11 Dec
2016
11 Dec
'16
4:05 p.m.
Picture of the parallel port drive i am using is attached. Looks like it
will be pretty nice if i get it working, i picked it up in box at a
scrapyard, the driver floppy was destroyed beyond reading, and took me a
while to find the drivers for.
https://s20.postimg.org/4t9067ka5/IMG_0026_1.jpg
I appreciate the advice on the drives. I do have some spare 720K and
1.2MB drives, if one of those will work with the stock controller it
will be of much better use to me. I do have interest in being able to
use it on an external monitor so ill look into tracking down a Zenith
version of dos.
DOS software is the main focus, not really interested in windows. I have
an 8 bit ISA sound blaster card, i want to see if i can get some music
tracker software going on it, or perhaps a BBS / JNOS .
--Devin
On 12/11/2016 6:03 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
If it can run
DOS 3.20, or depending on WHICH MS-DOS 2.11 is
available, then the 360K drives can be trivially swapped out for 720K.
Your picture shows "generic" MS-DOS 5.00
So, you absolutely can connect 720K drives. (a 1.4M drive will
prob'ly be seen as being 720K)
It definitely can handle a hard drive. (trivial GOOGLE shows that a
20M drive was available, but ANY XT drive and controller should
prob'ly be usable.
Your parallel port hard drive should be fine, once you make a SPARE
system disk with enough extraneous stuff deleted off of it.
TRY to find a copy of ZENITH (NOT ANY OTHER BRAND!!) MS-DOS ("Z-DOS")
2.11 or 3.31
If you want to be able to switch between the internal monitor and an
external one, you will need MODE.COM from one of THOSE two versions.
(and you will need to stetp on the INT21h function call 30h in
MODE.COM, OR MS-DOS 5.00 will need to run SETVER to keep from getting
a "Wrong DOS version" error message)
If you are crazy enough to want to, you should be able to run Windows
3.00 on it, but NOT 3.10 or above. Windows, of course, will require
more disk space than you currently have.