24 May
2023
24 May
'23
7:25 a.m.
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
24 May
24 May
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
11:29 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.
As i say, i'm in the market for a laptop. Omniflop, the tool i used to
write the RCA MicroDOS floppies, works well with Win2k, and i used a
Dell GX1 running Win2K to write the disks. The direct
drive-to-controller-to-OS links are what i'm after. No USB, Firewire, or
serial/parallel interfaces between the controller and rest of the
machine.Ideally, i'm after an early 2000's laptop. I've got a couple
mid-2000's Dell laptops with floppy modules, but they interface over
USB, which is a no-go for device-level stuff. I figure something from
before, or the early days of USB 2.0 is where i need to look, but i've
seen some machines that use/repurpose the parallel ports for floppy
interfacing. If the SuperIO chip sends direct drive controls across the
parallel port, as i've read somewhere, then i see no issue. But if the
floppy controller is on the drive side of the parallel port, and the OS
requires dedicated drivers to controll it, i imagine i won't have the
drive-level control i require.
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Joshua Rice -
Wayne S