and such off them.

Traced out a memory circuit for my MBC-775, hoping that someone will be able to tell me what to connect in order to get 640k to work on it.

Did another Label for Windows 98 SE Boot disk 😀

Comparison between orignal and mine :

Original :

Mine :

appiah4 wrote on 2022-02-28, 05:55:

NyLan wrote on 2022-02-27, 22:45:

Decided to recreate MS-DOS 6.22 labels from Scratch as the ones I found were really not that great.

2022-02-27 23.33.45.jpg
2022-02-27 23.32.54.jpg

I need to do this for MS-DOS 6.2 - do you have label images anywhere? How did you manage to do these? 🙁

For some reason Microsoft changed his design from time to time. I even have some with weird Microsoft logo (France) or totally different fonts (Germany)
I've found very few example of 6.2 version but I modified mine for MS-DOS 6.2 and will send you files in PM

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-28, 09:14:

Yeah I found a few spindles of backup DVDs...I figure they had been in storage for about 15 years and pretty much every spindle […]
Show full quote

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-28, 09:07:

I've never failed to read a disc due to scratches on the data side. But I've lost a lot of discs due to damage to the label and the reflective later beneath it.

On a similar note, I've also lost a lot of burned discs due to whatever material inside decomposing. I treat all burned discs as volatile now and unsuitable for archival purposes. From what I understand, this isn't a pertinent for DVD-RAM, but I've never owned any.

Yeah I found a few spindles of backup DVDs...I figure they had been in storage for about 15 years and pretty much every spindle had developed disc Rot, looks a little like rust at the edges but all the dye media has decomposed and either flaked off he disc or turned interesting shades of colour.

Looking at the names of the discs I wonder what a younger me was doing backing up all this data .. I never used any of it again.

I really hope I can rescue some of the worst PC mag discs, I want to grab the drivers and such off them.

M-disks are suitable for archival purposes as they have a crazy long shelf life after they are burned I think there rated for 1000 years or something like that. For the disk scratches I've had excellent success with using the Disk Doctor motorized unit. I've probably saved over 100 CD/DVDs and some I honestly thought were completely lost but I've yet to have a disk it wasn't able to restore.

(fingers crossed) - I think my RetroPie is finally starting to shape up. Figured out the Intellivision emulator last night (strange, does not use Libretto or RetroArch) and got that dialed in, still scraping a heap of games a co-worker gave me, and I just added NEC PC Engine to the list, a console I've never played (yes I'm aware it's TurboGrafix 16), man did I miss out, especially all the wacky japanese releases with low-brow humor like Kato Chan and Ken Chan and that really weird one with the budda guy boss where you fly around shooting bathroom stuff - 🤣. Also Bonk rocks....

Dangit, now I'm going to want to add a PC-Engine to my already overloaded 89' Mitsubishi.

NyLan wrote on 2022-02-28, 12:40:

I've found very few example of 6.2 version but I modified mine for MS-DOS 6.2 and will send you files in PM

Could you send me a copy for 6.2 as well please?