I got some 20MB Bernoulli disks in the mail today. Some of them are Tandy branded! Let's check them out and see how many will actually work... time for a 🧵
For the first disk, I decided to try one of the "older logo" Iomega disks. And... well... good old General Error decided to visit. This means that the disk has too many bad sectors to recover... and, yes, each disk does have reserved sectors, I covered that in a past post!
Which past post was that, RetroTechChris? I thought you'd never ask. If you are curious about how reserved tracks work on a Bernoulli disk, here you go!
I have a few things to test! A CD-ROM drive and an ATI All In Wonder Pro video card. Let's explore these in a 🧵 there!
First, the CD-ROM drive. It's a Universal Buslink Corporation drive, never heard of it! Unfortunately, it powers on, the light lights up, and, well, that's about it.
I thought I would do a teardown on it. Wow, this is a VERY cheaply assembled drive. Guess I am not surprised by that. And that MT1516E chip? It gets HOT!!! Well, these drives are a dime a dozen, so gonna call it.
Let's test out this recent acquisition of mine, a Xircom Credit Card Modem 56T (PCMCIA). I'm not optimistic, more on that in a minute. Time for a 🧵
First, some context. I picked this up at L&Y Electronics last week since I was excited to see a PCMCIA card that actually had a dongle that hadn't been lost! I paid $10 for it, despite what you see:
As I noted in the first post, I'm not optimistic. The connector is pretty shot. Furthermore, while it might not make a difference, this connector is designed for the "phone line" connection as opposed to the "modem" connection. See this "complete" example for reference.
I've been meaning to make it back to the ReStore to pick up an item or two. And I wasn't disappointed! Looking forward to setting up some home automation, and checking out this ATI All in Wonder card. What else did I find? Time for a 🧵
The Altec Lansing subwoofer was still there, but we know the story on that from before, so I left it. I don't have compatible speakers.
I decided to do a little Retr0briting on my thrifting finds. I think it turned out ok given how little effort I put into it! Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here.
So, for the speaker, I wanted to retr0brite the knobs and the upper portion of the grille. Disassembly was pretty straight forward. Look at the size of that speaker, pretty beefy!
I applied 40 volume cream developer like I had done in the past using a paintbrush. And then in the bin things went. I applied a new coat of developer cream twice throughout the day, and then just got lazy and let things sit overnight 😂
Time to "unbox" and check out this Logitech Trackman Portable. Will it be as expected? Well... no. Does it work with my AST Premium Exec just the way I want? Yes. Am I happy with it? YES!! Let's get into details in a 🧵 here!
Okay, well, let's start at the beginning and unbox. I took the "shrinkwrap" off, and this is the box. I always love having the box for cool devices like this.
Here are the contents! Some manuals, the trackball itself, and some communications program called Crosstalk because.. well.. who doesn't need a telecom program bundled with a pointing device? 😂. Ah, those were strange times 🤣