Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-11-20, 18:42:

Personnally I think period correct is silly. A lot of systems were designed to have add on upgrades via expnsion slots and external ports. If something new comes along like XTIDE cards why not impliment them if you feel you need to to enhance your system a bit more.

Like I have with my slime line 1990 Zenith Bull Z286LP Plus by adding a parrallal port and LS120 drive. An inkjet printer can be added to that combination as well. Also added a nic and sound card wit speakers. In future I intentd to get it on our WLAN.

WLAN is super easy to do. All you need is one of those LAN to WLAN adapters such as this:
https://www.amazon.com/Vonets-VAR11N-300-Mult … e/dp/B01199OGK0

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-11-20, 19:44:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-11-20, 18:42:

Personnally I think period correct is silly. A lot of systems were designed to have add on upgrades via expnsion slots and external ports. If something new comes along like XTIDE cards why not impliment them if you feel you need to to enhance your system a bit more.

Like I have with my slime line 1990 Zenith Bull Z286LP Plus by adding a parrallal port and LS120 drive. An inkjet printer can be added to that combination as well. Also added a nic and sound card wit speakers. In future I intentd to get it on our WLAN.

WLAN is super easy to do. All you need is one of those LAN to WLAN adapters such as this:
https://www.amazon.com/Vonets-VAR11N-300-Mult … e/dp/B01199OGK0

Thank. That looks pretty damn cool.

Would anyone happen to know any socket 939 motherboard that would support dual floppy drives? I have a good socket 939 build and I could just switch the motherboard if I found such.

Baoran wrote on 2020-11-22, 01:02:

Would anyone happen to know any socket 939 motherboard that would support dual floppy drives? I have a good socket 939 build and I could just switch the motherboard if I found such.

Ha No ! Have one and has no floppy support at all. Not even a floppy header for one drive but guess that depends on the exact board.
Think you are looking at too new boards for that type of support. Like looking for a AM3+ or Intel socket 1366 with floppy support 😀

Horun wrote on 2020-11-22, 04:03:

Baoran wrote on 2020-11-22, 01:02:

Would anyone happen to know any socket 939 motherboard that would support dual floppy drives? I have a good socket 939 build and I could just switch the motherboard if I found such.

Ha No ! Have one and has no floppy support at all. Not even a floppy header for one drive but guess that depends on the exact board.
Think you are looking at too new boards for that type of support. Like looking for a AM3+ or Intel socket 1366 with floppy support 😀

I thought Athlon64 were from about same period as Pentium 4 systems and someone already mentioned Pentium 4 motherboards having them. My current build with Asus A8V deluxe motherboard has only option for 1 floppy drive in bios so I thought it might not be impossible that a motherboard with different bios might have support for 2.

Horun wrote on 2020-11-22, 04:03:

Baoran wrote on 2020-11-22, 01:02:

Would anyone happen to know any socket 939 motherboard that would support dual floppy drives? I have a good socket 939 build and I could just switch the motherboard if I found such.

Ha No ! Have one and has no floppy support at all. Not even a floppy header for one drive but guess that depends on the exact board.
Think you are looking at too new boards for that type of support. Like looking for a AM3+ or Intel socket 1366 with floppy support 😀

The Super Micro X8SAX and C7X58 are socket 1366 boards that, according to the manual ( https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboar … 58/MNL-1063.pdf) :

1The    disk    drive adapter functions of   the    Super I/O   chip    include a  floppy disk    drive controller  that  is  compatible  with  industry  standard  82077/765,  a  data  separator,  write pre-compensation circuitry, decode logic, data rate selection, a clock genera-tor,  drive  interface  control  logic  and  interrupt  and  DMA  logic.  The  wide  range  of  functions integrated onto the Super I/O greatly reduces the number of components required for   interfacing with    floppy disk    drives. The    Super I/O   supports two    360    K, 720  K,  1.2  M,  1.44  M  or  2.88  M  disk  drives  and  data  transfer  rates  of  250  Kb/s,  500 Kb/s or 1 Mb/s.

I have not tested it (I have one), but it looks it has dual floppy drive support .

EDIT: Only one floppy option in BIOS on my X8SAX , so the manual is wrong .

Baoran wrote on 2020-11-22, 01:02:

Would anyone happen to know any socket 939 motherboard that would support dual floppy drives? I have a good socket 939 build and I could just switch the motherboard if I found such.

I have a DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR, which supports dual floppy drives. It also supports drive A & B swap.

ECS KV2 has one FDD
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1398/6

I have been doing searching online and based on motherboard manuals with bios pictures it seems that Abit AN8 and Abit AV8 socket 939 motherboards have dual floppy drive support. Haven't been able to find anything that I could actually buy at reasonable price on ebay though.

computerguy08 wrote on 2020-11-22, 13:52:

I have a DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR, which supports dual floppy drives. It also supports drive A & B swap.

OT, but if I understand correctly, you need to manually set jumpers on the board to enable/disable SLI? I've never seen this before.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-11-20, 17:24:

I don't concern myself with period correct, though I agree that 1GB is better. XP will run anything that 2k (and for the most part 9x) will while offering superior UX and reliability

When XP was new, we upgraded our family's PC from circa 256MB to 768MB.
This was in the early 2000s, on a Pentium III 733MHz that came with 98SE originally, I believe.
Later, I upgraded my AMD APU E-350 to 3,5GB, I recall. Also on XP.

Edit: Yes, XP supports 5,25" diskette drives.
However, some modern motherboards are apparently too week to drive a 5,25" FD drive. I had such an occurrence once with a 586. Disabling on-board FDC and using an FDC on an ISA Multi-I/O Card solved the issue.

matze79 wrote on 2020-11-20, 06:22:

Huch it depends hardly on the programs you run. If you optimize it will run on less then 256Mb and it will run snappy […]
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Huch it depends hardly on the programs you run.
If you optimize it will run on less then 256Mb and it will run snappy

This is XP SP3 Professional

pimp_my_xp.jpg

This is true. But I've always felt like using something like 384MB for a tweaked XP was a minimum if I wanted to also run at least one decent program with it. 512MB would be better and is actually fairly usable. The systems I would use these lower amounts of RAM combined with XP were usually Coppermines or sA Thunderbirds, both using SDRAM.

I've always tried to go for 1GB minimum, but 2GB is even better if using something like an AXP, Northwood or A64 or more modern but at some point I'd rather opt for Win7 if the system gets 4GB or more.

But XP definitely will like having more RAM 😮
It will eat all RAM that you give to it! 😁
Well up to 3.5GB or so that is 😜

Baoran wrote on 2020-11-19, 04:10:

What are the newest motherboards that have bios that supports 5.25" floppy drives and also supports having dual floppy drives?
I could really use something that allows moving files between different floppies and hopefully would also allow me to at least install Windows XP in the system without it being too slow. Newer windows could be even better but I think that would be too much to ask for.

May I ask what you want to use this system for?

Fwiw, one of my old builds used an MSI s939 board which at least worked with a 2.88MB floppy drive. This is not a 5 1/4 floppy drive, but is at least a 'non-standard' one.
I had XP on it, but since it's a 64 bit CPU, Win7 could also have been an option. There's even a 32 bit version of Win7, but I have no personal experience with it, nor do I know anyone that used it.
But it would max out at 2GB RAM, which might not be to your liking. For XP it would work and it worked fine for me, but I don't know what you intend this system to exactly do and what "too slow" is to you.

How many systems to you currently have?

Still an interesting question though. My apologies for not having an answer for you. This subject seems to be rather unexplored as of now.

Errius wrote on 2020-11-23, 00:52:

OT, but if I understand correctly, you need to manually set jumpers on the board to enable/disable SLI? I've never seen this before.

Yeah, this is a thing of the early 2000s, the first SLI boards on the market always had those "SLI fingers", which electrically connected the two cards in x8 mode. The DFI board happens to use jumpers instead.

Tetrium wrote on 2020-11-23, 20:26:

May I ask what you want to use this system for? […]
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Baoran wrote on 2020-11-19, 04:10:

What are the newest motherboards that have bios that supports 5.25" floppy drives and also supports having dual floppy drives?
I could really use something that allows moving files between different floppies and hopefully would also allow me to at least install Windows XP in the system without it being too slow. Newer windows could be even better but I think that would be too much to ask for.

May I ask what you want to use this system for?

Fwiw, one of my old builds used an MSI s939 board which at least worked with a 2.88MB floppy drive. This is not a 5 1/4 floppy drive, but is at least a 'non-standard' one.
I had XP on it, but since it's a 64 bit CPU, Win7 could also have been an option. There's even a 32 bit version of Win7, but I have no personal experience with it, nor do I know anyone that used it.
But it would max out at 2GB RAM, which might not be to your liking. For XP it would work and it worked fine for me, but I don't know what you intend this system to exactly do and what "too slow" is to you.

How many systems to you currently have?

Still an interesting question though. My apologies for not having an answer for you. This subject seems to be rather unexplored as of now.

Basically I want a convenient system that can store images of lots of old software and also allows me to write both 3.5" and 5.25" floppies and CDs for older systems. Currently all the software is on my main PC and I can only do 1.44MB floppies with a winXP laptop that has 1.44MB drives and it kind of goes like that first I copy files to an USB stick, take the stick to my XP laptop and then I turn on the laptop and write 1.44MB floppies there and then take the floppies I have written to my 486 system. If I need the files on an even older system I move the files from 3.5" floppies to 5.25" floppies on the 486.

Basically I want a windows XP system that could use large hard drives for storing files and is able to write multiple floppy types directly to make this process simpler. I would also want XP system to run smoothly and booting to XP reasonably fast. I prefer to keep my 486 and older systems period correct and that is why I have not done any flash type of storage with them and kept their hard drive sizes at what it would have been back then.

Edit: I would also prefer if building the system would not cost too much money like for example I could use my old parts and perhaps just buy a cheap motherboard that supports dual floppy drives. I have couple socket 939 cpus but no pentium 4 cpus so that is why I was concentrating on that. My current systems are few period correct 486 and older systems, a Pentium 3 win98 system. I also have socket 939 system with Athlon64 FX-60 cpu but the motherboard bios only supports single floppy drive.

I absolutely understand your needs, but also keep in mind:

Period-correctness = no progress, dead

At some point, it is required to travel an unconvenientonal path.
If your 486 has a 5,25" drive, why not simply let it do the work?
WinImage 3 can run on a 286 with Windows 3.1 (checked), for example.
Just use a null-modem cable and create a DOS VM on your modern PC.
That way, you can transfer files. Virtual PC can use shared-folders in DOS, for example, if the VPC 2004 VM additions for MS-DOS 6.22 are used.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-11-25, 07:57:

I absolutely understand your needs, but also keep in mind: […]
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I absolutely understand your needs, but also keep in mind:

Period-correctness = no progress, dead

At some point, it is required to travel an unconvenientonal path.
If your 486 has a 5,25" drive, why not simply let it do the work?
WinImage 3 can run on a 286 with Windows 3.1 (checked), for example.
Just use a null-modem cable and create a DOS VM on your modern PC.
That way, you can transfer files. Virtual PC can use shared-folders in DOS, for example, if the VPC 2004 VM additions for MS-DOS 6.22 are used.

Nostalgia is strong with me and dos is the most nostalgic for me since I was a 95% pure dos user until 1995 when I built my pentium system when win95 was launched. I am basically trying to recreate the feeling of using a pc back when I was using dos and floppy disks. Both my 386 and 486 are pure dos systems because of that and that is also why I am using real floppy drives with them and my 2 gotek drives have been unused so far.

Lack of space is generally the issue here. I only have one corner of a room for my retro systems and my modern pc is basically at other end of the place and that makes null-modem bit difficult. In my retro corner I have a single 19" CRT monitor surrounded by 4 desktop PCs, IBM model M keyboard and 2 mice which one is serial and one is ps/2. I basically connect the cables of the keyboard, mouse and monitor to a system every time I want to use one. Though you are probably right about there being other ways me not really needing a separate system for doing this. It was just an idea because I have unused 500GB and 250GB ide hard drives that I could use to store all retro software if I installed them on a pc which would free up some hard drive space on my modern computer.