I got my $50 HP LaserJet 6L in the mail today, and here it is. Let's have a closer look... oh.. wait a minute... oh no. Yea, not good. Let's talk about it, and some fun I had with it, and my NEW PLAN, in a 🧵 here So, yes, the plastics on this printer were brittle, and it unfortunately wasn't shipped well. As soon as I saw the box, and the size of the box, I thought we might be in trouble. And, yes, we were. Just look at all of those glorious plastic pieces.

I think it's time to consolidate a few more retro PCs 😅. Going to start with my Tandy 1000 TX which already has a new owner! I did a little bit of consolidation into my 1000 SX in preps for sending it packing. Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here!
My 1000 SX had an XTIDE card in it, but the 1000 TX had a Silicon Valley ADP50 "hard card" with a 540 MB HDD. I decided to move that over to the 1000 SX. It takes up a fair amount of space, fortunately my 8 bit ISA network card is tiny 😂

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!

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.

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:

https://x.com/RetroTechChris/status/1936494543245107360

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!

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.

During my travels to different thrift stores in the Northern Virginia area, I did pick up THREE different parts to create an Altec Lansing setup. Or, so I thought I had what I needed for a setup 😂. Yeah, not quite. Let's talk about what I learned in a 🧵 here.

When I was at one one of the thrift stores, there were a set of speakers and a subwoofer on a rack. I thought they would pair together since they were on the same shelf. These were the speakers. And I think this was the subwoofer (not my picture).

Going through my thrifting photos for the past few days, and I didn't get to posting a few, so here we go. Time for a 🧵

First, we have some optical drives and some media I found at one of the Goodwills. Glad I waited, I found a much better deal on media at Savers today!

At a Savers in Woodbridge, VA, Justin found a modem he wanted. I also saw a few computers (not too interesting), and this cool boombox!

As a part of my "PC deduplication" efforts, I decided to swap this UMC Green CPU into my Gateway 486/33C tower. Naturally, not everything went to plan 😂. Let's talk about it in a 🧵 here.
First of all, to get started, here's some pictures of the insides of the Gateway. Currently there is a 486DX-33 "overdrive" processor, which I will hold onto for later. I took a nice picture of the card order (less critical for an ISA system, but figured why not!)

Okay, just wrapped another case swap, this time for my 486DX4/100 system. Naturally, I had a few problems to sort out as I went through this. Let's talk about it in a 🧵 here. I ended once swapping from a "new" Macase that I bought recently that was in better shape. Despite being the same model, they are slightly different! One is a little taller and has some other differences. Funny how things that look so similar can be different 😂

Time to do a case swap for my Pentium 233 MMX. We're going from one Enlight case to another! Here's the end result. I thought this was going to be easier than it was, let's talk about it in, you guessed it, a 🧵 here!

So, you might ask: why do a swap? Well, the current case for my Pentium 233 MMX is nice, but it is a little bit beat up. I found this poor computer in 2019 at Computer Reset being used as a "stepping stool" to get to higher shelves. And I rescued it!

Okay, the first PC project is complete in support of my "slight collection slimdown." I've set up my Compaq Presario 2200 to "match" how the Presario 2100 was configured. Let's talk about it in a 🧵 here. So, the first question people may ask is "why the trade up?" Well, the Presario 2200 is slightly faster, and is cosmetically in better shape. The 2100 is missing a FDD button and a volume button. Probably could be 3D printed, but that's ok.. a future project for someone else😂

I picked up this Parallel to USB adapter on eBay for $1 plus shipping. Let's check it out with my Panasonic KX-P2123 24-pin dot matrix printer! Time for a 🧵
So, the first thing I did was "unbox" it and throw that grody packing material away. Inside we have a cable, a floppy disk with drivers, and a manual. Nice!

Recently, I announced that I was working on a packet driver for the DaynaPORT SCSI/Link, which will bring wireless support to DOS for select SCSI emulators. But did you know there are other wireless solutions available as well? Let's talk other methods I have used in a 🧵 here!


First, and this one is tried and true, and I have used it the longest: the Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA cards. I presume you could also use the PCI desktop cards, but haven't tried it. You're limited to 802.11b and 128-bit WEP, but these cards work GREAT!

https://x.com/RetroTechChris/status/1746305970358128892

I'm behind on my testing... let's check out these new XTIDE Deluxe cards that I picked up from Monotech PCs that arrived this week and answer a few curiosity questions. Time for a quick 🧵
I installed a CF card into the first XTIDE Deluxe card, and installed it into an ISA slot in the Rustbucket PC. I also have a SCSI drive in this system. And.. as we can see here in my boot manager, BootIt Bare Metal, both drives are present! Perfect!

I got this dual floppy drive in the mail this week! It's a 1.2MB 5.25" and 1.44 MB 3.5" combo drive by Teac! Let's check it out in a 🧵 here!
So, first, let's talk about the model number. Figuring this out was a little confusing: there's one model number on the top, and then, since each drive is its own entity, I found a label for the bottom drive too. But, looking at the manual, this is a Teac FD-505

I bought this BlueSCSI V2 back in April. My goal was to get WiFi in DOS. Well, there is just one problem: there aren't any drivers for that. Well, that just changed 😂. This is very beta, but I wrote a DOS packet driver, and it seems to be working well! Big shout out to @wrljet who provided moral support, suggested tools, and offered suggestions!

I made it through testing the rest of the ISA and PCI interface cards that I talked about yesterday... erm... at least as well as I could. I'd say things went pretty well! Let's talk about it in a 🧵 here!


We'll use Windows 98 SE for the testing again. And I'm starting out with a "freshly" copied partition again. It's for the best when installing a bunch of drivers.

A few weeks ago, I purchased a group of 17 ISA and PCI cards of all different types! I've had a chance to test out some of them and the results have been PRETTY good, despite an issue here and there. Let's talk about the first round of testing in a 🧵 here! So, first, this is the shipping box for the card. Eek! And, naturally none of the cards were in ESD bags. Oh well. Annnnyway, moving on, I stacked and sorted. 6 NICs (plus 2 bonus ones I bought), 5 sound, 1 IDE, 1 video capture, 3 misc interface, and... 1 MODEM 😂😂