Looking for info on the Dynalogic Hyperion, a "portable" DOS machine
manufactures around 1983. At least the one I have is 1983. it was designed
and initially built in Ottawa, Canada. Hyperion was acquired in about 1983
by Bytec, who was later bought by I think a Quebec company called Comterm.
Anyway, mine has stopped working: The machine still boots but no image is
displayed on its 7" diag screen. Hence I am looking for service info and/or
persons who have worked on the machine.
Any leads would be most appreciated.
Leo Butzel
Seattle, WA
lbutzel(a)home.com
Well, I finally had some success with these old computers I've been trying
to get working.
The Atari problem ended up being with the power supply. Its plug did not
properly fit the power receptacle on the computer. Once I got the proper
power supply it worked like a champ. More like I remember the last time I
played with an Atari 800 a few years ago. Then, I was amazed at how easy
it was to get up and running with a disk-based Atari 800. Everything is
total plug and play (but for real). I now like the Atari 800 :)
The TRS-80 M3 was a LOT of work but I finally got it running. It turns
out the problem with most of the units I tested most likely was a bad
keyboard or just my ignorance in not knowing how to boot it into BASIC ;)
I finally found one that had a decent keyboard and would boot to BASIC if
I held down the BREAK key upon boot-up or after a reset. I wanted to
make one nice machine out of two that I had. I moved the good keyboard
to the nicer one. The nicer one didn't have the serial port board, so I
moved it from the yucky one to the nice one. No wonder RS wanted you to
bring the machine in to the service center to get it upgraded. This is
NOT an easy computer to work on. I had to unscrew everything to remove
the motherboard to both take out the card on the one and install it on the
other. Also, there is a power cable that is added for the serial port
option when it's upgraded, so I had to cut the zip ties holding the cable
in place on the old one to move it to the new one. What a shit design.
The stuck brightness and contrast knobs were fixed with a healthy helping
of Deoxit, which is this deoxidizing agent. I worked the knobs back
and forth and they loosened up nicely. Now everything works great. I
now like the TRS-80 Model III :)
The Commodore 64 I have is just plum dead. Or at least it seems to be.
The video cable I am using has four connectors on it: red, yellow, white
and black. The 1702 monitor has three jacks on the back: chroma, luma and
audio. I tried all different combinations trying to get video on the
display but no die. What's the deal with that? I think I'm using the
wrong video cable, but all the C64 stashes I check turn up this
4-connector cable. I forgot to bring home the spare C64's I was going to
have as stand-by's so I don't currently have another C64 to compare with.
I know I have a three-connector cable that I'm sure goes to the C64 but I
cannot find one for the life of me. Grrr. I still hate the C64.
The Radio Shack Color Computer 2 is confusing. And somewhat lame. I have
to go find the disk controller carthridge to attach disk drives to it.
Then I have to find the proper disk drives. Fine. But I can't figure out
the video. I want to connect it to an Amdek color monitor. The only
video jack is the RCA type on the back that seems to be a built in RF
modulator. So needless to say I don't get video on the display. I can't
find any mention on the web of adding an external monitor to the CoCo.
The CoCo2 is lame. I do not like the CoCo2.
Any idea on how to hook the CoCo2 to a composite monitor?
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
I figure anything CP/M is on-topic, but the hardware I'm
talking
about would be brand new. :)
Are there working examples of CP/M running with just
a serial terminal connection and a drive+interface for
the sum total I/O? I'm assuming this has been done many
times and in theory would be nothing too offbeat?
If this exists, it might be useful to study the BIOS
to see what's being done there, or perhaps just buy the
board and CP/M if by chance something's out there already.
Are you giving up anything important with a terminal-based
CP/M system vs. one with integral monitor and keyboard --
in other words, cursor positioning and such in applications
being less flexible? I'm assuming the answer is "no", no
difference because of the way CP/M BDOS calls all go through
BIOS? Or is this a "in theory X in practice Y" thing?
The reason I'm asking is I've FINALLY -- after about two
months of struggle with hardware and coding -- succeeded in
getting my IDE interface working. Although it's currently
mated to a 6502 board and a 60GB HDD, since it's based on
an 82C55, could just as easily be coded to work with a
Z80/Z180 system.
Okay, I know that porting a BIOS to a new board would be
massively non-trivial. I've got a good book "Programmer's
Guide to Using and Modifying CP/M" (IIRC) which makes it
clear
it would be a fairly good prospect to take months to finish,
even with good debugging practices. (Although I'm no
stranger
to coding moderate-sized assembly programs.)
On the other hand, I'd motivated by having an SBC that could
run
any of a number of C, Pascal, Modula 2 or Fortran compilers,
along with BASIC, decent editing tools (well, I cut my teeth
on PC-DOS Wordstar!), would make such an SBC really quite
nifty as a hacking toy.
Comments?
I'm thinking of using a GAL decoder to map 32Kx8 of "shadow"
EEPROM to MEMRDs and the "shadow" RAM to the same address
for
MEMWRs upon RESET, then copy the "shadow" ROM to RAM on
coldboot,
and then write to an I/O port to cause the GAL to map only
the 128Kx8 SRAM into the machine memory map and jump to 0 to
bootstrap
up.
Not sure if BIOS could use the upper 64K
bank for storage in a useful way like disk I/O buffering,
but since 128Kx8 SRAMs are cheap and small, and I've got
a tubefull, that's what I'd want to use. :)
P.S.: I got the 360K floppy to work under Win98, but not XP.
I suspect it's just an undocumented "feature" of XP. :)
Hello,
Just a quick introduction... My name's Justin, and I've been collecting old computers for quite a while
now. Just joined the list today. :)
Now for a requests:
Among my collection is an NEC ProSpeed 286 laptop computer, which seems to be in full working condition.
The only problem is I have no manuals, drivers, or utilities for it. I couldn't find anything on the
internet despite extensive searching, and contacting NEC support as well as scouring through the NEC FTP
site. My specific problems are I can't switch to the external video output, or activate the serial port,
parallel port, or internal modem (which I think is 2400 bps).
Second, I have a 486 Philips P 3464 server tower, which I think runs at 25 MHz but I'm not completely
sure. Likewise, I don't have any software or documentation for it. Fortunately, I do have the key which
was conveniently stuck in the keyswitch when I picked up the computer! And although it looks like it has
a ROM based BIOS setup complete with a debugger, I have no idea how to use it's arcane interface and I
can't even get the computer to boot from a hard drive!
If anyone has any information on these computers, drivers, utilities, setup programs, etc, please let me
know! Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
-Justin
www.trailing-edge.com (and it's subordinates, like
simh.trailing-edge.com) has been unresponsive for about a day now. Does
anyone know if this is just temporary, or a permanent situation?
On Aug 31, 8:02, Jeff Hellige wrote:
> > > I also have a rebadged Logitech mouse, model# M-S43, SGI
> >> part# 063-0010-001, that is dark gray, almost black in color.
> I put a query on Usenet concerning the mouse and I got a
> reply back stating that it had shipped with the 230/330/550 line of
> workstations, as well as being shown in some product shots of the
> Octane2.
Ah, that makes sense. I've never paid much attention to those funny Intel
things that SGI plasyed with for a while, but AFAIR some of them did have
that sort of colour scheme. I wondered if the mouse had been from a
rebadged machine, but 230/330/550 sounds more likely.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
> Oh. Well, yeah. They're mostly the same folk. As contradictory as
>that sounds, it is really the truth.
Amazing how that is huh. They'll give you all the real junk, but toss the
stuff that is of interest.
>Let me guess. "But I thought you only like OLD Macs?"
No, it was more along the lines of "Well, it never worked right for me
anyway". My retort was simply "Yeah, but you're a moron" (I've known his
brother since I was in the 3rd grade... so I can get away with calling
him a moron and not fear that he will stiff me when he junks the iMac G4
in a month when he craps it up too.)
And to add insult to my weekend... I just got back from my sister's house
(had to fix her PC, her kids shoved the power button clean out of the
front of the case). It seems her husband did the same thing to me. They
got a new PC, and she planned to turn the old one into a kids gaming
computer. But her husband decided it was taking up space and gave it to
some guy he knows from work last month. At least I don't mind half as
much with this one, it was only a P180 Compaq, this little black, non
expandable desktop unit. And it went to another user rather than the
trash. No serious loss. (although it would have made a nice tiny netBSD
server since the thing was little bigger than a VCR)
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>
On Aug 30, 1:01, cvisors(a)carnagevisors.net wrote:
> Thanks for all of this information, it looks as if the mouse, which looks
> like the right sort of mouse, is one of the mice used for the Indigo2.
> Which unfortunatly is a PS/2 mouse, the person I got the indigo from,
> though is going to have a bit of a poke round and see if he can find the
> original mouse. Its from a university who are pretty anal about keeping
> all of these things together. so hopefully it will turn up..
Maybe this will help: there are basically 4 mice that have been used on
SGIs.
Some early 4D's used an optical mouse made by Mouse Systems, rather
rectangular in shape; it's possible to convert some old Sun optical mice to
SGI use and vice-versa (see the 4DFAQ aka "This Old SGI" for details).
BTW, having the mouse work correctly on one axis but not the other is a
common symptom of using a mouse pad with the wrong line spacing. Some
people have in the past incorrectly attributed this to "one of the LEDs not
working", but in fact the perceived non-illumination is because one LED is
visible red and the other is infrared.
Most Personal Irises and the original Indigo (both R3000 and R4000 models)
use a Mouse Systems mechanical mouse, which has a 6-pin miniDIN that plugs
into the keyboard. This is basically a serial mouse. It's a beige colour,
same as the keyboard, with about 32" of cable, part no 9150800. Benjamin,
are you sure you've not misread the last digit? I've checked half-a-dozen
mice in case I had any variants...
The Indigo^2, Indy, and later machines use a PS/2 type mouse, also 6-pin
miniDIN, which plugs into the machine (which has two PS/2 ports, one for
the mouse and one for the keyboard). The first ones were made by Mouse
Systems and look just like the earlier Indigo serial mice, except that they
are normally granite (grey) in colour, have a much longer cable -- about
105" -- and a different part number: 063-0001-001. The very earliest ones,
however, were beige (the earliest Indy keyboards were beige).
Later Indys, and O2/Octane/Origin/Onyx2 and the like, were sold with a PS/2
mouse made by Logitek. It's a rebadged 3-button Pilot mouse (equivalent
Logitek type M-S35), also granite coloured, part no 063-0009-001.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
I just received one of William's ASR33s and it appears to be in good
working order. I am not at all familiar with these machines so I have a
few questions about their operation and interfacing.
First off, when I power on this unit the "main" motor doesn't run. It
turns when moved manually, but it won't move by itself. Depending on
the motor position at power-up (I think) I sometimes hear what sounds
like a warning buzzer. Is there something I'm doing wrong? How would I
run this machine in "local" mode?
Once I figure out that this machine is working (I assume the problems
are mine and not the machines) I'd like to hook it up to my Altair
(which is now running great thanks to Dwight!). How would I go about
doing this? I'm guessing I'll need some sort of box to interface
between the TTY and RS232, but I haven't yet found any information on
that. Can anyone point me to an article, website or some other source
of information on this?
If I manage to get that all done, is there anyone on this list who has
software on paper tape that I could get copies of? I'd be most
interested in a BASIC variant and any BASIC programs that could run on
it, but anything else would be great.
What am I missing? Is there anything else I should know?
Thanks!
Erik S. Klein
www.vintage-computing.com
I am looking for the EISA "CFG" file for the trident tvga8900c video card.
If you have it or know where I can get it, it would be appreciated.
Mac Mccurdy
mac_mcc3(a)juno.com
