dukeofurl wrote on 2024-01-20, 20:19:

I've recently unearthed my families old 386/486 (we put in a Cyrix upgrade chip in the 90s) from its multi-decade storage. The c […]
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I've recently unearthed my families old 386/486 (we put in a Cyrix upgrade chip in the 90s) from its multi-decade storage. The case and motherboard indicate they are designs by Standard Computer Corporation. I've been trying to research what else came out of this company and have found surprisingly very very little in terms of info on the web. Having such a generic name as Standard Computer also gets a lot of hits for unrelated information...

I did find this cool advertisement that I think has my pc in it (the 386 on the left)... I wonder what the "hyperdisk disk accelerator" did... I'm kinda interested in learning more about the company, how long it lasted - were they still around by the mid 90s when Pentiums came out? What did their other computers/cases look like? That sort of thing. Will also be making a post in the coming weeks as I try to get it running again, as I'm a bit of a newbie to setting up stuff of this vintage from scratch (the old HDDs stored in here for decades seem to be defunct/corrupted and completely unusable). I was kinda young when we were using this pc, so I mostly used it for playing Apogee/Epic shareware stuff. Towards the end of things, I remember trying to run some 3D stuff like Screamer and Battle Arena Toshinden on it, and needless to say, those were unplayable slideshows on this machine.

Here's the advertisement

And here are a few pics of my computer

Welcome to Vogons 😀

Assume it's the same company that built large mainframes back in the '60s - '70s and beyond. Try searching for Standard Computer Corporation in quotes - you'll get quite a few hits.

I've got the PC in hand now and am working on general clean up before I try to boot it up. Condition seems good but I'd like to get to the area of the motherboard that is beneath the metal tray that contains the PSU and a 5.25 floppy drive. I'm a little stymied on this right now. I've removed every screw holding that tray to other parts of the case... but there are 4 metal parts from this tray that extrude through the rear panel of the case. The top two are like hooks, where the bottom 1 or 2 mms extends below the opening for those two hooks. The bottom two metal parts are just little squares that fit into slots that are exactly their size.

The tray is pretty firmly locked in on the back via these 4 metal extrusions. It seems like the tray would need to lift out in order for the top two "hook" pieces to come out... yet it does not lift our because the bottom two metal parts have no space in their respective openings in the back panel to allow for that. Have gently applied some force and nothing doing. A few pics are attached. Am I missing something obvious or routine?

How large are the "corrupted" hard drives? 486's typically only support 500 or 8GB hard drives so if larger than that the drives may be fine and the PC is at fault
(my 486 recognises 8GB but will hang anything larger than 6GB so it's not a guaranteed rule)

maybe some screws hiding under the floppy drive?
Is the PSU attached to the rails or now loose? maybe you can slide the PSU out the side which will then give access below?
(all just guesses)

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-01-20, 20:19:

I've recently unearthed my families old 386/486

Build like a tank!

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-01-20, 20:19:

(we put in a Cyrix upgrade chip in the 90s)

Cyrix DR2-25/50 was a solid upgrade if cheap. Borderline enough for Doom at 9-12fps. Sometimes back then it was more economical to sell whole 386 motherboard with ram and buy cheapest 486 board with 486SX instead of this Cyrix upgrade.
Were anyone using this computer for CAD work at home? Otherwise you have been scammed back in the day. Someone sold you an FPU, totally useless outside of workstation loads, cost ~$100 and did nothing.

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-01-20, 20:19:

I did find this cool advertisement

Not a fan of bombarding consumers with slogans.
"ATI VGA XL High performance SVGA card with 1MB DRAM. ATI': CODE Technology gives an effective 262,144 colors. "
VGAWonder XL https://minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/AT ... %202.0.pdf
"Color Depth Enhancement (CODE)

Unique to ATI's Windows drivers, CODE allows the viewing of
24-bit images (including TGA. TIFF, PCX, BMP) in 15-bit color
with near photo-realistic accuracy. By displaying up to 262,144
simultaneous colors, CODE effectively eliminates color banding in
640x480 and 800x600 resolutions."

SVGA card with 15bit color support, they just couldnt resist making grand marketing claims 😀

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-01-20, 20:19:

I wonder what the "hyperdisk disk accelerator" did...

https://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/pc/garbo/pc/filelist/INDEX.TXT
spkt465s.zip Speedkit; Hyperdisk disk accelerator v4.65s
https://ia601900.us.archive.org/2/items/swsii/SWSIIS.txt
HYDK430.ZIP 252k Hyper disk, disk cache.
HYDK431.ZIP 254k Hyperdisk v4.31 disk cache -fast- works with Qemm
HYDK432.ZIP 261k Hyperdisk 4.32 (Windows 3.1 compatible)
HYPDK432.ZIP 226k Latest hyperdisk cache program.
HYPER45.ZIP 314k Hyper Disk v4.5 Hyper Disk Cache program *Very Good*
https://bbs.phonenet.au/?page=002-files.xjs&dir=cdno07_028a HYPDK432.ZIP (234K) :

1S P E E D K I T                               BY                      H Y P E R W A R E
2       Welcome to HyperWare's SpeedKit Version 4.32
3The fastest utilities East, West, North and South of the Pecos!
4HYPER286 EXE     HyperDisk for 80286 Extended Memory
5HYPER386 EXE     HyperDisk for 80386 Extended Memory

so a SmartDrive, but from third party. Wouldnt be surprised if they bundled shareware version.

Excellent info and suggestions. No hidden screws under the disk drive but I have yet to try and slide the PSU out. Will give that a shot.

Rasz, no cad work, just programming, windows and games. If the cyrix could give a speed boost for dos games I'm happy enough. I do remember playing doom on the PC, not full speed and not a slideshow but was good enough for the era.

The corrupted hdds I mentioned were the original ones we used with the machine back around 92-94. I think one is 500MB and the other might be 1GB. I was unable to boot with them on this PC when I last booted it up about 8 years ago, and since then I've tested them with a USB to IDE kit on another machine using dmde, which just tells me the drives are full of bad sectors and gives no file list. Though I've heard those kits may not work well with early ide drives, something about the standard not being uniform in the early days, so I'm keeping them around to plug back into this mother board and poke around if I can get the pc going with an alternate drive (going to try compact flash first).

It lives! Sort of... Need to make a boot disc now and pray the floppy drive works.

A couple things happening...

The PC doesn't seem to like my 2GB compact flash. I was hopeful I could just configure and use 250MB of it or whatever other settings the bios has for large HDDs (it allows for manually entering cylinders/heads but I don't know what to put in for this 2GB CF), but when booting up, the system seems to hang with the message "invalid configuration information, run setup program" if I've selected one of the existing HDD templates. It's not frozen as there's a blinking _ after that message, but it doesn't allow me to enter setup or do anything unless I reboot with the CF card itself ejected from its adapter.

With the CF ejected, it will give me a fixed disk controller error since it sees no HDD, but at least I can then get into the bios and change settings. Btw, it seems to be Phoenix Bios 1.01 from 1990/1991. No auto detect feature for HDD, and I guess something this early might not play nice with something that is too large.

I've made a boot disk on a floppy but I can't get it to do much of anything. There are no manual settings in the bios to change boot order or otherwise set to boot from floppy (see screens above for the bios screens and options). Around the time of the fixed disk controller error, the floppy drives will light up and be pinged so maybe the bios looks for a boot disk automatically if/when the HDD fails to initialize, but nevertheless, it does not seem to load anything from my boot disk and I get the message "No boot device available".

Open to ideas, I think my next things to try are:
-buy smaller CF cards to experiment with and see if they don't cause the system to hang
-maybe try loading dos onto one of these smaller CF cards from another PC to try and skip using the boot disk
-disassemble and clean floppy drive in case that might make the boot disk work

If you hit Page down on your 3rd photo does it show boot order?

Although typically during startup the FDD will be read twice. Once to detect the drive (and will ignore any disk inserted) then a second later to attempt to boot off it.
this time you'll hear it spin the disk for a bit while attempting to boot off it. if it cant it'll give up and give the no boot device available error, and not even try the HDD.
(was a very typical support call, is a disk in the drive? remove it and reboot. Thanks, all ok now)

are you able to check the disk in a different PC. boot disks need special formatting and bad sectors can also top a disk from booting.

here are a few HDD settings you could try, but I suspect your going to be limited to 500MB hard drives.
https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/cf_cards.php#oldbios

in which case I recommend using drive overlay software, I use it on my 486 with the same issue and works well
EZ-Drive Dynamic Drive Overlay

Page down/up in the bios brings up another half page of options, mostly geared toward security like setting passwords. Didn't see anything about boot order there.

For the boot disk I downloaded the image for one available at Phil's computer lab. Winimg didn't want to write to my floppy for some reason (I'm doing this on a modern pc with a usb floppy drive), but I was able to format the disk, virtually open up the boot disk img and copy its files over to the disk in explorer if that's good enough. I can verify the files from the image are all on the disk.

Thanks for the links. I wouldn't mind being limited to something like 500MB or 300MB, and I've got a 256MB CF card on the way to give me something else to test with. The current state of things is that my boot disk doesn't seem to do anything and regardless of whether it or the CF are in place, I get the messages below about fixed disk controller failure and no boot device available.

That'll be the problem! simply copying the files to a disk won't work.

Quick google found this, not that I've used it personally but seems to have an exe you can run to create boot disks?
https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/dos.html

Excellent, will give it a shot.

By the way, the PC had two HDDs on one ide cable in its old configuration in storage. I'm repurposing this cable right now but only with the one ide/cf adapter attached. I've tried it with the adapter plugged into each of the two HDD ends of the cable. Could this cable be leading to the fixed disk error if I'm leaving one master/slave end on the cable open and unattached to anything?

I think I have a spare ide cable around, could try swapping that out.

Typically I've found computers don't really care but its always good to have the master HDD in the correct position on the cable.

As long as the HDD/adapter jumper is set for Master and at the end of the cable having an empty middle slave connector is perfectly fine.

Great, I do have it in the right place then. Just dotting the i's as I double check all of my hardware connections. The jumper on the CF is in the correct place for master right? (There are no instructions beyond what's printed on the PCB).

I have had a significant breakthrough but have ultimately wound up at the same result with a nonbootable CF.

-I acquired a 5.25 floppy boot disk for dos 6.22. This actually worked and I can readily get to the dos prompt from the disk!
-I ran fdisk to create a new partition
-I ran fdisk/mbr
-I ran format/s to format the CF
-I copied over various other files, utilities and drivers from the boot disk to the CF

After getting to the dos prompt with the boot disk I can navigate over to the C drive and see the files I've copied over on the CF with dir, but if I try to run any of them I get the message "not ready reading drive C". At the end of the day, if I go to boot the PC, it will not boot from the CF and it gives me the same errors I was getting earlier "invalid configuration information - run setup" followed by "fixed disk controller failure".

If I put the CF into a USB reader on my modem PC, it no longer appears in explorer and disk management says the drive is in RAW format and must be formatted to be used. There goes my hope of easily dragging and dropping dos games and utilities onto the CF maybe.

I have tried using both a 2GB CF and a 256MB CF and have received the same results. Very much open to suggestions!

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-02-27, 02:11:

I have had a significant breakthrough but have ultimately wound up at the same result with a nonbootable CF.

What you describe seems like DOS, or BIOS, is seeing different CHS configuration to what is actually supported by the card. So you can see the files since FAT structures reside on lower cylinders (with head translation it can all fit on cylinder 0) but the actual data ends up written to other parts of the HDD and corrupted.

Did you try setting 1024 cylinders / 16 heads / 63 sectors in the BIOS to see if that works? If it does it might just be that BIOS can only support up to 504MB properly.

Hmm, the largest preset for HDDs in the bios is around 300MB, which led me to buy the smaller 256MB CF in case there would be issues with something larger than 300.

Currently, I have tried a few custom settings I've seen online that others used with 256CF cards, such as: 493 cylinders / 16 heads / 63 sectors. When browsing the CF in dos, the PC reports both the 256MB CF or the 2GB CF as approximately 250MB.

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-02-27, 14:07:

Hmm, the largest preset for HDDs in the bios is around 300MB, which led me to buy the smaller 256MB CF in case there would be issues with something larger than 300.

Currently, I have tried a few custom settings I've seen online that others used with 256CF cards, such as: 493 cylinders / 16 heads / 63 sectors. When browsing the CF in dos, the PC reports both the 256MB CF or the 2GB CF as approximately 250MB.

These values might work with some cards but not all. For example one of my 256MB cards is 980/16/32 - the card will internally calculate LBA based on CHS values it gets and the geometry it supports. If you set 63 sectors per track in BIOS, and ask for track 1 during write, that will start over-writing sectors 32-63 of track 0.
That being said if the card does present itself as 63 sectors / 16 heads and only the cylinder count is different then you can set a lower value here without issues. You can discover the reported geometry on a PC that works with that card, or just plug it to second IDE channel and run HWiNFO for example, it'll do its own IDE discovery and report what it found.

So with all that being said I would expect the 2GB card to work when set to 493/16/63 since it's very unlikely it reports 2GB and has head/sector count lower than 16/63. But it's not impossible I guess so check that as well.

Is the CHS reliant on the particular ide adapter I'm using? I'm checking out what tools I have on hand and I won't be about to run hwinfo on the 386 simply because only the 5.25 floppy is working at the moment and I do not have the ability to make my own 5.25 disks. At the same time, my modern PC has no ide connection... Could I plug the CF into a separate pcmcia to cf adapter I have and get the values for the card using an old laptop? (Might as well try this out after work anyway.)