Repaired this Matsushita CR-563-B CDROM. The CD wasn't spinning because the laser wasn't working. The laser wasn't working because the motor driving the laser up and down the control arms wasn't working. I manually moved the control arms with my fingers to loosen everything up and bingo! it's working perfectly with my Creative CR1830.

I’ve been using DOS since since 1996, and only today leaned about the SUBST command! Virtual floppy drive capability right under my nose this whole time.

For (internet downloaded) drivers that demand to be installed from a floppy and will *only* unpack from A: or B: - this is very useful, I don’t own many working floppies but SUBST is just the ticket.

I know, I know, I should pick up a floppy emulator. I just like the aesthetic of a real FDD on the 6x86, even if it seldom gets used.

SUBST works for some CD games as well that don't install completely to the hard drive and don't have any Red Book audio, such as Daggerfall.

CD audio is the only real hangup for bare metal virtual disc emulation. It's just not a thing.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-07-19, 15:02:

SUBST works for some CD games as well that don't install completely to the hard drive and don't have any Red Book audio, such as Daggerfall.

CD audio is the only real hangup for bare metal virtual disc emulation. It's just not a thing.

No, I guess there's no way around that at all. Only a couple of my titles make use of it fortunately, Alone In The Dark being one. I think maybe original Worms does too.

Another day, another bad BIOS flash, and bricked motherboard.

It wasn't even an incorrect ROM this time, the AMI programmer just got half way through and came out with:

"Programming error. System will not be usable unless existing flash EPROM is replaced with new programmed flash EPROM. Please turn off your system"

Gee, thanks for the info AMI!

Is anybody aware of a UK based vendor who either sells pre-programmed EPROMs for vintage hardware, in this case for my beloved socket 7 system (MS-5182) - or who I could send the misflashed chip to for re-programming? I was tempted to invest in a programmer myself, I'm quite experienced with doing modern chips using CH341A but that's about as far as it goes. Either way the cost of another programmer seems prohibitive for just the one chip.

I've emailed the people at biosmaster.co.uk to see if they can help, if anybody has any alternatives, please do drop me a line.

If you have another motherboard that takes the same type chip, you can try a hotflash, boot that with it's own bios, pull bios with it live, insert corrupt bios, flash it, turn off, give it it's own bios back. loop of carboard pre-installed under the chip helps you pull it cleanly with power on.

However, could also be a hardware error in the chip, so might need another chip (which could be taken from a deceased board and hotflashed as above)

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-07-19, 15:02:

CD audio is the only real hangup for bare metal virtual disc emulation. It's just not a thing.

well ackshually, there was something in Gotek like Optical Driver Emulator - Is it possible? Someone at some point posted a TRS that intercepted CD audio commands to CDROM and send those over the network(or serial?) to another computer with audio player.

Given how many consoles they've developed ODEs for, I don't see why they couldn't develop a CD Audio-capable one for PCs that you just wire into your sound card the traditional way and let it do the work of playing the audio.

Hell, given what you can do with ATAPI thanks to it tunnelling SCSI vendor commands, all sorts of interesting tricks could be achieved. (eg. Imagine a TSR which implements DOSBox-style "rack up a bunch of disc images and then press Ctrl-F4 to swap discs while a game's running" interaction. Design it to make it really easy to insert/remove sets of discs and call it something like CADDY.COM.)

Dan386DX wrote on 2024-07-19, 22:02:

Another day, another bad BIOS flash, and bricked motherboard. […]
Show full quote

Another day, another bad BIOS flash, and bricked motherboard.

It wasn't even an incorrect ROM this time, the AMI programmer just got half way through and came out with:

"Programming error. System will not be usable unless existing flash EPROM is replaced with new programmed flash EPROM. Please turn off your system"

Gee, thanks for the info AMI!

Is anybody aware of a UK based vendor who either sells pre-programmed EPROMs for vintage hardware, in this case for my beloved socket 7 system (MS-5182) - or who I could send the misflashed chip to for re-programming? I was tempted to invest in a programmer myself, I'm quite experienced with doing modern chips using CH341A but that's about as far as it goes. Either way the cost of another programmer seems prohibitive for just the one chip.

I've emailed the people at biosmaster.co.uk to see if they can help, if anybody has any alternatives, please do drop me a line.

Yesterday I had a non working Asus K7M. These boards also need reflashing, common problem.
If you encounter much BIOS work, an external programmer is really a good investment.

After a couple of tries flashing, it went through. Old chips can get stubborn I guess.

Been installing games on the NanTan FMAK9200D - Wing Commander 3 and the 11th Hour. So yeah, more gigabytes of ISOs being run virtualized by a 486 with a insane sized HDD.

THe install of OpenBSD did not work out, I managed to avoid the 63 sector offset but failed to mark the partition active...not sure if I need to....to get BSD running with a DDO. I'm getting warmer though. That said, I may play with some other ideas. I thought the CD-ROM died at one point, I think one of my IDE cables might be a little wack or shorting or something, but I got it all back running and the 486 is happier than ever. Also, I finally figured out why I had to keep re-flashing my AWE64, it's because it's memory address for the Flash Rom is VERY close in Memory space to the Ethernet Card - so when the Ethernet Card or AWE64 did certain things, either my AWE64's firmware would get wiped, or the Ethernet card would stop working and crash WIndows for Workgroups at boot time if I chose to run that - or I'd not connect to the network in FreeDOS and not have any sound to boot. So I'm shifting memory addresses for the Ethernet card around in my time honored tradition of making a spreadsheet of IRQ's and Memory Addresses, hehe.

I had to go into safe mode to remove a crappy driver, to stop a BSOD loop. How retro is that?

(This post isn't wholly true 😀 )

Well after getting my hands on a novint falcon controller i discovered that the ball part of the controller was let's say "unique"

It has been modified, some parts are clearly 3d printed and the whole thing had a spring like accessory that pressed on the 4 buttons on the PCB, all in all i'm not displeased, i was planning to create a pistol grip but i thought i was gonna use the OG ball, this thing offers me one extra button which is what i needed, now i just need to 3d print a gun that can make use of that pcb while also feeling good during gameplay.

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-20, 07:15:

Also, I finally figured out why I had to keep re-flashing my AWE64, it's because it's memory address for the Flash Rom is VERY close in Memory space to the Ethernet Card - so when the Ethernet Card or AWE64 did certain things, either my AWE64's firmware would get wiped, or the Ethernet card would stop working and crash WIndows for Workgroups at boot time if I chose to run that - or I'd not connect to the network in FreeDOS and not have any sound to boot. So I'm shifting memory addresses for the Ethernet card around in my time honored tradition of making a spreadsheet of IRQ's and Memory Addresses, hehe.

That would make a really interesting YouTube video 😀

I've finally got around to uploading the disk images I got from my T4600C to the Internet Archive 😀

Then I found that there's Toshiba Card Manager 3.0 software which no-one else has shared yet, it's basically a Toshiba branded Phoenix Card Manager like pcm301.rar: Re: PCMCIA CF Cards on an old 486 Laptop

Soon I'll be uploading the disk images for my T2450CT and make a post about the *adventure* I had bringing that back to operational status, it's got the super-rare optional soundcard too!

Dan386DX wrote on 2024-07-19, 22:02:

Is anybody aware of a UK based vendor who either sells pre-programmed EPROMs for vintage hardware, in this case for my beloved socket 7 system (MS-5182) - or who I could send the misflashed chip to for re-programming?

If you're stuck you can post the chip to me and I'll try to program it in my TL866. I'm in the south west.

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2024-07-17, 07:01:

Installed a totally normal OS on my iMac G3 the other day 😜

NT3.51 support has been added to maciNTosh with release v0.05, so that too had to be given a try 😁

Not today, but last week. I took an 8 days long vacation and spent it in Transylvania hiking and visiting various towns. There was a steampunk and fantasy exhibition in Cluj-Napoca where there I've played some with this:

Beautiful city by the way.

astonsmith wrote on 2024-07-21, 14:02:

Dan386DX wrote on 2024-07-19, 22:02:

Is anybody aware of a UK based vendor who either sells pre-programmed EPROMs for vintage hardware, in this case for my beloved socket 7 system (MS-5182) - or who I could send the misflashed chip to for re-programming?

If you're stuck you can post the chip to me and I'll try to program it in my TL866. I'm in the south west.

Thank you - that's kind, I may yet take you up on that. I'm in Cornwall myself. Will keep ye posted.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-07-20, 02:13:

If you have another motherboard that takes the same type chip, you can try a hotflash, boot that with it's own bios, pull bios with it live, insert corrupt bios, flash it, turn off, give it it's own bios back. loop of carboard pre-installed under the chip helps you pull it cleanly with power on.

However, could also be a hardware error in the chip, so might need another chip (which could be taken from a deceased board and hotflashed as above)

Sadly none of the other boards I have use same chip, some have the same DIP32 form factor, but I'm fairly sure the pinouts can vary?

Did some very shallow testing of what I had laying around of pairs of 72 pin DIMMs. Using a Pentium TX motherboard, I obviously couldn't test the singles.
Tested to POST and memory count, most of all to find their sizes rather than finding data sheets for the chips 🤣

An interesting finding though; of every pair of 72 pin RAM I tested, not once did I have to re-seat DIMMs to get it to POST. That's a thing I find myself doing all the time with 168 pin SD-RAM 🤷‍♂️