dionb wrote on 2024-11-11, 17:08:

Front bay adapters would be great, but not been able to find any locally other than 3D printed brackets which of course don't fit my adapters...

You can order the StarTech one from Amazon, or from their own website. Possibly other places too.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-11-11, 14:32:

Or as Joseph_Joestar noted, there are front drive bay adapters as well.

I've seen those, but are there any beige ones? I think the StarTech ones are only black...

dionb wrote on 2024-11-11, 10:40:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-10-24, 22:48:

If you're using a CF card (or SD), you don't really need a network card. Unless you want to network it for something like gaming.

Meh. Yes, CF cards are swappable, but if you're using it as an HDD replacement you don't want to keep swapping it in and out, and indeed it might be buried deep in the machine (or sticking out the back of it). I'd thoroughly recommend getting a simple Ethernet card working and running mTCP FTP server as prime means of file exchange. So much easier than messing around with cards.

Here is another question in the 'things I don't really understand' category: what is the best way to work with CDs on an older retro PC, e.g. to install software? Anything 98SE or higher, you can mount ISOs easilyish enough, but what about for something older? You can burn discs in a modern system I suppose, but is there something simpler? In Mac world something like a BlueSCSI would let you mount CD images as fake hardware CD-ROMs.

One other thing that leads me to ask: why is there very little love for SCSI in retro PC land? This Dell D300 I have, a friend of mine had one new back in the day and he had gotten a super-crazy spec, and he had a 4GB SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM, and some SCSI PCI card (either BusLogic or Adaptec) from the factory. You can get an Adaptec 2940UW for $40CAD on eBay, yet for some reason it seems that no one does anything with SCSI emulator things like BlueSCSI. I assume there's a good reason for that..

VivienM wrote on 2024-11-12, 00:34:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-11-11, 14:32:

Or as Joseph_Joestar noted, there are front drive bay adapters as well.

I've seen those, but are there any beige ones? I think the StarTech ones are only black...

Not that I've seen. I got a white 3D printed one from Ebay, plus the StarTech ones.

You'd probably have to paint one to match the beige used in old cases.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-10-08, 02:17:

What's weird is that you might be able to get an MMX laptop cheaper than an MMX desktop, at least at eBay prices, but you don't get to choose your soundcard.

The problem with buying a vintage laptop is that you also end up inheriting vintage laptop problems. Vintage laptops did not age well as the desktops did, due to the plastic cases (that would crack), LCDs that "rot" from Vinegar Syndrome, capacitors that can fail leading to a no-power condition even plugged in (certain PowerBooks and PC-98 laptops are notorious for this), soldered DC jacks that can crack, terrible Passive Matrix LCDs that are useless for any action games (and look terrible even otherwise), and many more issues.

Also, the only thing worse than not being able to choose your sound card is not being able to choose your video card, and laptops did not get 3d accelerators as fast as desktops did. Sure, some of the ATI Rage chipsets exist in the Dell laptops among others, but those are usually in Pentium 2-3+ era machines that have CPUs a bit too fast. On a Pentium MMX system, you're going to be stuck with a Neomagic or Trident chipset of some sort. Even worse, it might not even support display scaling so all your games run in a window on DOS. This is also an issue PowerBooks and PC-98s have, hence getting a high res LCD model of many DOS laptops is risky for DOS era gaming if you don't want to play games in a tiny window.

VivienM wrote on 2024-11-12, 00:41:

[...]

Here is another question in the 'things I don't really understand' category: what is the best way to work with CDs on an older retro PC, e.g. to install software? Anything 98SE or higher, you can mount ISOs easilyish enough, but what about for something older? You can burn discs in a modern system I suppose, but is there something simpler? In Mac world something like a BlueSCSI would let you mount CD images as fake hardware CD-ROMs.

One other thing that leads me to ask: why is there very little love for SCSI in retro PC land? This Dell D300 I have, a friend of mine had one new back in the day and he had gotten a super-crazy spec, and he had a 4GB SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM, and some SCSI PCI card (either BusLogic or Adaptec) from the factory. You can get an Adaptec 2940UW for $40CAD on eBay, yet for some reason it seems that no one does anything with SCSI emulator things like BlueSCSI. I assume there's a good reason for that..

Waiting for luckybob post in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... 😜

But pending that:
SCSI is niche in the PC world. It's relatively complex from a hardware perspective (termination, different bus widths and voltages, different transfer speeds, device IDs etc) and from a software perspective (in DOS you need ASPI drivers or even more obscure non-ASPI stuff to get anything other than bootable C:-drive to work, and then juggling those with conventional memory requirements of games). And due to the higher cost, not so many people came into contact with it in their younger days, unlike in say the Mac world, or the various workstation flavours in the days when workstations weren't x86. Oh, and the drives tended to be LOUD.

Of course SCSI is also amazingly flexible if you understand it, SCSI HDDs tend to be more reliable than IDE and have lower seek times, SCSI CDROMs tend to be a lot more reliable than IDE and SCSI is less CPU dependent. And you can hook up all manner of devces if you have the right adapter cables and software, including emulators.

But bottom line is few people have warm, fuzzy retro feelings about the stuff, the learning curve can be steep and there's not really a compelling reason to do so for most.

Now, I'm one of the exceptions. As a student I messed around with Sun and SGI workstations and being a poor student (or at least one who spent most of his disposable cash on travel and beer rather than computers) I raided university and company dumpsters and bought unfashionable (High Voltage Differential) things being dumped at cheap prices. And then there was the SGI Origin 2000 I bought for EUR 1 with its Fiber Channel (not quite SCSI, but closer to that than to IDE) array... So I do get warm fuzzy feelings from the stuff. I have a couple of SCSI builds, a dual P3, a VLB Pentium (with VLB SCSI controller, of course) as well as a Sun SparcStation 20 and my XT has a whopping 500GB SCSI HDD running off a modded-to-be-bootable 8b SCSI controller.

CDRom emulation is a very interesting use case. I for one hate physical media in any form, in particular floppies and CDs. I love Goteks for the former and would really like a good solution for the latter. I once built a RaSCSI setup (similar to BlueSCSI) and had it working for accessing images, but not to boot from. I sort of gave up after a while.

VivienM wrote on 2024-11-12, 00:41:

Here is another question in the 'things I don't really understand' category: what is the best way to work with CDs on an older retro PC, e.g. to install software? Anything 98SE or higher, you can mount ISOs easilyish enough, but what about for something older? You can burn discs in a modern system I suppose, but is there something simpler? In Mac world something like a BlueSCSI would let you mount CD images as fake hardware CD-ROMs.

Apparently it is possible to mount ISO images under DOS using the SHSUCD suite of applications: https://github.com/adoxa/shsucd

I haven't tried this myself since apparently ISO images with CD audio may not work properly. Since I tend to use CDs mainly for games, I just stick with authentic game CDs.

One other thing that leads me to ask: why is there very little love for SCSI in retro PC land?

Most people probably used IDE, and IDE devices are pretty ubiquitous. Especially when it comes to things like CF-to-IDE adapters and using them as replacement hard drives.

That said, I do have a early model SCSI CD-ROM I've been intending to try with a PAS16 sound card, since the latter has a SCSI interface.

Pawlicker wrote on 2024-11-12, 02:28:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-10-08, 02:17:

What's weird is that you might be able to get an MMX laptop cheaper than an MMX desktop, at least at eBay prices, but you don't get to choose your soundcard.

The problem with buying a vintage laptop is that you also end up inheriting vintage laptop problems. Vintage laptops did not age well as the desktops did, due to the plastic cases (that would crack), LCDs that "rot" from Vinegar Syndrome, capacitors that can fail leading to a no-power condition even plugged in (certain PowerBooks and PC-98 laptops are notorious for this), soldered DC jacks that can crack, terrible Passive Matrix LCDs that are useless for any action games (and look terrible even otherwise), and many more issues.

Also, the only thing worse than not being able to choose your sound card is not being able to choose your video card, and laptops did not get 3d accelerators as fast as desktops did. Sure, some of the ATI Rage chipsets exist in the Dell laptops among others, but those are usually in Pentium 2-3+ era machines that have CPUs a bit too fast. On a Pentium MMX system, you're going to be stuck with a Neomagic or Trident chipset of some sort. Even worse, it might not even support display scaling so all your games run in a window on DOS. This is also an issue PowerBooks and PC-98s have, hence getting a high res LCD model of many DOS laptops is risky for DOS era gaming if you don't want to play games in a tiny window.

Yes, quite true. Best to buy them in person, sniff round the vents for burnt or fishy smells.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-11-12, 00:46:

VivienM wrote on 2024-11-12, 00:34:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-11-11, 14:32:

Or as Joseph_Joestar noted, there are front drive bay adapters as well.

I've seen those, but are there any beige ones? I think the StarTech ones are only black...

Not that I've seen. I got a white 3D printed one from Ebay, plus the StarTech ones.

You'd probably have to paint one to match the beige used in old cases.

Indeed, the 50 shades of beige, and/or greige problem...

For me I find SCSI a bit pointless now when you have IDE or SATA already onboard.
CF and SD cards will give you better performance at a fraction of the cost and arent decades old which anything SCSI will be now.
And for larger disk sizes you have SATA to IDE adapters and still no need to load specific drivers other than motherboard drivers.

And if you are adding a SCSI card whynot make it a SATA card instead?

With all that said I do still prefer SCSI on old servers.

As for iso's and dos I find I rarely have the need. Just about all my dose games have had a no-cd patch applied. And for installing dose games these days I just copy the whole games folder from 1 pc to another.

Well, after it was stuck for almost 6 weeks due to the Canada Post strike, I received my Gotek today... so... I guess I can turn my mind back to this project. Will DOS 6.22 install on my CF card?

Well, new problem. Dell floppy cable is missing a pin, while the Gotek has all 34 pins. So unless I'm going to start removing pins from the Gotek, I guess I need a new floppy cable...

Nah, just carefully puncture the cable's head at the right spot. It's not too hard with any sharp pointy object like a precision screw driver head or a pointy knife.. just be careful not to slip and hurt your hand in the process. Other people even do it with a drill, but that's overkill IMO.

Another method I have used is unbend a paperclip, heat with lighter/candle and stab the hole in and out quick with that. However, the implementation of these things can vary, merely a thin cap of material with the normal structure behind, and those you can punch through easy with short, sharp object, like the knife or the jewellers screwdriver. Some however, are solid fill through the whole thickness, and it's either hot needle/paperclip or drill to do those with any ease. Then there's some that are super easy, they've just got a separate tiny plug in the hole, if it's white it's definitely that, may be some black ones too. Those you can just catch an edge of it with a blade or something pointy and pull. There's one type that are buggers though, drill only, because they are old shit pre-1995, that are made of some phenolic resin or something similar to IC encapsulations, rather than softer ABS or other thermoplastics.

Okay, I found a functional floppy cable that was lying around, that problem is fixed for now.

New problem: I think my VGA to HDMI adapter and/or my excessively new monitor are unhappy. I didn't pay attention to this before getting the floppy adapter, but basically, as soon as the BIOS (which is in some kind of graphical mode since there's a Dell logo on the side) clears the screen at the end of POST, the monitor stops displaying anything. No error saying there's no boot drive, no 'Starting MS-DOS' if this Gotek is actually working, etc. I guess I need to find an older monitor now (which, luckily, I have a few of...)

Also, is this Gotek adapter supposed to do anything when you push the knob in? Everything else works, but pushing knob doesn't seem to do anything...

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-31, 22:29:

New problem: I think my VGA to HDMI adapter and/or my excessively new monitor are unhappy. I didn't pay attention to this before getting the floppy adapter, but basically, as soon as the BIOS (which is in some kind of graphical mode since there's a Dell logo on the side) clears the screen at the end of POST, the monitor stops displaying anything. No error saying there's no boot drive, no 'Starting MS-DOS' if this Gotek is actually working, etc. I guess I need to find an older monitor now (which, luckily, I have a few of...)

So... tried a different monitor, same result. Checked the amazon reviews for this VGA to HDMI adapter and... well, people are complaining that it's not suitable for vintage/MS-DOS applications. Reporting same issue as I'm seeing.

So... time to dig up a native VGA monitor. I have some LCDs around, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, and 1680x1050. Leaning towards the 1280x1024 because I figure that'd be the easiest to get Windows 3.1 running on, although someone will probably tell me a 4:3 screen is preferable.

Okay, dug my 1704FPT out of the storage locker, now I managed to install DOS...

This is going to be a long, long, long term project...

VivienM wrote on 2025-01-01, 04:32:

although someone will probably tell me a 4:3 screen is preferable.

I would think 1600x1200 is the best, as the resolution divides exactly into common DOS resolutions like 320x200 and 320x240. Though I think no LCD screen uses integer scaling, so it will look blurry regardless.

So... made lots of progress:
- DOS/WfW 3.11 are installed
- video drivers for the RIVA 128 are working, I get 1280x1024 in 65K colours in Win3.11
- installed 4DOS and PKZIP
- installed CD-ROM drivers
- flashed the BIOS

But... wow... is retrocomputing hard. Doesn't help that my main way of transferring files over is currently making floppy images with WinImage on a modern system. And I'm at a huge advantage compared to many as I actually had MS-DOS/Win3.11 experience... 30 years ago.

This is way, way, way more labour-intensive than any retro XP project, that's for sure...

Next task, and I think this will be for tomorrow or the weekend - burning some kind of AWE64 driver CD and trying to get some sound going. And then installing QEMM.

VivienM wrote on 2025-01-02, 03:06:

Doesn't help that my main way of transferring files over is currently making floppy images with WinImage on a modern system.

This is why people tend to use CF to IDE or SD to IDE adapters nowadays. Preferably mounted somewhere that makes them easily accessible.

That way, file transfers are as simple as popping out the card and putting it into an USB 3.0 reader, which you can use on a modern PC.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-01-02, 03:53:

VivienM wrote on 2025-01-02, 03:06:

Doesn't help that my main way of transferring files over is currently making floppy images with WinImage on a modern system.

This is why people tend to use CF to IDE or SD to IDE adapters nowadays. Preferably mounted somewhere that makes them easily accessible.

That way, file transfers are as simple as popping out the card and putting it into a USB 3.0 reader, which you can use on a modern PC.

And I thought of that earlier today... but... the only card readers I have easily accessible to me are SD-only, I think. (And I listened to everyone here who advised against SD to IDE and went with a CF setup)

Hmmm. Amazon does have some good pricing on some unknown-brand CF card readers. Maybe I should just pick up one of those.