Skyscraper wrote:timb.us wrote:"
Whoops, you’re right! It’s the 493, not 423. I guess I can’t see either!
By the way, do you mind if I mirror your MR BIOS dumps on my site? I credited you in the text files that accompany the ROMs, but I just wanted to make sure it was OK with you first.
It's fine. 😀
Awesome, they’re up on my site! http://retro.timb.us/ROMs/BIOS/
(I’m currently in the process of uploading about 5GB worth of additional retro stuff I’ve collected over the years, including a large number of ROMs, various driver packages, hundreds of datasheets and most importantly the entire Simtel MS-DOS collection.)
In other news, hopefully I can finally get those Speedsys benchmarks done tonight. I’ve spent the past two nights trying to get the floppy drive working. It was an ordeal, to say the least. Apparently, the original floppy that came with this machine has developed an intermittent issue where it’s not quite stepping to the correct tracks some of the time.
At first I thought it was the floppy cable, so I spent some time rigging up a new one (I make custom round floppy cables by peeling the ribbon cable up into 17 groups of two wires then put them in silicone tubing, to make them easily routable in the tight spaces of this lunchbox machine; unfortunately I can’t just buy off the shelf round floppy cables since I needed one with a 5.25” connector in the drive B position).
That didn’t fix the issue, so I tried a drive I pulled from an old PIII Celeron machine that’s been sitting in storage for years. After pulling it apart to clean all the dust out and reassembling it, I found it didn’t work at all. Not only did it not work, it ruined several floppy disks (which led to more time wasted when I tried booting from those disks in a drive that turned out to work).
So I tried yet *another* drive that’s been in storage for years and it too turned out to be bad. Finally I found a brand new NEC drive (I’d purchased about two years ago and never used) that actually worked! Unfortunately it has a black faceplate, so I’m still going to need to buy a beige/white drive off eBay, but this’ll do for now. (What I really want is one of those Teac FD-505 5.25”/3.5” combo drives, which would free up a drive bay, I just need to find one at a reasonable price.)
Once I got the floppy working I set about installing MS-DOS and DR-DOS, only to run into an issue where they wouldn’t boot after installation (it just hung with a white screen; no “Starting MS-DOS”, nothing). I finally got it working by doing a format /u /s on each partition from the respective install disks. Letting the installers SYS the partitions didn’t work (for any OS, including FreeDOS). There were also some strange MBR issues going on.
Edit: I ended up low level formatting the drive and starting from scratch. Everything appears to be working now!
Old hardware is so much fun! 🤣
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (E.g., Cheez Whiz, RF, Hot Dogs)