Recent content by VMSZealot

I have a curious problem with an Epson SD800 floppy drive. It's a half height combo drive with a 3.25inch floppy drive (mapped to A in the BIOS and set up as 1.44MB) which appears to be fully working (which is to say, whilst I haven't tried formatting any disks in it I was able to install...

Okay. I'm hanging my head in shame, and thanking you all for your patience (and for managing not to call me an f'ing eejit). All I needed to do was try a different CF card (1GB), and power it via a cable. It's working. And I am clearly a bit of a fool! Thank you all.

Thanks Ruud! I'm not really a hardware person. Actually, I haven't used a PC since about 1992 when I migrated from PC to Mac as my main machine. Now, I'm trying to get an old PC working (actually, a couple of them) so I can get a nostalgia fix. I'm not partisan about computers, I love 'em all!

Why do the parity RAMs have four fewer pins than the main RAM chips? What chips should I fill these sockets with?

What about something like 3COM Etherlink III 3C509B BNC Ethernet NIC ISA Network card? I have an AUI adaptor to give me RJ45.

Can you recommend a particular Ethernet card that would work with DOS 6?

I tried it with the power connected, but only once (and with only one card). But all the lights on the adaptor (other than activity) lit without the power connector being connected. I'll try again though.

I think those are wise words, Konc - but I don't have a network card (much less an MS-DOS 6.2 compatible card) for that PC. I did consider pushing files over using serial, but a CF card would be quicker. Especially since I think I've got all the bits and bobs that I need - I just don't know...

While I think of it, and as a slightly separate topic, you'll see that the battery has been wrenched off the board by a previous owner. Which is good from the perspective of preventing leak damage - but, ugh, good have been done more neatly! I was thinking of replacing it with a battery holder...

And this is the full board (with reconfigured memory at the moment - I haven't set it back to stock).

Well, it's not the entire board (I'll take that picture later), but this is the picture I took of the memory banks before I rearranged the chips (I wanted to be able to take it back to its stock configuration). It reports 2MB RAM when doing the memory check on startup (well, it does until it...

I've tried using 1GB Lexar and 2GB Sandisk Extreme III cards. I also have 256MB and 512MB Kingston cards and a 256MB Lexar card that I can try. I have no idea what size to manually enter for them though - particularly not for wpcom (I can have a reasonable stab at the other settings). It...

A chip tester sounds like a good idea. Any recommendations? Would it only test RAM - or can it test other chip types as well.

I have a 286 with a nice clean board, and which seems perfectly happy to work for ten minutes (or, at least, long enough to boot and complete a level of Xenon II) - but then it freezes. On rebooting it decides it only has 64k and goes no further. I've tried swapping memory chips around (sadly...

I have a Pentium II based PC for nostalgias sake, and I'd like to be able to get files onto it quickly from a more modern machine. After all, if I can pull off this trick with an XT (using a CF to 8bit ISA adaptor), or with a Mac G3 (using a StarTech IDE to CF adaptor) then it should be a...