My new old stock Tandy 1000 SX is now all configured! As mentioned earlier, I'm going to made a video about it at SOME point. But let's talk about the fun I had today with getting it set up. Was setup 100% trouble free? No. But was it the Tandy's fault? Also, no. Time for a 🧵
The first thing I did was to populate this gorgeous motherboard with a full 640K RAM, and also popped in a NEC V20 processor for the 8088. Flawless! No issues whatsoever with this!
Next up, I jammed in some cards. Network. XTIDE. Multi I/O. Real Time Clock. On boot, we see the XTIDE option ROM screen, so we are now cooking!
Well, after spending way too much time this weekend trying to get my MPEG-1 decoder working on the Presario 5528 from a fresh Windows 95 install, I finally was successful. Let's talk briefly about it in a 🧵 here!
So, first some background: what's the story with MPEG-1 decoders? Well, back when PCs weren't quite powerful enough to play full-motion video, hardware options like this were popular. This machine has a S3 Scenic/MX2 (86C443) chip to do just that.
For this particular system, this chip pairs with an S3 Trio64V+ (8C765) via the S3 Scenic Highway bus. That said, it's fair to say that MOST S3 Trio64V+ cards did NOT pair with a Scenic/MX2, as this MPEG-1 option chip seemed to be FAIRLY short lived.
Okay, let's play with this "new to me" Compaq Presario 5528 All In One that I picked up this morning. Going to build this thread as we go! But let's get this kicked off! 🧵
As we saw from the first picture, this is a Pentium 75 system with 72MB RAM and a 1.0 GB HDD. As we look at the bezel, we can see it is not in perfect shape. But perhaps we can fix that up later!
The first thing I did was run MemTest86+ which passed. From there, I got out my "good camera" because, as we can quickly see, we're going to need to be able to adjust shutter speed here 😂
I got a few optical drives in the mail today. Let's get them tested. Time for a quick 🧵
Okay, here we go. First up is a Toshiba XM-5302B. This is a 4X IDE drive! I loaded a Microsoft Money '99 CD into the drive, and this drive works GREAT!!
Next up, we have this Mitsumi CRMC-FX4831T 48X drive. Once again, we load up the MS Money disk, and pass!!
Let's talk about my newest PC acquisition, which might be the most budget build ever 🤣. But there was a reason for buying it. I'll cover that... along with a Windows 95 installation, in a 🧵. Let's go!
First, why did I buy this? Well, the plan was to do a case swap with another system I had, which had some strange "fit" issues. However, that planned got smashed... literally. So, I thought we might as well explore what's left of this PC!
This system has a PC Chips M748MR motherboard, an Intel Celeron 400 MHz processor, and 16MB of RAM. Yikes! And of course the case is nothing fancy, but is nostalgic for me. But yea, this is the most budget build ever, for sure!
I just watched a video where YouTuber Action Retro set up a web server on a floppy disk using ELKS (the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset). I thought, I have to try this for myself! Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵
So, first of all, what is ELKS? It's the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset, and it will run on a wide range of hardware, including 8088 systems. Pretty wild for a modern product! If you want to read more or try it out, GitHub repo is here: github.com/ghaerr/elks
Alright, let's go. I need to choose a system that will support the networking for ELKS. Turning to the Wiki, as of right now, the network cards supported are NE1000, NE2000, Western Digital 8003, Western Digital 8013, and 3com Ethernet III (3c509). My 486 DX4 has a 3Com 3c509!