SquallStrife wrote:

It will be in the full write up, but there's a very specific difference in the original IBM 5150 that necessitates the translati […]
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kithylin wrote:

That seems like an awful lot of effort for something unnecessary to me.... I worked with a friend at his house this past summer 2015 on something similar, getting CF-IDE adapters to work and boot in a 8086 and 286 systems. All we had to do was just use older small CF cards, like 64-512 MB, and just google their C/H/S parameters and then enter em in bios and they worked flawlessly with no modifications to an old ISA IDE adapter, no soldering. Just worked right off and booted normally.

Might be a different story with IBM though, we were using generic PC clone motherboards.

It will be in the full write up, but there's a very specific difference in the original IBM 5150 that necessitates the translation: On the 5150, the I/O range 000-1FF is system reserved, and normal IDE adaptors reside at 1F0/3F0. On the PC/XT 5160 (and all other clones henceforth), the reserved range is reduced to 000-0FF. Thus, if I was using an XT or higher, then simply installing the XTIDE Universal BIOS and connecting the CF card to an unmodified IDE card would be sufficient.

My soldering transposes the card's expected I/O range to 300/308, making it 5150-friendly.

Edit: Also, INT 13h services are provided by XT-IDE Universal BIOS in this system, which auto-detects the drive geometry. 5150 BIOS has no fixed disk support.

Ahhhhh...! I've never laid my paws on -any- IBM hardware myself, so I had no idea about the 5150's "quirks".

Played Doom-1 with my 7 year old daughter. Selected next hardest difficult and typed in "IDKFA" and "IDDQD", and let her go postal on those monster's.
When she killed the first couple of monsters she said: "I will slap him in the face, so his mother will cry" and 5 minutes later, my daughter said: "She will seriously cry, oh yes, she will"

I HAVE A GANGSTA DAUGHTER.... She has a cool dark humor. So metal, so dark..... 😁 🤣

Edit:
The machine that was used, was a 5x86-133 on a FIC 486 VIP IO, 8mb ram, CL-Gfx and SB16-CT:2910.
I saw the same joy I had with this kind of shit, back in 1993. What a day.... She had the same experience.
Another joy of collecting old hardware, when ones children can have the same blast as one had back then.

Bringing them up early, I see... 🤣 🤣

Yeah... She's truly my daughter. When she was 6 months old, I used to amuse her by headbanging to metal. 😀
That made her laugh every time. 🤣

Successfully tested a CM-32L I bought in DK (of all places) in September.

Din datter er flink! 😀

@brostenen; Ah, now this is what I call parenting. Much better than neglecting your child to play crappy iPhone stuff, you instead spend time with them and teach them a new craft. Well done.

brostenen wrote:

Yeah... She's truly my daughter. When she was 6 months old, I used to amuse her by headbanging to metal. 😀
That made her laugh every time. 🤣

I'll be sure to keep that in mind whenever I have kids... 😉

While I am passing through here;

KCom provide that authentic retro feel to daily internet usage at the discount price of £49.99 a month. Suppose when you're the only ISP in town you can get away with not implementing a sufficient backbone for your network, OFCOM don't care.

HighTreason wrote:

@brostenen; Ah, now this is what I call parenting. Much better than neglecting your child to play crappy iPhone stuff, you instead spend time with them and teach them a new craft. Well done.

True. True... Thanks 😀
Yeah... My son and I even played DynaBlaster together. He is 5 years old. Now... I used the arrow keys and he placed the bombs.
Let me just say, that he was like totally happy with placing as many bombs as possible. Resulting in massive "suicide" every 2 minutes. (max)
Was fun though, was fun. My daughter played DB too. Well... She likes the gameplay in Doom better, yet likes the DB music better.

Sutekh94 wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Yeah... She's truly my daughter. When she was 6 months old, I used to amuse her by headbanging to metal. 😀
That made her laugh every time. 🤣

I'll be sure to keep that in mind whenever I have kids... 😉

And when the child is old enough to hold up it's head, then throw it straight up in the air, as high as you dare and catch the child again.
Small babies (6/7/8 month's old) love that shit, and it helps them know their body better by getting these kind of body sensations.
And yeah.... Hold them up side down in one leg for a really short time and move them slowly (I mean it. SLOWLY) around. They love that shit too.
Just remember that you need to start small, and as young as possible, else they get afraid. It's all about timing and the right age.

Put Windows XP on a notebook I wasn't using. No XP drivers from Compaq, it's a small notebook with a basic AMD E-300 APU, but the drivers from Realtek (Ethernet, Audio and card reader), RaLink (wireless) worked well. The graphics and chipset driver was harder to find, but I got lucky with drivers from a Lenovo machine.

I wanted this machine for tasks such as running my flash programmer or various other software that doesn't want to work under Windows 10 anymore.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Put Windows XP on a notebook I wasn't using. No XP drivers from Compaq, it's a small notebook with a basic AMD E-300 APU, but the drivers from Realtek (Ethernet, Audio and card reader), RaLink (wireless) worked well. The graphics and chipset driver was harder to find, but I got lucky with drivers from a Lenovo machine.

Ya know, usually for driver finding I do a detailed Internet search (I'm quite good at that as are most VOGONS veterans) but on a system I didn't care too much about the other day, in order to save time I decided to try some of those spammy "driver detective" apps. While I wouldn't recommend them per se, the best experiences I found were with IOBit Driver Booster and Slimware Utilities SlimDrivers (both actually found and downloaded driver updates and didn't charge for the privilege). Both should work on XP or higher for sure. Also both utilities seemed to uninstall relatively cleanly, though I used Revo Uninstaller Pro to monitor them, they left only a few bits and pieces behind. Also, both scanned clean with Avast. Your mileage may vary.

Nice, didn't know such tools existed 😁

Will check them out for sure, thanks.

I pulled one of my old untested 386 boards today. Plugged in the power supply, keyboard, and speaker and turned it on...NOTHING. Hmm...i hate dead equipment. I looked over everything, and there was no beeps, etc. I had a spare 386DX bios next to me and thought just for the hell of it I'd swap BIOS just to see if I could at least get a beep or two. BEEPS! It was somewhat alive, though having issues. I looked online for jumper configs and there was a jumper missing that enabled the SRAM cache. I plugged in the old BIOS and put on the jumper and boots up fine!

One 386DX motherboard saved from the scrap heap!

Oh, and I also got a 170mb SCSI drive for my MAC SE. Plugged that in and the things works perfectly. My apple collection is building....

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Nice, didn't know such tools existed 😁

Will check them out for sure, thanks.

Yep. Keep in mind they can still detect the wrong things or provide the wrong drivers, or the automation of installation go screwy, but if you have a clue, you should be able to figure those out. Stuff really sensitive - like integrated laptop HD audio - I probably wouldn't install drivers this way. 😉 Still, lemme know how you make out sometime. For laughs, try imaging your laptop you did the other day for backup, then putting the flat load of XP plus network drivers back on, and then let one of these utilities go to town and see what happens, and compare to the manual install later. 😀

Stiletto wrote:

Still, lemme know how you make out sometime. For laughs, try imaging your laptop you did the other day for backup, then putting the flat load of XP plus network drivers back on, and then let one of these utilities go to town and see what happens, and compare to the manual install later. 😀

I'm doing just that!

I have a little USB WLAN dongle with Realtek chip that I will use to connect initially. I load that driver from a USB and I got these two programs on that same USB. I think the AMD APU environment might be more of a challenge that a standard Intel machine 😀

EDIT: Holy xxxx. I just finished testing Driver Booster and it worked flawlessly. All the unknown devices got correctly identified and drivers installed. Even the card reader 😀 Graphics driver too, but without the AMD control centre.

I'll test Slim Drivers now.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I'm doing just that! […]
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Stiletto wrote:

Still, lemme know how you make out sometime. For laughs, try imaging your laptop you did the other day for backup, then putting the flat load of XP plus network drivers back on, and then let one of these utilities go to town and see what happens, and compare to the manual install later. 😀

I'm doing just that!

I have a little USB WLAN dongle with Realtek chip that I will use to connect initially. I load that driver from a USB and I got these two programs on that same USB. I think the AMD APU environment might be more of a challenge that a standard Intel machine 😀

EDIT: Holy xxxx. I just finished testing Driver Booster and it worked flawlessly. All the unknown devices got correctly identified and drivers installed. Even the card reader 😀 Graphics driver too, but without the AMD control centre.

I'll test Slim Drivers now.

Way cool.

Back in the day (1999-2000, followed by 2003-2008) I worked for a local mom&pop computer repair chain. Started in sales, and switched into service. Definitely had a ton of war stories that by now I've mostly forgotten. Still, around 2006 or so I started using things like DriverAgent and Driver Detective (who've both been bought and sold to other companies and seen updates and branding changes since then). Partly due to trying to save time, partly because I'm one of those anal techs who live to install bleeding-edge driver versions, BSODs be damned. And every once in a while someone would bring in some really obscure device and say "get this installed in Windows XP please", so it helped there too. 😉

But usually those products required you to PAY to get your downloads. Not much usually ($30-50/yr), so it was still worth it. But then IOBit and Slimware started up and was sorta offering what the other companies were doing for free. There might be other free ones out there, but most of their other competitors are pay. Aaaand that's about all I know on the matter, sorry to sound like a commercial. Like i said, with tools like these you'll sometimes see false positives in detection or the installation process for the drivers may actually be more complex, YMMV.

It might make for a fun video: "let's see how long it takes me to find the drivers for this manually" versus "now let's let this tool do the work" but it might come off as a commercial without testing a few competitors (Windows Update on newer OS's than XP, etc.), see what versions they download for you, etc. I'd always meant to get around to doing that but never found the time. Laptops of course are of an additional squirrelly nature with OEM-modified driver packs so that's an additional challenge there, I'd trust tools like these more for desktop HW than for laptops but it's always worth a shot.

Well that was quite interesting actually.

On the Compaq with E-300 processor this is what I found.

Driver Booster is much faster. It seems to "only" load the drivers, like you would through device manager > update drivers. It also installs drivers silently in the background. SlimDrivers takes very long for each driver to download. The installers are just like as if you downloaded the full driver package and run Setup. You get to see all the UI screens and need to confirm it all.

Driver Booster got all drivers, but no Catalyst Control Centre. SlimDriver got the CCC, but you have to install .Net manually. Also the Ethernet card ended up not working. When running Driver Booster after SlimDriver, it still found a lot more drivers.

So from the performance point of view I like Driver Booster more. It is much more "in your face" regarding getting the full version and pops up with offers when you remove it and things like that.

I was actually ready to buy it, but then looked at the licence, and all you get is a 1 year licence for 3 PCs. They don't even offer a site licence or something like that. I have to check if it's for 3 PCs at a time, that would work. And if there is an activation limit.

I'd like the full version as it can do all drivers in one hit. That's the kind of thing that would save time for my projects. It can even auto boot, auto start and just keep doing that until all drivers are up to date. I haven't tried anything older yet, like a Pentium 4.

I'd rather install the drivers myself. Call me weird, but hunting drivers, manually trying different versions and setting things up is kindda fun. I hate one-click solutions - its like playing Final Fantasy XIII.