Recent content by Makefile

Can you imagine being a stock photo model back then, and needing "training" on how to hold the mouse properly (having never actually used one) to avoid a faux pas like this https://stock.adobe.com/images/young-man-holding-soldering-iron/181196507

OS2Museum has a few posts on early IDE history; here is one of the most detailed: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/whence-identify-drive/ There were at least some extremely early drives that were just an MFM/RLL with a bolted-on controller to make it IDE, but native Conner IDE drives arrived quickly...

An issue is that the IBM AT BIOS and some early clones have a race condition bug when accessing hard disks. When reading more than one sector, an IRQ comes in when the first sector is ready. The BIOS should acknowledge the interrupt, then read 512 bytes, then wait for the next interrupt...

XT BIOSes do not generate POST codes. You have to put in a diagnostic ROM, such as Ruud's, for that. Even without RAM you should get some codes. The first few tests just check the registers to verify that 1+1 is still 2. Further, those ebay special POST code cards don't recognize them when put...

Did you come to Linux by way of Minix or straight from Tandy Xenix?

Looks like TheRetroWeb knows that board by another name, has drivers, and even a manual: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ford-lian-agp-ali Note that USB was just an interesting curiosity when this was made. The onboard USB might be disabled by default, might use a different pinout than...

Hmm, either I just read wrong info somewhere, or maybe they actually meant that BSD supported fewer sound card CD-ROMs than linux at the time?

I recall reading that 386BSD required a fairly hefty PC for the time, for example, requiring a SCSI disk controller. Any truth to that?

Thanks. I'm going to bring it to the next workshop at System Source. I did open it and it has a Samsung tube inside, and the numbers on the circuit boards suggest it is the same as AOpen A70PF which does have an archived service manual. But it doesn't sound like I should be ordering a bunch of...

Real mode is appropriate when booted into plain DOS like that. You will stay in real mode unless you load EMM386, in which case you will be in V86 mode. If the BIOS is detecting 4x256K instead of 4x1MB for some reason (such as a broken trace going to the SIMMs), you would see 640K, because 384K...

This is a 2003 CRT monitor (AOpen A75P) and accordingly was the budget 15" monitor for those unwilling to go for a 1280x1024 LCD at the time, and has no service manual and was presumably cost-reduced as much as possible. Murphy's Law: I have two of these, this one has no burn-in and a less...

You might post the back of the board, behind the SIMM sockets. I have had traces scratched through in that area before, and it's caused issues like detecting the RAM as a different size (or not at all).

There is a datasheet for that CHIPset: https://theretroweb.com/chipset/documentation/cs8220-datasheet-62f900da77051198936540.pdf Based on skimming it quickly, two of the DIP switches could be RAMSEL0 and RAMSEL1, to configure between 256K, 640K, 512K, or 1024K memory. Maybe using a multimeter...

Local bus video was a core feature of even the most bottom basement "multimedia PCs." Maybe not the very first generation, but the 1993/1994 generation of those LPX 486SX-25s do have the onboard SVGA hooked up via VLB. It's not treated as an optional feature like external cache.

They should be recognized. If you have only one IDE interface, the hard drive and CD-ROM will have to share one cable, which can be fraught with compatibility issues if you're using anything other than a real spinning IDE HDD, or if you're using 32-bit disk access in Windows 3.x.