Congrats! 😁 Just remember, if it were easy, it wouldn't be so rewarding.

Oh yes, I forgot a picture of the system so far. I decided it needed a little more life to it. Believe it or not, I do intend to cable manage it at some point and get everything routed nice and neat, once it's more finalized. If that ever happens.

The first thing you probably noticed is that the VGA card has no bracket. It came with one, but it's oddly shaped and seems to have been bent out of shape then back into shape, and doesn't quite fit in the case. I intend to try 3d-printing a new one that fits better, so we will see how that goes.

SirNickity wrote:

Congrats! 😁 Just remember, if it were easy, it wouldn't be so rewarding.

Yes... we all tell ourselves that...

novasilisko wrote:

The first thing you probably noticed is that the VGA card has no bracket.

Nope, the first thing I noticed is the absolutely delightful plastic plant that is living in your case. Please promise to never remove it. 🤣

You should put some astroturf in there for good measure.

dkarguth wrote:

novasilisko wrote:

The first thing you probably noticed is that the VGA card has no bracket.

Nope, the first thing I noticed is the absolutely delightful plastic plant that is living in your case. Please promise to never remove it. 🤣

I don't believe I could even if I wanted to (which I don't intend to). I originally did intend it to be temporary, but I discovered that double-sided tape REALLY likes to bond to:

- Computer cases
- Aquarium plants

Anonymous Coward wrote:

You should put some astroturf in there for good measure.

Honestly, looking at this I've had some terrible ideas about making some sort of detailed diorama featuring a functioning computer embedded (maybe not literally embedded) in it. Some HO scale science lab or a lunar archaeological team excavating a 486. Why yes, I do question the rationality of my own motivations sometimes.

Please tell me your case has a transparent side panel so you will be able to see the plant when it's finished. That would make my day. Also, it wouldn't be a real PC build if you didn't add RGB lighting to the plant. I should design an ISA RGB lighting controller just for kicks and giggles when I'm bored some weekend.

Keep up the good work!

dkarguth wrote:

Please tell me your case has a transparent side panel so you will be able to see the plant when it's finished. That would make my day. Also, it wouldn't be a real PC build if you didn't add RGB lighting to the plant. I should design an ISA RGB lighting controller just for kicks and giggles when I'm bored some weekend.

Keep up the good work!

I've actually done some thought on a lighting controller that would interface with serial using a microcontroller (just something quick and dirty using arduino libs and some level shifters, send it a message like "PULSE 5 255,128,96") so it can operate independently after you tell it what it should be doing. But an ISA interface version of the same thing would be wonderfully silly.

I've done some cable management since the last picture but still want to make a few other changes before another portrait session. Might try printing the new VGA card bracket, although I really need to give my printer some TLC... I think I've got some rollers too tight because it sounds a bit uncomfortable when moving in certain ways.

This is a really fun build thread I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do next.

Behold, cable management! It's... an improvement!

Once I work out whether or not the floppy controller on this card works (and accordingly, whether or not I need to swap it out), I think I'm going to connect the drive module with an extension cable, then mount it to some sort of 3d-printed outrigger sticking out from the card, so it isn't awkwardly protruding vertically and blocking two additional slots...

I've been having some more bad ideas. After the hassle with the floppy drive (which I still can't pin down), I've been leaning toward getting one of those USB to floppy emulators instead. But that leaves me with a problem - what if I have any floppy disks I want to actually use?

Meanwhile, I discovered the following device on ebay:

(10/10 classiest watermark 2019 award)

It's basically a USB to floppy adapter, without the drive. You can attach it to any drive and it will be treated as a USB device. Naturally, that had me intrigued, so I decided to order one. Only available from china though, so I'm still waiting on it.

Here comes the bad idea.

I can take this device, plug it into a known working floppy drive, insert that drive into my modern PC with the internal USB header, and use that to make disk images of all the floppy disks I want. Then I can feed those images to my 386 with a floppy emulator. And there's nothing stopping me from swapping the real drive over to the 386 for the real experience, or if there's any compatibility issues, which you can't do with one any of the random external floppy drives out there (like the one I have, which is already making concerning swishing noises when reading any disk)

The only sticking point (apart from whether or not the adapter even works) is connecting it internally, but there are plenty of little adapters that can connect from an internal USB 2.0 header to a USB-A receptacle, and I in fact have one already, in the form of an expansion slot insert with two USB ports. I can just unscrew the bracket and tie up the cable slack and plug the drive in internally that way.

I do hope this works. Having a 2017 spec PC with a working floppy drive is a stupid, delightful dream.

What I really wonder is if that device would work with a 5.25" drive with an adapter. I haven't been able to find a USB 5.25 inch floppy drive yet.

dkarguth wrote:

What I really wonder is if that device would work with a 5.25" drive with an adapter. I haven't been able to find a USB 5.25 inch floppy drive yet.

If I can get my hands on one and an adapter for 5.25" from a 34-pin connector, I'm definitely gonna try that. I also want to try to dissect that off-the-shelf USB floppy drive I mentioned and see if there's any sort of recognizable connection inside... even if it's some weird type of connector, I can't help but wonder if it's using the same interface, and accordingly, if the USB adapter module could be extracted from it.

I've got a 386 DX 40 board that looks similar to this, but it has a soldered 386 DX 40 and slight differences. I'll post pictures when I can.

from the looks of it, you should be able to just attach a double-length dual row header and just connect a normal floppy cable on there. I may be wrong there however, so maybe not. I guess you'd just have to match up pin 1 on everything and then you'd have the correct adapter. I doubt the thing would recognize the 5.25" drive, though, as it is probably built as cheaply with as little features as possible.

dkarguth wrote:

from the looks of it, you should be able to just attach a double-length dual row header and just connect a normal floppy cable on there. I may be wrong there however, so maybe not. I guess you'd just have to match up pin 1 on everything and then you'd have the correct adapter. I doubt the thing would recognize the 5.25" drive, though, as it is probably built as cheaply with as little features as possible.

Yeah... I'm not holding out hope, but I definitely aim to find out.

AFAIK, there's no way for a floppy controller to identify the type of drive, and I would imagine USB adapters would need to know what kind of drive it is to pass that on to the OS. Ordinarily you would provide that detail at the BIOS setup screen, but that doesn't apply when attaching via USB. I.e., my barely-educated guess is that it is hard-coded to identify itself as a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive, and unless there's a way to tell it otherwise (jumper, solder pad, etc.), it would probably not (properly) support a 5.25" 1.2MB drive.

I have a USB external drive that I disassembled once. It does not use the standard floppy interface internally -- not even a common laptop floppy ribbon (since it's a small form factor drive). It's clearly designed from the get-go to be a USB drive. This does have one benefit, though: It's fast. 2x the speed of a normal floppy drive. Since this speed is set by both the disk RPM and the controller data link speed, you can't just turbo a standard drive. It has to be an all-in-one drive + controller that is designed to run at a higher / different speed.

A minor update but an update nonetheless - a new acquisition that will certainly (eventually) see some use...

Well that's curious. I didn't see any DIP-24 slots on your motherboard.

And some other bits. This time, a prototype 8-bit ISA breakout board for making custom cards if so desired, without needing a whole card-sized PCB. Can just link it to some breadboards out of the machine or whatever.

In this case, I am giving serious, dangerous thought to the idea of constructing my own Adlib-compatible sound card. Hence the impulse-purchased YM3812.

Having an adlib clone PCB printed would probably not have been that much more expensive.. Of course, if that's the kind of project you want to undertake, by all means.