Recent content by mbbrutman

Wow .. I never knew about that market. So I went to their web site and sure enough, they have typewriters with clear cases approved for use in various prison systems. They even sell replacement ribbons with clear cases. It makes me think twice about all of those clear Amiga, C64 and...

I'm not familiar with perifractic. I just watched both videos in their entirety (1 hour) and that was just painful. Not my style ... Keep in mind that they have an agreement to purchase in place. No money has traded hands yet. That's a big hurdle to clear. The vision about saving us from...

Another consideration - the RTC has the ability to generate interrupts. If that happens too early (before the interrupt vector is ready) then the machine will jump to what looks like garbage and execute it. I don't think that feature is used often, but it reiterates the need to ensure that the...

The short story is that it's basically an illegal instruction. Did it try to boot from the hard drive or the floppy drive before that happened? It is important to know if the bad code is in the BIOS (unlikely) in the boot code that it tried to load and run.

I've not tried the StarTech SATA-IDE bridge on an older "native" IDE port. Just jrIDE and newer ports. I'll look into SD adapters again. How unlucky can I get? Thinking more broadly, I'm beginning to see a need for a debug version of the XT-IDE BIOS if I'm going to get anywhere. Something...

I tried two different PATA to SD adapters on very different systems and I couldn't get either of them to work. One system was slow with a jrIDE, and one was reasonably fast with a real motherboard IDE interface. After a few hours and a few different combinations, I just gave up. Do you have a...

I might get to that point to collect data, but it's a 5155 and it's just an irritating machine to work on. I have newer cards I can use, but I'm curious about what's going on with these specific cards. An occasional error just seems weird; usually something either works or it doesn't work...

I handed my MCL86jr and a spare PCjr over to the person who was doing the soldering, and he applied the new microcode. Flight Simulator still had some glitches. I think the next step is to run the core against a verification suite to find the offending opcodes. I don't know how are along that...

It would be helpful if we stuck to what I wrote ... nothing here hints that I'm trying to assign blame. I'm just trying to find out if other people have seen this problem and that is right in the title. As a secondary question, I'm asking if the BIOS does retries because it seems like a...

I don't know that it's bad, nor did I say it was bad. Glitch has his reasons for shipping that version; he only confirmed that he had a good reason for it. Perhaps you can answer the question though ... Do any versions of the BIOS do a retry first before reporting an error to DOS? What does...

I'm using the BIOS that Glitch ships with the card kit, and I'm assuming that he has a good reason for using an older BIOS. (I asked directly and he confirmed my assumption.) These cards all tested well on a USB reader, but that's consistent with the general XT-IDE experience. The machine is...

I started by wiping the MBR record with zeros before running FDISK, so the boot code is whatever DOS 3.3 FDISK put there.

I have disk exercisers that I can run. As far as I can tell I'm not running into data corruption, and in general I don't want to run a pattern type testing on FLASH storage because I have no idea that the same FLASH block will be used each time I write to an LBA. So an exerciser might help me...

The last time I touched an XT-IDE I got it directly from Hargle, and it was for testing purposes. Things have changed quite a bit ... Recently I soldered up a Glitch Works revision 4 and installed it in an IBM Portable PC (5155). I had some startup pain, but in general it works now with a...

Ok, I see the 6.0 vs. 6.9 KB/sec discrepancy ... that's a bug I'll look into. That's a much better way of describing a problem than just a off-hand comment saying that something is "quite misleading." There is no intention to mislead.