• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Recent content by SomeGuy

  1. SomeGuy

    Questions about 3.5 inch floopy driver on Compaq Portable 2

    You could try loading the 2M-XBIOS / 2M-ABIOS driver at startup. But upgrading the ROM BIOS, if an update is available, is the best solution. I see there are some Compaq Portable II bios files on MinusZeroDegrees: https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/rom/rom.htm
  2. SomeGuy

    Ebay just killed themselves

    Haven't had much time to actually mess with eBeh latley. But now I am seeing a pattern that if I review more than a few dozen bookmarked items, it will insist on "verifying" my browser, which of course does not work right.
  3. SomeGuy

    The Eagle PC

    I finally got a minute to try the dumped 1.2 bios posted above in the PCE emulator - there is a build with an Eagle PC machine type - and this bios seems to mostly work. (for some reason this version gives PCE a boot error at startup, but press a key and it successfully boots). Thanks for...
  4. SomeGuy

    Looking for Internet Mail service for Win95 Exchange 4.0 client

    Just did a quick search through my crap, and surprisingly I have this update. Attempted to upload it as an attachment. Note that this was freely redistributable. Have not tried it. It is getting harder to search for this sort of thing. It probably is "out there" in some big zip or ISO, but you...
  5. SomeGuy

    XT-IDE and Plus Hardcard 10MB at same time in Compaq Portable

    "3) Hardcard with jumper in "PC" mode, AND XT-IDE: The XT-IDE boot message appears at startup, including "Master at 300h: SanDisk SDCFJ-256" but it actually boots the Hardcard as C:, and no CF D: drive" The bios is loading, that is good. It seems to be talking to the card. That is good. Clearly...
  6. SomeGuy

    Seeking Help Identifying 5.25" Floppy Drive

    That drive has a Shugart interface, so it is not an Apple II drive. It does appear to be single sided, so not of much use on an IBM PC. It does not have jumpers on the drive select, only a wire permanently soldered in to the first position, suggesting the drive was used by an OEM as part of some...
  7. SomeGuy

    Missing Operating System - what's going on here?!?

    When the CHS geometry recorded in the MBR/boot sector does not match what the BIOS reports, a booted copy of DOS can figure out what is going on and often access the drive fine. But DOS's simplistic boot loader has no idea what is going on, and usually fails.
  8. SomeGuy

    can ATX PSU be used instead of XT PSU ? floppy working weird

    If you can boot from the hard drive, what happens when you access a floppy disk from DOS? If you can, perhaps try running ImageDisk, to see what it reports when doing a read test.
  9. SomeGuy

    The Bombing of Pan Am 103

    I guess the IBM PC and XTs are highly recognizable. But would a single office have been full of just those in 1988? A lot of businesses were still on terminals. I can think of one office that at the beginning of *1996* had about a dozen 486/Pentiums in the front offices and the rest had DEC...
  10. SomeGuy

    The Eagle PC

    Right, that 1986 version is what I dumped from my own machine. All I can tell you is that it works in mine, and it only uses one EPROM.
  11. SomeGuy

    The Eagle PC

    Very interesting. Just at a glance, these both look like very early versions of the Eagle PC BIOS. In that case, I'm thinking both ROMs probably need to be installed. When you tested it, were both ROMs present?
  12. SomeGuy

    The Eagle PC

    Could you please post the contents of those two ROM chips? Yes, with the later ROM version only one chip is used. Mine also had a extra unused EPROM chip in it. The ROM from my working Eagle PC is posted near the beginning of thread. You might want to compare it to what you dumped, or test in...
  13. SomeGuy

    Can a very early PC BIOS boot anything other than a diskette drive?

    The early Davong hard drive units had a program to patch PC-DOS 1.x so it could use the hard drive. No idea if it could then boot from the hard drive without a floppy. The Eagle 1600 used a customized OEM of MS-DOS 1.25, but the hardware booting support was in the Eagle 1600 specific...
  14. SomeGuy

    Can a very early PC BIOS boot anything other than a diskette drive?

    It is interesting to think that the original BIOS *only* booted from floppy. it does make me wonder what third party storage providers would have done if IBM had not standardized on BIOS extensions. Logically, that would require either booting floppy disks with custom driver code, or replacing...
  15. SomeGuy

    I'm now going to be an AI :)

    That is the whole problem here. Humans are allowed to learn from properly licensed copyrighted material and use that knowledge. But what humans can DO with that information is very limited compared to what a magical AI can do. A single human can't answer a million questions a second to every...
Back
Top