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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)...

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...

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...

Hi all, I'd like to get an EGA video card working just for fun, so I can play some EGA DOS games on real EGA hardware. I found an old Everex EV-659A EGA card (8-bit ISA), however when I plugged it in one of the tantalum caps promptly exploded in a shower of sparks. It was connected between...

Hi all, I was looking at the XT-IDE project this morning and it got me thinking. (But please excuse my ignorance, I'm no expert in any of this!) Would it be possible, or even worthwhile, to create an embedded system (like a router with an ARM CPU, for example) and build it onto a card that...

Hi all, I have just managed to connect a couple of 8" Shugart drives via USB and read the data off them. The only disks I have on hand are labelled "DEC RT11 V5.4G BIN RX01 MAN" and reading them in, the data appears to be interleaved in chunks of 128 bytes. I've had a look around but can't...

Hi all, A while back I got hold of a DSD440 (rackmountable dual 8" floppy drive w/ PSU) and I have just connected it up to a generic Dell PC via a DBit FDADAP. Enabling the floppy in the BIOS seems to work (the drive light comes on when the system tries to boot from the disk) however I can...

Hi all, Found an old box in the corner of my office and was about to chuck it, but I thought I'd just post here first on the off chance anyone wants anything. There are five AT keyboards (IIRC used on 80286 and later, large 5-pin DIN plug, 101-key, no Windows keys) and four nine-pin serial...

Hi all, I just stumbled across this forum and it looks really interesting! The reason I am here is that I have obtained an 8" floppy drive and I would like to see if I can hook it up to a modern PC so that I have a method of reading old 8" disks. The drive is a Shugart 800-2 and I found the...