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Fixing an old 486?

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Reply 20 of 27, by aries-mu

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All the best!!!

Have you tried a floppy emulator with USB stick?

They said therefore to him: Who are you?
Jesus said to them: The beginning, who also speak unto you

Computers should be fun inside not outside! 😉 (by Joakim)

Reply 21 of 27, by bjwil1991

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He cannot boot from a diskette, even the GoTek USB Floppy emulator due to a BIOS issue.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 22 of 27, by aries-mu

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I see, ok. Thanks.

They said therefore to him: Who are you?
Jesus said to them: The beginning, who also speak unto you

Computers should be fun inside not outside! 😉 (by Joakim)

Reply 23 of 27, by bjwil1991

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I forgot to mention: the FCC ID is listed in the back end of the machine, or underneath.

Also, what is the BIOS version?

Is it 1.01 Ref ID xx?

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 24 of 27, by df00z

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bjwil1991 wrote:

I forgot to mention: the FCC ID is listed in the back end of the machine, or underneath.

Also, what is the BIOS version?

Is it 1.01 Ref ID xx?

The machine is busy now running that website, so I don't really want to mess with it right now. If\when it crashes, I'll check again, but I just bolted the thing back together. There was a number on the back but it didn't specifically mention an FCC ID, it looked more like a vendor serial #.

Interestingly, freedos + ckermit seems to be working better than Win98 dos did on the p233 it replaced. ckermit is shelling out the various midi programs faster, and the transfer rates over RS232 seem solid.

Reply 26 of 27, by mrau

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nice website, happy You got this running again

would You share a little bit of intel here? how do You choose the sound device on the pc? there is a proxy here that would translate requests into remotely typed in commands and the digitize the output?

Reply 27 of 27, by df00z

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There is a raspberry pi running kermit with a DigiKey usb->RS232 adapter attached.
The 486 runs CKermit. The Raspberry Pi hits a restful endpoint, grabs the midi file, sends it via kermit to a ram drive on the dos machine, and sends commands over kermit to run dos programs to play the midi file.

I used to use qbasic + curl + a packet driver on the dos machine and it did more of it's own control - but it wasn't as stable as kermit.

It's now on FreeDos, which seems to be _really_ stable. I haven't had to reboot the box at all.