test-drb January 2016

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

172 participants
198 discussions

Big-Board II & Micro Cornucopia User Group Disks?

by james.h.simpson＠gmail.com

I'm a retired software engineer. My first home computer was a Z80 CP/M system built on the Big-Board II back in the mid '80s. I bought a bare board kit and went from there. It took me several months to collect all the parts before I had a running system. After discovering some very old M80 assembler listings while rummaging in my basement, I've been bit by the "nostalgia bug" so I dug out my old system and powered it on. It still runs after all of these years. The problem is that I've lost most of my old 5.25 media and therefore the system utilities . I'm looking for any Big-Board II system disk images/files I can find. I'm also trying to recover all of the Micro Cornucopia UG diskette data. Ultimately I want to put all of that old data on optical media for safe keeping. I'm looking for any BB-II stuff or Micro-C user group disk stuff. Help here will be much appreciated! Thanks, Jim Simpson

8 years, 9 months

Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA hard drives?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: CuriousMarc > I could run Explorer 5.5, but never 6.0. ?? 6.0 runs fine on all my 98SE machines. If you need to get to a later Web site (many don't work with older IE's now), there is a version of Opera (9.80, Version/10.63) which works under 98SE and makes most sites accessible. There are only a _very_ few where I have to use another browser running under a later Windows. Noel

8 years, 9 months

What to Do with a PS/2?

by nf6x＠nf6x.net

To my surprise, I found something just barely old enough to interest me on the e-waste pile at work: An IBM PS/2 85 from around 1993 or so. The hard drive is long gone and it didn't include a keyboard, but it did come with a model 8516 touch screen display and original mouse. I already had a nice Model M to plug into it, plus some scsi2sd adapters sitting around waiting for projects like this one. I'm new to the PS/2 line, but after some poking around I found images of the reference and diagnostic disks necessary to set this machine up. I also found the ADF file needed for the Cabletron ethernet card in it. The machine has 12M of parity RAM, with one SIMM slot pair still open. It has a 2.88M 3.5" floppy and a 1.2M 5.25" floppy. The 5.25" floppy is a motor-eject style which I haven't encountered before. This model has a 486SX 33MHz CPU, and the math coprocessor socket is empty. Aside from a bunch of dust that I cleaned out, it's in pretty nice cosmetic shape. This particular model was intended for duty as a server. I've been posting pictures of the machine on Twitter over the last few days, starting on 1/21/2016: https://twitter.com/nf6x/media I replaced the CMOS battery (conveniently, a CR2032 coin cell, available at the local supermarket), reconfigured the CMOS settings, set up a scsi2sd as four emulated 512M SCSI hard drives, milled a pair of generic PC hard drive mounting rails to length for use in a PS/2, and installed MS-DOS 6.22 on it. OS/2 2.0 would probably be more appropriate for this machine, but I don't have it. I see original OS/2 2.0 boxes in the shrink wrap on eBay, but eBay and I are seeing other people at this time. Well, I seem to have it fully working aside from not having suitable software installed to test out the touch screen and networking card. The monitor sometimes makes a bit of high-pitch whine which by some miracle I can still hear. Younger folks might find it objectionable. I wonder if it would be effective as a child repellant? :) Thankfully, it doesn't seem to set my dogs to howling. And now that it is cleaned up and working, I have no clue about what to do with it! I just didn't want to see it go to the landfill or end up as toxic dust in some poor guy's lungs in India, so I got permission and then carted it home. I am not normally interested in PC-family machines, but actual IBM ones interest me a bit. And the countless ways IBM found to make the PS/2 line incompatible with regular PC lines give me things to bitch about, and that in turn gives my life purpose. :) So, would any of y'all like to help me brainstorm about interesting applications for this vintage heap, or maybe point me towards non-eBay sources of software that it would like to run? -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/

8 years, 9 months

IBM 3101-12 ASCII terminal - need fuse holder

by seefriek＠gmail.com

Wow...that fired some old brain cells. I saved one of these around 86-87 and had it hooked to a VAX/BSD4 system for a while. All I really remember about it was that it was pretty well made but after wasting too much time mucking about I could never finesse a termcap entry for it that didn't have some more or less annoying corner-case breakage. I suspected that even though it had a serial port and "VT compatibility", IBM didn't much want to encourage anyone hooking one up to a non-IBM system. KJ

8 years, 9 months

Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA hard drives?

by jhfinedp3k＠compsys.to

I run Windows 98SE on a 14 year old Pentium III. I have replaced the power supply twice and all three hard disk drives. It is a really good system to run the Ersatz-11 emulator for the PDP-11, specifically RT-11. Since Ersatz-11 has built-in VT100 emulation, I don't need a separate terminal emulator. I also run Netscape 7.2 for e-mail and newsgroups. And that is all - no surfing the internet or google of any sort. Incidentally, I use Ghost 7.0 for backups to DVDs. Aside from the daylight savings time changing 3 weeks too late in the spring and a week early in the fall, I really like the system and I would like to use it for another 20 years. Since I am 77 years old now, I figure that will be just about satisfactory. The Pentium III hardware is more than a bit of a concern. I would be very pleased to upgrade to 64-bit Windows 10, but the DOS variant of Ersatz-11 is not supported and I really would prefer to keep using Netscape 7.2 since I have over 100,000 e-mails and posts to newsgroups that it is important to be able to keep. QUESTION: Is it even possible to run Win98SE on a current Intel I7 CPU with SATA hard disk drives? I realize that it might be possible under a virtual machine, but I really want all of the advantages that Win98SE provides. One problem, of course, is that there must be a patch to Win98SE when more than 1 GB of actual physical RAM is present. But I can't seem to find out anything else. What leads me to believe that there is a reasonable chance is that the IDENTICAL 3.5" floppy media is able to boot DOS >from drive A: and run on both the Pentium III (with a 3.5" HD floppy drive, of course) AND on a Q9550 Core 2 quad CPU which also has a 3.5" HD floppy drive which currently runs 64-bit Windows 7 from the C: drive, of course, using three SATA hard drives where the C: drive has an NTFS file structure and all the other partitions on all of the SATA drives have a FAT32 file structure. So without really understanding the details of the device drivers and the BIOS, it would seem that the SATA drive hardware and software is compatible. Ghost 7.0 is a file on the F: drive of the Q9550 CPU (first extended partition of the 1st physical SATA hard drive). Ghost is able to take a file produced as a backup image on the Pentium III system (and copied over the router connecting the Pentium III and the Q9500 systems - that also provides internet access for both systems) and re-create the same files on a specified partition on the Q9550 via the Ghost 7.0 program while the Q9550 is booted from the 3.5" floppy media. Since the SATA hard drives on the Q9550 system don't seem to have a problem with DOS on the floppy, then I have some hope that Win98SE could manage them as well. Has anyone experience or knowledge about being able to run Win98SE using an Intel I7 CPU with SATA hard drives all of them using a FAT32 file structure? Alternatively, does it seem reasonable to attempt to keep a system with a Pentium III CPU and associated hardware running for another 20 years? Jerome Fine

8 years, 9 months

VCF East exhibit registration is open

by evan＠snarc.net

VCF East is April 15-17; the exhibit halls are open April 16-17 (April 15 is all tech repair classes -- to be announced soon). Click here to register an exhibit: http://tinyurl.com/htlfsmh

8 years, 9 months

CDC Sabre 8" SMD blues

by ian.finder＠gmail.com

Hi folks, I recently picked up a Symbolics system built around an 8" Control Data Corp. Sabre hard drive. Some files read when I show the FEP directory listing but many show as "Error reading file header, wrong pkid read" which I assume is some sort of FEP FS integrity check. In short, the drive becomes ready and much of the data appears still there, but I have some brand of consistent read errors that preclude the machine from booting. It's not a software issue as the machine was deinstalled in a working condition. Anyone familiar with these terrible drives? Am I totally up the creek? I tried a couple different orientations. Thanks, - Ian Sent from Outlook Mobile

8 years, 9 months

What to Do with a PS/2?

by john.h.blake＠gmail.com

Vetusware is highly unreliable and tries to charge for accounts, which isn't worth it at all because most of the things I've gotten from there haven't worked. Try: https://winworldpc.com/library Their images are tested, I've used the OS/2 Warp 4 images to install on an old thinkpad 760. I'd also suggest you try some other OSes, Nextstep 3.3 should work (and may have network drivers), as well as Unixware, GEM (on top of DOS), and possibly even AT&T SVR4 or one of the later Xenix variants. If you do decide to go with OS/2, you should also be able to find native applications and development tools there too. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

8 years, 9 months

Decimal Adjust Accumulator on the 4004

by kylevowen＠gmail.com

I'm currently writing a bit of code for the 4004 at the moment, and playing with it in the online Javascript emulator found here: http://e4004.szyc.org/emu/ According to http://e4004.szyc.org/iset.html (which I believe is copied straight from the MCS-4 Users Manual), the DAA instruction should increment the accumulator by 6 if carry is set or if the accumulator is greater than 9. Carry should be set following the instruction if the resulting addition generated a carry; otherwise it's unaffected. Let's say the accumulator is currently 9, carry is not set. I add another 9. Accumulator is now 2 with a carry. Running DAA should turn this into 8 with carry set, indicating that 9+9=(1)8. Am I thinking through this correctly? I ask, because according to the simulator's source code, DAA won't do that, if I'm following it correctly: function opDAA() { //DAA Decimal Adjust Accumulator if(A_reg > 9) A_reg += 6; C_flag=0; if (A_reg & 0xf0) {A_reg&=0xf; C_flag=1;} incPC(); } It says that it'll only add 6 if the accumulator is greater than 9, not if a carry is already set. It will then reset carry and set it if and only if there was a carry. Have I found a bug in the simulator? Am I misreading the MCS-4 Users Manual? In any event, this is my proposed fix to better match what the instruction description says: function opDAA() { //DAA Decimal Adjust Accumulator if((A_reg > 9) | (C_flag)) A_reg += 6; if (A_reg & 0xf0) {A_reg&=0xf; C_flag=1;} incPC(); } Seems to work as I would expect it to. Thanks, Kyle

8 years, 9 months

Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA gard drives?

by jhfinedp3k＠compsys.to

>mark at markesystems.com wrote: >> Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2016 11:44:44 -0500 >> From: "Jerome H. Fine" <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to> >> Subject: Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA gard drives? >> >> I run Windows 98SE on a 14 year old Pentium III. I have >> replaced the power supply twice and all three hard disk drives. > >> QUESTION: Is it even possible to run Win98SE on a current >> Intel I7 CPU with SATA hard disk drives? I realize that it might >> be possible under a virtual machine, but I really want all of the >> advantages that Win98SE provides. One problem, of course, > > > Almost certainly not, at least practically. Even if you can get it to > boot and install, it will have no idea how to handle any of the modern > peripherals, and drivers certainly won't be available. So sound won't > work, the screen will be limited to VGA-16, and I'm not sure about the > keyboard and mouse (there's a reasonable chance that the BIOS will > emulate the legacy PS-2 devices, just as it's abstracting the details > of the SATA disks). Then I am really confused. I have two older systems that are able to run 64-bit Windows 7, an E8400 and a Q9550. Both take SATA drives which are still available. The mother boards are ASUS5B. I would guess they are both about 7 years old and I would hope that some of that old hardware might be a bit easier to find. I can also still boot from both system using an old DOS 3.5" floppy media and run Ghost 7.0 with these old SATA drives, but as far as I can understand, using the device drivers on the floppy drive. Is it likely that either of these two systems be able to run Win98SE with the SATA hard drives, in one case 500 GB each and the other system has 1 TB drives. In that case, it would still be possible to use current SATA drives, but the 1 GB limit on physical memory for Win98SE would need to be patched. By the way, the Pentium III that is 12 years old has 768 MB of memory, so it is possible to run Win98SE with more than 500 MB of physical memory. As I mentioned, the only two applications I would run would be the DOS variant of Ersatz-11 and Netscape 7.2 for e-mail and newsgroups. Jerome Fine

8 years, 9 months

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test-drb January 2016