HanSolo wrote on 2022-09-24, 11:11:

Bought an external LS120 drive that nobody seemed to want (the seller's text said that in two days he will dump it). Freecom see […]
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Bought an external LS120 drive that nobody seemed to want (the seller's text said that in two days he will dump it). Freecom seemed to be a german company that sold external drives but they are out of business. So far I only tested if the drive reacts when inserting a floppy disk and it sounds fine.

The problem is that it's missing the parallel-port cable. I found a picture of it on an old website so maybe I'll try contacting them.
Does anybody here know anything about it? I assume if the pinout of the drive's port would be known the cable could easily be built. The next problem would be the drivers but I think I just found them on archive.org.

In worst case I can still use the drive itself as an internal one.

You could shuck it. I bet it's just a 3.5" drive with an ATAPI interface on the inside. It even has a proper beige faceplate.

DerBaum wrote on 2022-09-24, 11:29:

There are different cables. I got this freecom external CD-Drive and it was available with different cables like Parallel and US […]
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HanSolo wrote on 2022-09-24, 11:11:

Bought an external LS120 drive that nobody seemed to want (the seller's text said that in two days he will dump it). Freecom see […]
Show full quote

Bought an external LS120 drive that nobody seemed to want (the seller's text said that in two days he will dump it). Freecom seemed to be a german company that sold external drives but they are out of business. So far I only tested if the drive reacts when inserting a floppy disk and it sounds fine.

The problem is that it's missing the parallel-port cable. I found a picture of it on an old website so maybe I'll try contacting them.
Does anybody here know anything about it? I assume if the pinout of the drive's port would be known the cable could easily be built. The next problem would be the drivers but I think I just found them on archive.org.

In worst case I can still use the drive itself as an internal one.

There are different cables.
I got this freecom external CD-Drive and it was available with different cables like Parallel and USB if i remember right.
The converter part is in the (blue) plug. (maybe its just a parallel>usb bridge)
2022-09-24 13.25.24.jpg

Yes, there's also a PCMCIA and a Firewire-version. The problem is that the port on the drive is not the usual DB-25 so who knows how they connected the pins.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2022-09-24, 17:08:

You could shuck it. I bet it's just a 3.5" drive with an ATAPI interface on the inside. It even has a proper beige faceplate.

In fact that was the reason I bought it even without the cable (you can see on the photo that I already opened the case). I just hate to have incomplete things 😀

Received those lately, a 250GB external hdd, cardbus dvb-t/svideo card, vga to composite/svideo adapter:

And a box that contains exactly what's written on it:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-09-22, 22:21:

Pleanty of features u say HA HA... Wanna compare some stuff maybe ? Lets take for example the mobo u did mention A7V8X-X (HELL i will even mention the Delux of that shit) so what they had on their boards for 462 socket was maybe SATA ports and that useless crap WI-FI special ASUS BS.. Wanna see real features i will tell u look at GA-7NNXP, or even the PRO variant, that thing have 4 slots for memory, not only 3, it has SATA + IDE RAID, it has DUAL BIOS, and even that crappy useless DPS VRM module, but at least looks cool, and yes the board also is blue, not shitty yellow color like ASUS.. Or the AOpen AK79G Tube, sexy stealth black color, AOpen build quality, it has as well DUAL BIOS, and there is the useless but great looking tube audiophile for the audio.. Or the SOYO - SY-KT600 DRAGON Ultra Platinum, or the SOLTEK-SL 75FRN2-RL - Golden Flame, and there are more, but u got the idea..

- There was no A7V8X deluxe.
- The trailing X in the A7V8X-X model number is ASUS code for "stripped of primary features for budget/OEM systems". this would be the broadcom gigabit ethernet and Promise SATA RAID the regular A7V8X had.
- The "useless wifi ASUS BS" is irrelevant as you had the option to just buy any wifi card and put it in, there was no shortage of PCI slots. I suppose they could have offered a CNR slot, which was equally useless. Every manufacturer did something similar at the time.
- The A7V8X (non-X) had promise SATA RAID and IDE RAID.
- The GA-7NNXP uses the nforce 2 ultra 400 chipset which was a refresh of nforce 2 and is approximately a year newer. It did offer one more DIMM slot and the separate VRM.
- The AOpen AK79G Tube did not have SATA, and the tube section came at the cost of 3 PCI slots. It is also unobtainium now and is impossible to find for under $500 or so. The tube section did little to compensate for the nforce 2's chronic issue of crosstalk in its analog stage, rendering more or less all motherboards using the chipset terrible for audio quality if SPDIF was not used.
- The Soyo board you mention is a KT600 chipset and is a year newer.
- The Soltek board has only 3 DIMM slots and the same featureset as the A7V8X.
- PCB color has no correlation to quality.

If you're going to be critical of something, at least have some knowledge of what you're talking about. Thanks.

OMG, is the Asus argument not finished yet? We all have our favourites in any hardware (my favourite MBs are Asus, GPUs are EVGA, but I'm not going to try to argue why, I just know they work for me)

I don't have any particular favorites, though I like old ASUS, Tyan and Supermicro 90s offerings simply because there were few from other vendors which offered their featureset. At this point all of the hardware has roughly equal reliability since it's all 15-20+ years old and all of it suffers the same cap plague or other issues.

But I encourage people to criticize things using objective criteria if they're going to do so, and not to spread misinformation.

HanSolo wrote on 2022-09-24, 11:11:

The problem is that it's missing the parallel-port cable. I found a picture of it on an old website so maybe I'll try contacting them.
Does anybody here know anything about it? I assume if the pinout of the drive's port would be known the cable could easily be built. The next problem would be the drivers but I think I just found them on archive.org.

This probably used a PCMCIA to IDE bridge. I have one similar to this which came with a PCMCIA card. It's unlikely to be parallel just because LS-120 drives were mostly IDE and using a parallel chip would mean it's PCMCIA/USB to parallel to IDE, which added an extra chip and costs/complexity.

Got another unlocked Pentium II. Seems like it's not me searching for them but instead they are finding me 😀
This time a 333Mhz SL2KA from the Philippines. Overclocked it runs at 410Mhz with default voltage.

libby wrote on 2022-09-25, 21:37:

HanSolo wrote on 2022-09-24, 11:11:

The problem is that it's missing the parallel-port cable. I found a picture of it on an old website so maybe I'll try contacting them.
Does anybody here know anything about it? I assume if the pinout of the drive's port would be known the cable could easily be built. The next problem would be the drivers but I think I just found them on archive.org.

This probably used a PCMCIA to IDE bridge. I have one similar to this which came with a PCMCIA card. It's unlikely to be parallel just because LS-120 drives were mostly IDE and using a parallel chip would mean it's PCMCIA/USB to parallel to IDE, which added an extra chip and costs/complexity.

I don't know much about such stuff, but looking at the converter-board I think it's too simple to contain any controller. Is it possible that the controllers are always in their cables? This way the statement on this site also makes pretty much sense: "You can operate all drives of the IQ-series with an IQ-cable of your choice".
This would also mean that building an own cable is not as simple as I thought

HanSolo wrote on 2022-09-25, 22:58:

I don't know much about such stuff, but looking at the converter-board I think it's too simple to contain any controller. Is it possible that the controllers are always in their cables? This way the statement on this site also makes pretty much sense: "You can operate all drives of the IQ-series with an IQ-cable of your choice".
This would also mean that building an own cable is not as simple as I thought

controller would be in the PCMCIA card or USB dongle then. or on the obverse of the PCB.

HanSolo wrote on 2022-09-25, 22:58:

This would also mean that building an own cable is not as simple as I thought

The USB IQ cable seems to be a IDE>USB bridge and is quite complex...

Thanks to the good folks and their detailed posts around this forum, I found out about the Terratec Maestro 32/96. Wow, what a sharp looking card, and the Dream chipset lives up to its name! The 32/96 is going to be paired with an AWE64 Gold in an upcoming build I have brewing.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-09-22, 00:18:

I didn't buy this retro hardware today - I wanted to, but I resisted the urge (but I might give in sometime in the future). I went to the only local computer store in town that does repairs and sells both new and used parts, and they have about a dozen NOS Asus A8V-X socket 939 motherboards that they are selling for $59.99 each. I have a couple of 939 CPUS, and I have a 939 system, but it's PCIe not AGP. They also have boxes of round IDE cables, round floppy drive cables, many other goodies, and even an old pizza box style AT case on a shelf. I did buy a PS/2 cable dongle for an AT motherboard since they have a bunch of NOS ones for $4.99 each.

I went back and bought one. A brand new motherboard with an AGP slot, and a pair of PCIe 1x slots ( I guess I wasn't paying attention back then because I didn't know such boards existed) with the back plate and manual for $59.99 plus sales tax. I also bought three round IDE cables, and three round floppy drive cables as they were $1.29 each.

It was easy to rationalize since the only Socket 939 board I have right now is an Asus/HP OEM MATX with a PCIe x16 slot. My 4400+ deserves a better home.

Got this little number, seller states that it works but being a 250 I await its arrival to find out for sure, already have an Atapi 250 and a Atapi 100 but really needed a external version to help move files from a newer PC that has internet access.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-09-27, 06:19:

Got this little number, seller states that it works but being a 250 I await its arrival to find out for sure, already have an Atapi 250 and a Atapi 100 but really needed a external version to help move files from a newer PC that has internet access.

Zip2501.jpg
Zip2502.jpg

Test it thoroughly.

That original style external Zip 250 were awful. I was part of the beta test for them and we all told iomega they were awful but they released it anyway! I recently picked up a small slim USB Zip 250 though and that works well...

SteveC wrote on 2022-09-27, 10:40:

That original style external Zip 250 were awful. I was part of the beta test for them and we all told iomega they were awful but they released it anyway! I recently picked up a small slim USB Zip 250 though and that works well...

😀 Are the internal ones better?

HanSolo wrote on 2022-09-27, 12:21:

SteveC wrote on 2022-09-27, 10:40:

That original style external Zip 250 were awful. I was part of the beta test for them and we all told iomega they were awful but they released it anyway! I recently picked up a small slim USB Zip 250 though and that works well...

😀 Are the internal ones better?

I've never owned an internal Zip drive, 100 or 250MB!

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-09-22, 22:21:

(.... all this ASUS rant here ....)

Well good for u, u happened to deal with good seller. When i sell stuff i give 20 days warranty on my retro parts. Some stuff even have more warranty, that if the thing fail in that period of time i will refund back the money to the buyier.. And i dont even sell on ebay (at least yet).. Sure some times when we are mad need, not to go and rage on someone that did some shit, but talk firts instead..

ASUS back in the day was top notch, I still have first model of 386 ASUS motherboard (first model they ever produced) and it works just fine, so are some of my other 386 and 486 and Pentium motherboards. To be honest only ASUS things which died on me were literally:
- A8N-E (may have been killed by the PSU).
- K7M (it died laying in box - well it's not fully dead, perhaps some caps dried up because it works until it heats up, then hangs up).
- Several ASUS notebooks - I must admit, that ASUS notebooks are crap compared to Dell machines... but well, every other notebook brand is crap compared to Dell... 😁
- Some budget ASUS graphic cards.

Other than that ASUS and early AsRock motherboards are very reliable (ie. budget ASUS boards compared to budget Gigabyte boards - even in the capacitor plague period, and especially to post-2000 MSI board which are super unreliable).

So in my opinion you were simply unlucky but that doesn't change that ASUS was and still is a very decent brand when it comes to motherboards.

HanSolo wrote on 2022-09-27, 12:21:

😀 Are the internal ones better?

Never had any issues with the internal 250MB IDE variant. Solid in my experience.