11 Dec
2016
11 Dec
'16
4:59 p.m.
Picked this up a while back, just getting around to messing with it.
Appears to be an IBM XT compatible machine in a portable....err luggable
size. Dual 360K drives, although the second one does not seem to be
working. I can get it to boot to dos, but run out of space quite quickly.
Anyone have any experience with these machines, is it possible to
upgrade the drives in there? There appear to be isa card slots inside, i
was thinking as a last resort to swap out the floppy controller and put
some new drives in it. That space limitation is really making it a
doorstop. I have a parallel port hard drive, but the driver takes up too
much space and will not fit on the boot disk.
--Devin
https://s20.postimg.org/t0ozx0iul/IMG_0018.jpg
https://s20.postimg.org/cqytu486l/IMG_0022.jpg
11 Dec
11 Dec
5:28 p.m.
On Sun, 11 Dec 2016, Devin wrote:
Picked this up a while back, just getting around to
messing with it. Appears
to be an IBM XT compatible machine in a portable....err luggable size. Dual
360K drives, although the second one does not seem to be working. I can get
it to boot to dos, but run out of space quite quickly.
Anyone have any experience with these machines, is it possible to upgrade
the drives in there? There appear to be isa card slots inside, i was
thinking as a last resort to swap out the floppy controller and put some new
drives in it. That space limitation is really making it a doorstop. I have a
parallel port hard drive, but the driver takes up too much space and will
not fit on the boot disk.
If it is "XT compatible", and runs MS-DOS 2.00 or above (hopefully ZENITH
MS-DOS 2.11),
VER
then it can support a hard disk. "Hard Card" would be one
of the easier ways to do so.
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.
If you make a new boot disk (write protect the one that you have!)
FORMAT /S
if you delete everything except COMMAND.COM from the duplicate, then is
there room (about 300K!) for your driver? You will need to create
CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to run the driver. Surely, the authors of the
driver for a parallel port hard drive would not make a driver that would
not fit on a MINIMAL system disk! (although likely not fit on a
"complete" copy of DOS)
MicroSolutions "Backpack" drives always had a verion of their drivers that
would fit on a 360K, sometimes even on a 160K.
6:01 p.m.
On Sun, Dec 11, 2016, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Sun, 11 Dec 2016, Devin wrote:
> I have a parallel port hard drive, but the driver takes up too
> much space and will not fit on the boot disk.
[...]
MicroSolutions "Backpack" drives always had
a verion of their drivers that
would fit on a 360K, sometimes even on a 160K.
I was just going to ask, what kind of external hard drive Devin has. I'm
thinking one would be nice in my significant other's Sharp PC-7000 as
well (although that one actually had its own hard drive model; that
would be really cool to acquire).
--
Eric Christopherson
6:03 p.m.
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.
7:05 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.
7:59 p.m.
On Sun, 11 Dec 2016, Devin wrote:
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.
1.2M will NOT WORK!
720K will
There are some aftermarket floppy disk controller cards that would work in
that machine that can handle high density drives, but the stock controller
CAN NOT.
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.
Get ZENITH ("Z-DOS") MS-DOS 3.31
There might be more than one version of THAT, so get one explicitly
intended for that machine.
Although MODE.COM from any DOS version that was intended for THAT machine
is likely to work.
It may be a trivial BIOS call.
Besides special video capabilities, that MODE.COM may have other machine
specific capabilities, and some other aspects of Z-DOS Zenith MS-DOS may
not be the same as generic MS-DOS.
I think that the Z160 is based closely enough to the Z100 that
http://planemo.org/retro/downloads/z100/manuals/Z-100%20Programmers%20Refer…
is likely to be the correct one.
In stock configuration the video is CGA, so it is POSSIBLE that connecting
a composite monitor (if the Z160 has the connector) might not require any
additional software.
Do not connect an MDA monitor unless you are sure that the sync frequency
is right.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=465&st=1
Don't those machines have a debugging monitor in ROM? (something that IBM
does NOT) Otherwise DEBUG.COM should work.
9:41 p.m.
On Sun, Dec 11, 2016, Devin wrote:
It looks like missiles are about to pop out of those floppy drives!
--
Eric Christopherson
11:10 p.m.
Yeah, quite an odd pop up design on the drives,, but it works quite
well, it is pretty comfortable to use.
On 12/11/2016 9:41 PM, Eric Christopherson wrote:
On Sun, Dec 11, 2016, Devin wrote:
It looks like missiles are about to
pop out of those floppy drives!
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