I have one more ISA sound card that I have been meaning to test, and it's kindof neat! Let's get it tested, time for a 🧵!
First, here's the card. It's a Labway Labsound A00 card, with a Yamaha YMF719 (OPL3-SA3) chip! Now THAT's neat.
Before I got to installing and configuring the card, I wanted to check the base address of my network card. It's set to 280h, to hopefully avoid any resource conflicts.
I copied over some drivers using the network, and the drivers we will use are Yamaha OPL3 SAx drivers. Let's get them installed! This install will get us configured for DOS as well.
So, similar to when I tried to test this card last time, it was cranky. I pulled the card out several times, moved the jumpers around, and eventually it worked (ultimately the jumpers ended up back in the original location... foreshadowing!) We get this config screen.
With the card configured in DOS, let's listen to some Commander Keen gameplay. Sounds good to me!
Let's fire up Windows 3.11 again and have a look at the software. I like the mixer! Also, the readme is very helpful for explaining how the config utilities work. Apparently this card has "3D sound support too!" We have lots of options for recording too.
Time to listen to some canyon.mid. I am not audio expert, but this sounds really good to me!!
Well, great, success! Card is nice and installed, and I took the other card out for now. Great, I'm happy! As always, thanks for following... HEY, WAIT A MINUTE! What have we here?? I booted up again, and.. card not detected. UGH.
Well, the good news is that I think this is solved...I took some rubbing alcohol to the gold contacts on the card, and I think we are good again. But I will keep this card in this PC to monitor it, to see if it keeps working. Thx for following along!
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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!
I got a new DOS file transfer toy! Now, these have been around since the dawn of time, but let's talk about it: a MicroSD to LPT Printer Port Adapter. We'll give it a test on my Compaq LTE 5400. Time for a 🧵
First, if you are interested in reading about these, there is a thread on Vogons! Included in that thread is where I found the DOS drivers for it, you can go here for that, and to read about this device! vogons.org/viewtopic.php?…
Also, here's a few more perspective shots of it, captured from different angles.
And speaking of the past, here's what I had before today: four cards. These Xircom RealPort Ethernet 10/100 cards are great for getting a laptop without Internet connected to a wired network!
My holiday break is quickly coming to an end. So, I think it's time to power on the retro PCs that I have yet to power on recently. I am sure this will go flawlessly 😂. Let's do most of this, in real time, in a 🧵 here!
Alright, you've already seen the first three. My trusty, original 486DX4/100 powered right up, as did the Packard Bell Multimedia 601 Pentium 233 MMX
How about the Kehtron 486 DX/50? Weeelll.. the front seven segment display needed reconnected (I really should fix this permanently), and the sound card was being a pain, but I moved it over one slot and it is now working!
The challenges and solutions in retro computing never cease to amaze me, and today's project is no different. Today's goal was getting working storage in this AST Premium Exec 386 laptop. And fortunately, somewhat against the odds, I found one! Let's talk about it in a 🧵 here!
So, anyway, the issue I had with this laptop is that the original 20MB 3.5" IDE hard drive had died. I thought "no problem, I'll pop on eBay and get one." Except they are scarce and expensive. I picked up two 120MB drives and one 40MB drive. None of them worked.
In the past, I had also tried a CF card. I could get the CF cards to a point where they were accessible, but when I go to boot, I get a blinking cursor.. and sometimes a "non system disk or disk error" a few minutes later. Tried multiple CF cards, same result.