18 Apr
1998
18 Apr
'98
8:34 p.m.
On 18 Apr 98 at 23:07, Tony Duell wrote:
I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to check it out more.
Like
the mchns possibilities tho.
Like most of my stuff my books come from thrift stores or garbage bins.
Whenever I do get manuals they are treasured altho most of the tech writers
should have been forced to take courses in basic communications before they
were ever allowed to have anything printed. They're almost universily bad.
Possibly the rare good ones become Sci-Fi writers :^)
ciao larry
lwalker(a)interlog.com
In exploring
the programs on the 5150's Hard-card I found two small programs
from the same company (PLUS) that made the hardcard. One was light.com and the
other sound.com parameters were light= on/ off , and sound = on / off . Since
the h-c itself had no external connectors, I'm wondering whether these are for
the cassette port. This 5150 was also configured for 2 serial and 2 parallel
I'd guess that those programs were simply to provide some means of
knowing when the hardcard was being accessed. Possibly by either turning
on a graphics block in the corner of the screen or by making some kind of
sound through the PC's speaker. Have you tried them?
on the Herc. leaving one serial unaccounted for.
The only other connector is
the f 37 pin ext. on the fdd controller card. ( for an external drive ? ) QUE's
It's for 2 external 360K (or 720K, unofficially) floppy drives. My XT has
2 360K drives in the case and 2 720K ones externally.
I can look up pinouts if you need them, but I seem to remember that all
you need to do is take a standard PC floppy cable (with the twist),
remove the controller connector and crimp on a DC37-P plug (IDC version).
Do that so that pins 1,2,20 are not used and so that the marked edge of
the cable goes to pin 21 (nearest the top of the machine when it's
plugged in). That's it.
Upgrading and Repairing P.C.'s v.5 (BTW an
excellent book with the most
extensive info on PS2 s I've seen -V.5 only) doesn't mention this port tho it
has a lot of detail on the 5150 and adapter cards.
I've looked at a lot of those books and come to the same conclusion. They
miss out so much information compared to the IBM manuals (like
schematics, ROM sources, etc) that they're a waste of money. I'll stick
to my 'mini purple wall' :-)
ciao larry
-tony