24 May
2023
24 May
'23
9:32 a.m.
What op sys and version do you want to run on it? Windows changed the way drivers work
after Xp so it may be an isshe. That made replacement of older PCs that controlled
equipment like xray, MRI, and industrial stuff impossible as the manufacturers couldn’t
write new drivers — lost the knowledge thru mergers and retirements/buyouts.
Sent from my iPhone
On May 24, 2023, at 07:25, Joshua Rice via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Interestingly, i'm looking at procuring a reasonably vintage laptop for a computer
festival i'm planning to attend soon. It seems that many laptops of the PIII era use
SuperIO chips, but i'm rather confused as to how "low level" they get.
Some of you may remember my RCA MS2000. I've had great luck writing bootable images
from a PIII machine with a "standard" 1.44mb floppy drive, despite the format
being 70-track, SSDD. The machine's floppy controller uses a bona-fide NEC uPD765
though, so no surprises it worked fine... ( Here's a video of me playing around with
it for the curious... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdKkaf-77dE )
I'm really asking if anyone has any recommendations for a laptop that is reasonably
powerful, fairly modern (has USB), but also has a direct-connection floppy drive that can
do device level shenanigans (via Omniflop) to allow me to write floppies in obscure
formats. Bonus points if it can use it with a serial terminal emulator, and run the Emma02
RCA 1802 emulator on it as well. I, like Tony, don't drive, so i need something
compact and portable for public transport travel.
I've been eyeing up a Dell Latitude C series (C600?) But the whole
SuperIO-over-parallel thing makes me think there might be proprietary drivers involved,
preventing device level access of the floppy drives... Hopefully some of you might be a
bit more wise.
Cheers, Josh