10 Apr
2002
10 Apr
'02
2:56 p.m.
In doing a search for NEC V-20 chips I ran across this site
http://www.pcenterprises.com/newbegin.htm
It has a lot of upgrades and info for the PCjr, PS/2 and Tandy 1000. The site
was last updated in April so it is still current.
Lawrence
lgwalker(a)mts.net
bigwalk_ca(a)yahoo.com
> I
installed a PC HD 5.25" floppy in my long-suffering PCjr by replacing the
> old IBM drive. It all seems to work on DD disks, but not HD disks. Do I need
> to upgrade something else? (being somewhat ignorant on old PCs).
Yes. the computer.
Welcome to one of the least popular collectibles - the Edsel of CC.
Actually, I'm rather fond of it. It has much more personality than a plain
boring old XT clone. Now that I have Cartridge BASIC (tip of the hat to
Sellam :-) I'm able to do more practical things with it once I understand
what's actually going on ;-)
The disk controller only does "DD". It
operates at a 250K data transfer
rate, and was intended to work with 360K drives ONLY.
A 720K drive (either 3.5" or 5.25") will work with it just fine, except
that it isn't supported by PC-DOS 2.10. If you switch to PC-DOS 3.20 or
above, then it'll work with DRIVER.SYS.
What is the highest DOS I can run on a PCjr? And how can I tell the
difference between a 720K drive and a 1.2MB 5.25" drive? (See, I really *am*
ignorant about old PC systems. ;-)
Is a 3.5" disk really practical in the jr?
If you expand the RAM further (with a 512k
sidecar), then you might be
able to run Windows 3.0 on it if you are willing to devote some time and
effort to configure it.
I have the RAM disk software running, which takes up most of the 128K
internal RAM expansion, and ended up writing an autoexec.bat that copies
most of the useful DOS files into the RAM disk, makes the COMMAND.COM in
RAM the permanent shell, and makes the default path the RAM disk. This is
much, much faster. :-)
--
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Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu
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