I picked up this $5 VESA Local Bus I/O card at the System Source Swap Meet. Let's test it out! Time for a 🧵
This card is a SIIG Professional VL. And it has your typical I/O as you can see here: dual IDE, FDD, 2 serial, 1 parallel, and 1 game
We'll start out with a base case, which includes the Promise EIDE 4030 card that is installed. I did do a quick bootup with this card installed, and it was successful.
Who here believes in redemption? The other day, I was cursing these SMC Elite 16 ISA network cards as they were giving me all sorts of trouble. Let's give them another chance since I have so many of them 😂. Time for a 🧵
Anyway, this thread starts out with a funny story. I grabbed a PC at random, and it happened to be the Kehtron PC. Guess what kind of card was already installed and operational in it? Yep, a SMC Elite 16 😂. Well, good, this problem should be solvable then!
As science teaches us, always start with a control group, and we lucked out in this case. So I booted up Windows for Workgroups, and the card is working great. Looks like we are set to 0x280 and IRQ 3 per the DOS EZStart utility.
I picked up a $5 ISA video card (!) at the System Source Swap Meet! Let's test it out. Time for a 🧵
So this card is based on the Cirrus Logic GD-5422 chipset. It looks to be a STB System Horizon card. I didn't count the memory, but looks to be 1MB
I installed it in the system, and we can see the BIOS splash screen for it (sorry for the blurry picture). From there, I installed some drivers that I found on Vogons, and bumped up the resolution. Looking good!
I got a memory upgrade in the mail yesterday for my Compaq Armada 7770MT! And, well... OF COURSE this was an adventure. Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here!
So, why was this an adventure? After all, it's a simple memory upgrade, right? Well, for whatever reason, the display wasn't lighting up, so I went with an external monitor. Okay, fine.
I did troubleshoot and solve that. Bad LCD inverter. That's a first! I swapped it out of a parts laptop. Okay, let's continue MemTest. Ah geez! We have a bad module.
I did a system restore on my $3.33 Packard Bell Legend 11CD. This is a GREAT little 486DX2/50 system. Let's talk about the restore process, in a 🧵 of course!
The first thing that I did was to write out track 0 of the hard drive with Packard Bell System Credentials. I found credentials for a Packard Bell Legend 10CD, which is similar. I tweaked them a bit and then wrote them out! The HDD in this system is a 730MB Western Digital.
From there, I needed to track down a boot disk and Master CD. I found a boot disk that was close enough (thank you, ), and from there, changed the port in config. sys for the Panasonic 2X CD-ROM drive in my system. From there I wrote this image to a disk. ryan.thoryk.com/pb-restore/
I decided to do "retro computing from the recliner" tonight, and set up Windows 3.11 For Workgroups on my "Super Armada 7770DMT". Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here!
So, this particular computer doesn't have a traditional floppy drive since it originally had the dreaded Citizen W1D drive. No problem! We'll use OpenFlops and disk images where we need them!
I also decided that I would use my Parallel Port to SD (SDPPD) device to transfer files to the laptop. So after creating a DOS partition, I created a disk image with the driver for the SDPPD with the right changes to config. sys to load it!