I didn't have an intermediate floppy only stage, went from cassette tape to 80MB and floppy. Though I had used floppy machines at school infrequently.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-04-06, 13:27:

I went from 880K Amiga floppies to a 213MB HDD overnight. My mind was blown.

I'm not going to pretend that I understood the difference at the time, but I went from using a Tandy 1000HX (720K floppies) and a VIC20 (with only Congo Bongo on cartridge... never remember having disks, tapes, or anything else) to a Packard Bell 486 with a ~500MB hard drive and a CD-ROM.

Mind was definitely blown for many reasons.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-04-06, 13:27:

I went from 880K Amiga floppies to a 213MB HDD overnight. My mind was blown.

I went from 286 with 2 42MB HDDs to a K5 PR133 with 1,2GB HDD.

I won't say my mind was blown but that was definitely an upgrade.

I went from an Amiga 600 to a Cyrix 686 with Windows 95.

I was so excited, but DOS (because all I wanted were games) felt like a huge step back compared to the Amiga OS.

I think I was somewhat spoiled during the DOS years. I came late, and the personal computer I got had a Sound Blaster and 256 colors. So I never felt like DOS was lacking.

Only looking back can I see the turmoil of the 8086, 286, and 386. CGA, EGA, Hercules, etc.

I got to play on my Dad's work laptop before I got my own computer, and even that had a 486 with 256 colors. I played Doom and Sim City 2000 on it a lot.

xcomcmdr is talking about OS. Not games. Games were better (looking) on PC-DOS since 1991/92...

Some 1991/92 games were still far better on the Amiga. Lotus III on PC or Speedball II on PC are botched ports, for example.

But yeah, I was talking about the OS.

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 15:56:

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale. […]
Show full quote

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

I remember this one. IIRC all the I/O where in the docking station.
It was square, IBM like.

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 15:56:

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale. […]
Show full quote

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

If it's anything like the other armada mxxx series you can hook up a floppy drive via the printer port.

Nexxen wrote on 2023-04-09, 16:12:

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 15:56:

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale. […]
Show full quote

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

I remember this one. IIRC all the I/O where in the docking station.
It was square, IBM like.

It does have VGA, 1x serial, 1x parallel, 1x USB on the rear. Although does not support booting from any USB devices.

I could take this opportunity to play around and try and install windows 98 over the network...
Or just put the HDD into another system and copy the files over after partitioning/formatting it correctly.

This would be a good candidate for an IDE->SD adapter to make this process easier in future.

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 16:57:

Nexxen wrote on 2023-04-09, 16:12:

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 15:56:

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale. […]
Show full quote

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

I remember this one. IIRC all the I/O where in the docking station.
It was square, IBM like.

It does have VGA, 1x serial, 1x parallel, 1x USB on the rear. Although does not support booting from any USB devices.

Of course. FDD and CD-ROM were on the docking station.
Today it's not an issue with SD adapters, you are only stuck at deciding how. 😀
It was another era. I wonder if a BIOS mod could enable USB installs.

Nexxen wrote on 2023-04-09, 17:08:

Of course. FDD and CD-ROM were on the docking station. Today it's not an issue with SD adapters, you are only stuck at deciding […]
Show full quote

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 16:57:

Nexxen wrote on 2023-04-09, 16:12:

I remember this one. IIRC all the I/O where in the docking station.
It was square, IBM like.

It does have VGA, 1x serial, 1x parallel, 1x USB on the rear. Although does not support booting from any USB devices.

Of course. FDD and CD-ROM were on the docking station.
Today it's not an issue with SD adapters, you are only stuck at deciding how. 😀
It was another era. I wonder if a BIOS mod could enable USB installs.

I think I have had the decision made for me. This HDD has a large number of bad sectors while being formatted.
I think once the SD card is in its rather trivial for the other problems 😀

I snagged a lot that included this very mysterious looking card yesterday.

That's the best picture I have of it at the moment. The squiggly white PCB logo indicates that it's probably a DCS brand card (though they may go by different names too, I'm not sure), but it has a Vibra16 chip (CT2501 probably) and, most interestingly, what really really looks like a Yamaha OPL4 chip set. There are other wavetable chip sets that resemble these, but it really looks like a YMF278B + ROM to me. (The markings on the chips really look like these.)

Google searching any of these terms together comes up with absolutely nothing, so this seems to be a very rare card. I can't wait to tinker with it. 😀

Anyone ever seen or heard of anything like this? I know that Vibra16 and SB16 chips sometimes ended up on third party cards, but I've personally never seen one with wavetable and definitely never with OPL4.

EDIT: Actually, it could also be a Samsung SEC KS0164 + ROM. The ROM chip looks a little too narrow to be OPL4, but it's very hard to tell. The printing looks more like what is on the OPL4.

Either way, this isn't something I've ever seen before.

Was at the weekly Sunday car boot sale in my town and came home with this nice 939 machine.

Specs:

Techsolo TC10-SR case - nice Thermaltake Clone, shame the sidepanel is absolutely broken
ASUS A8N-SLI Rev1.02 + Zalman ZM-SB47J heatsink
Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939
3x512MB GeiL DDR400
Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 cooler
XpertVision Geforce 9400GT 1GB DDR2
Pioneer Slot-Loading DVD-RW drive
LG 52x CD-RW
Sound Blaster Live 5.1 SB0100 PCI
no PSU (not that I'd miss it that much, probably was some Techsolo branded unit that would blow around the 275W mark...)

Nabbed a rebadged Belkin FireWire to SCSI adapter and a set of SCSI cables with gold-plated connectors, apparently that was a thing? (edit: Mine is a Orange Micro model, which is apparently a rebadged Belkin F5U541, both of which you can find hardly anything about).

In total, it ran me only 45 euros or so, versus the 200+ euros that the few FireWire-SCSI adapters I can find seem to command (especially Ratoc FR1SXes!).

Nexxen wrote on 2023-04-09, 16:12:

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 15:56:

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale. […]
Show full quote

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

I remember this one. IIRC all the I/O where in the docking station.
It was square, IBM like.

These Compaq machines were like tanks for road warrior business/field work. And less heavy/more powerful than their same year released ThinkPad models.
Ofc it didn't last. Compaq was then sold to HP, and IBM released their successful A/T/X ThinkPad series, specially the lightweight X models.
But during some time, Compaq Armada models were like the lightweight Apple of today, but for business back then.

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 15:56:

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale. […]
Show full quote

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

That's a really nice find. Some interesting facts:

Judging from its bottom stickers and keyboard layout, the laptop was likely assembled in year 2000 in Taiwan and sold to mainland China; the shipping lane is the other way around nowadays.

Back then, a mainlander have to be either very rich or very smart to buy a Compaq Armada M300, with your own money or paid by the institution, respectively. I wonder if that Enron property sticker is genuine. 🤑

Speaking of which: there are many excellent vloggers on Bilibili introducing modern computer hardware, but the quantity and quality of Chinese vloggers are much lower when it comes to pre-millenium retro hardware. OTOH the icing on the cake like GeekLogic is an excellent source of learning.

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 15:56:

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale. […]
Show full quote

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

It looks like the lid is also covered in that soft touch plastic material. Good luck getting that off. It's going to take a lot of rubbing alcohol and scrubbing, but it's possible.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-10, 05:11:

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 15:56:

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale. […]
Show full quote

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

It looks like the lid is also covered in that soft touch plastic material. Good luck getting that off. It's going to take a lot of rubbing alcohol and scrubbing, but it's possible.

Its just a matt plastic luckily! In very good condition overall besides some discolouring on the external screws.