Recent content by Malvineous

Hi all, I recently picked up some ISA cards off eBay, and one of them was an "EGA Ultra" (Gemini VC-001 chipset) as shown at the VGA Museum. However this particular card came with a "daughterboard" of sorts, which consists of an oscillator attached to what I am guessing is a feature connector...

Hi all, I recently picked up a collection of "old floppies" on eBay, with the intention of writing over them and using them as working floppies with my retro x86 PCs. However when they arrived, it turned out that they were all RX50 floppies and many of them were original Digital disks. Before...

Hi all, Does anyone know the name of the CD audio connector used on early Creative Labs sound cards, before the introduction of the MPC connector? Here's a photo of a Sound Blaster 16 - the connector in question is labelled CD_IN. I would like to order both some sockets (as shown on the card)...

You can also order the parts directly from China (via eBay) and make the cables yourself, as another option. Costs about the same (maybe $20 all up) but you get enough parts to make a few cables and you can make each one as long or short as you like and put the connectors where it suits you...

Hi all, Since I could never afford an LS-120 drive back in the day (too young) I have recently obtained a few to marvel at. However I am having a bit of trouble getting them to work. The BIOS detects the drive fine - I have it set up as master on the first IDE channel - however as soon as I...

Here are a couple as I have been looking for the same thing. I have been meaning to approach a Chinese company to see how much it would cost for them to stamp out a few hundred, but I've been put off by the fact that I only need 5-6 of them and it would probably take forever to sell the rest.

Hi all, I have had very little exposure to Apple products so I'm hoping some experts might be able to help. I recently purchased a "new in box" 5.25" floppy drive sight unseen, and it turned out to be a Teac FD-55A (single sided, double-density, 40 tracks.) To my surprise, it turned out to be...

Hi all, I'm looking for a particular connector to make a CD audio cable for one of my retro PCs, but I realised that I don't actually know what the connectors are all called. There's a photo of one type of "universal" cable here...

Hi all, I have a 5.25" floppy that has four jumpers on it - D0, D1, D2 and D3. I am aware the normal set up is two drives with D1, and a twist in the cable. Two questions: (all in the context of standard PCs) Does setting a drive to D0 allow you to use a straight-through 34-pin cable? In...

Hi all, I'm interested in trying to get more than two floppy drives into the same PC. I don't have a four-drive floppy controller, but I have found a generic two-drive ISA card that can operate as a secondary floppy controller. Unfortunately I'm not having much luck getting DOS to see the...

Hi all, I'm hoping to use a CompactFlash card with my 286, but as I have just gotten the XTIDE BIOS working, I'd like to use an original 16-bit ISA IDE controller, rather than one of the modern CF ISA cards. I was planning to use one of those CF adapters that plugs directly into the IDE slot...

Hi all, I've had a VT320 terminal that needs repair for some time now, and I've decided I'm never going to get around to fixing it so I'm happy for it to go to a good home. It powers on OK but the picture on the screen is scrambled, as if there is no horizontal sync. It's been a while since I...

Hi all, I'm looking to swap an NEC APC for a Shugart SA-850 double-sided 8" drive. The NEC comes with two half-height 8" double-sided drives, so hopefully this will be considered a fair trade! Unfortunately there is no keyboard or software, however disk images can be found online. The...

Hi all, To save removing the ROM chips from my 286 board and dumping them in an external device, it seems like an easy option is (or was, until I tried it) to just use DEBUG.EXE to write the ROM data to a file. Unfortunately when I try this, it either drops every second byte, or the machine...

Hi all, Is it possible to get an RSS feed of new posts across all or some of the subforums here? I like to skim through posts regularly in my newsreader, otherwise I have so many forums to keep track of I often forget to visit. Being able to see messages all in one place also makes it much...