TurnedToast wrote on 2020-02-11, 18:03:

Today I am realizing I need a serial mouse for my DOS computer and then also realizing how annoying it would be to have multiple peripheral sets for multiple computers. Time for KVM research!

Let me save you some time! The Belkin Omniview Pro will translate PS/2 input to serial. If you use a USB mouse that also natively translates into PS/2 mode, you will likely need to power it externally. I've done this to run a Microsoft Intellimouse on a Tandy 1000. It's a great feeling!

Fixed a bad Panasonic JU-475-4 5.25" 1.2Mb floppy drive. Manufacture date on the chips on the board is late 1988 though think the drive is a year newer. Also worked on a Dual Pentium board from my spare NEC, it has some issues still not totally resolved.

Was the alignment off on the FDD? Looks nice and clean. Fabulous job on the floppy drive repair.

Broke my Toshiba 3330V laptop while trying to reset boot/bios password with LPT/Parallel port device 🙁

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WebSYPUN3fo (English version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQEqXIY7P0I (Russian version)

Cleaned and tested two of my Zip drives only to find that apparently all my Zip100 disks are no longer working...

derSammler wrote on 2020-02-12, 09:33:

Cleaned and tested two of my Zip drives only to find that apparently all my Zip100 disks are no longer working...

I keep my ZIP drives around and/or on builds for cosmetic reasons only..

I remember back in the day I wanted to try out Zip drives, but never had one and never got around to buying one. Over the past few years I've ended up acquiring 2 Zip drives, but I've never actually tested them out so I have absolutely no idea if they even still work.

I had an Iomega Zip Drive. Can’t remember where I left it... it has been decades

I keep finding internal Zip drives. Have a little pile I need to test one day. Don't have a sensible use for them though, so I'd agree with appiah4 that they are mainly of cosmetic interest. An external drive can be useful for file transfer, but is hardly more practical than CF cards or a Gotek.

I actually want to install one of my zip drives into my Dell Dimension XPS D333 - it apparently came with one, but I can't. The bottom floppy drive slot requires some kind of rail mechanism or something of the kind to install a floppy there, so I had to install the floppy where the ZIP drive normally would be. I have no idea what the case I have is lacking, I can't find good detailed interior shots of the Dell Dimension XPS series..

This is the best I can find, and I need whatever it is that is holding the floppy drive secure in that plastic slot, but I have no idea what it is or how I can juryrig something..

EDIT: Funnily enough maybe the floppy drive somehow sits there without any retaining mechanism? 😒

Strange enough, there are not many people on the un-official vogons IRC channel. 🙁 🙁

brostenen wrote on 2020-02-12, 19:01:

Strange enough, there are not many people on the un-official vogons IRC channel. 🙁 🙁

I've been trying to go there some weeks ago, but I forgot to continue due to work constraints. I'll try to be more active there starting this week

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-02-12, 02:54:

Was the alignment off on the FDD? Looks nice and clean. Fabulous job on the floppy drive repair.

It was the internal cable connectors (there are five counting front LED), they had some film that ISO alc cleaned up well. Think it was mostly the head and stepper motor ones that caused seek errors. Lubed it and let it doing a dozen seeks (set bios to floppy seek) to get the parts moving freely after a few (5+) years in storage then finally booted off a 1.2mb dos 6 floppy and it works great again. Cleaned it best I could. It has one of those odd tan bezels, not white or beige but a true tan color.

fixed a 25 year old floppy with diskfix and was able to copy an old shareware wolf3d to the hardrive.
It was from back when you could edit and add your own gifs to the shareware version ,so it was all new levels with adult pictures as the wallpaper.(original author unknown)
Also got my infinity machine working with pci sound card.The emm386 needed for the sblive was killing the search function in i.m.I had to add novcpi after the noems in the emm386 line.
I have to scan all new tables but at least it works now.

Zip drive? My D600 still has its mediabay Zip drive, and works perfectly. I actually use it as a convenient method of file transfer from my main (with usb powered 250) to this machine.

Otherwise, I just completed this little guy. Very similar in hardware to the D600 and once I get the PCI SCSI controller to play well, it will drive the Polaroid HR6000 film recorder underneath it.

I'll probably build an actual case once all the hardware is working properly. The board is an Epox IP-4MTS2B 5.25" with a Pentium M 735 and a gig of ram.
This is probably not the most ideal and correct way to power it, but it works fine for now.
It's got Nvidia FX5500 PCI as I'm using it as a test bench of sorts. Still need to find out which port is the floppy and what adapter I'd need.

yourepicfailure wrote on 2020-02-13, 03:43:

... Polaroid HR6000 film recorder ...

I had to look this one up; what a wonderfully obsolete piece of kit. 😀
http://w3.marietta.edu/~mcshaffd/macro/pfilmrec.html
"It is usually easier to lug a tray of slides and a slide projector around (and find a place to plug it in) than it is to carry a laptop and a projection unit, plug them (and the mouse) in, untangle all the cords, boot the system, defragment the hard drive, remove the viruses, find the file - you get the picture."

Also, the mediabay zip-drive is cool, never seen that before.

Finally got my 20GB HDD on my 40GB HDD for my ThinkPad R40 successfully after so many trial and errors since Sunday night. I had to use Hiren's Boot CD and run Mini XP, the Partition Wizard Home Edition 7, remove the partition that wasn't working correctly, and copied the partition over from the 20GB HDD to the 40GB HDD with the drive set to primary and MBR, along with resizing to 40GB. After that, I set the partition to active, applied the changes, rebooted, and it booted from the HDD. Runs quicker than before, but was a bit sluggish at times, but after doing some space cleaning and defragmentation, it runs very well.

Got my new S7 pet project to boot with SDRAM instead of EDO which resulted in 16% better memory bandwidth and around 1% better performance. 😁

Played with my new Furia-020 for my Amiga600. It has become quite the beast, my little Amiga600.

brostenen wrote on 2020-02-14, 07:44:

Played with my new Furia-020 for my Amiga600. It has become quite the beast, my little Amiga600.

Furia.jpg

Are you experiencing the CPU clamping issues a lot of users of this card are having?