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Recent content by vwestlife

  1. vwestlife

    What is this for? 9pin to 15pin cable

    It's almost certainly to use a VGA card with an older MultiSync-type monitor, many of which had a DE9 video input.
  2. vwestlife

    Easiest way to get 16 MHz CPU running on any XT board?

    I once had a case whose speed display came with an ISA card that somehow attempted to measure the system's actual clock speed and put that on the display. But it was useless to me because it maxed out at 25 MHz and I put a 33 MHz board in it. What really made it cool is that it had little LED...
  3. vwestlife

    Easiest way to get 16 MHz CPU running on any XT board?

    The popular claim that "pushing the turbo button slows down your computer" is a misleading oversimplification:
  4. vwestlife

    Custom text mode on EGA

    There's a small program called VMODE which lets you switch between 200-line, 350-line, and 400-line text mode on VGA.
  5. vwestlife

    Custom text mode on EGA

    A real EGA monitor is strictly dual-frequency: 21.8 kHz for 350-line mode and 15.75 kHz for 200-line mode. Putting out a signal somewhere between those two modes wouldn't work, unless you're using a multisync-type monitor.
  6. vwestlife

    Bye Bye, Google AI

    I'm all for a non-capitalist economy, but the proliferation of AI is the exact opposite of the way to bring it about. This modern era of AI is a purely capitalist venture. Companies wouldn't be creating it, forcing it on their users, and replacing their human workers with it if they didn't think...
  7. vwestlife

    Bye Bye, Google AI

    Even overlooking the massive issue of copyright infringement, a big problem with AI is that using it to provide summaries of news articles, research journals, documentation, etc. deprives the web sites which are actually hosting that information of the ad revenue, subscriptions, and/or donations...
  8. vwestlife

    IBM 5161 Expansion Unit. Does any text come up on the PC to indicate that there is a 5161?

    Make sure you have the drive cabled, jumpered, and terminated correctly. A common mistake is to use a floppy drive cable instead of an MFM/RLL hard drive cable. They have the twist in different places, so a floppy cable won't work.
  9. vwestlife

    IBM 5161 Expansion Unit. Does any text come up on the PC to indicate that there is a 5161?

    There's an easy way to tell without even turning the machine on: IBM 5150 PCs with the updated BIOS have a B in a circle stamped on the back panel of the case.
  10. vwestlife

    IBM 5161 Expansion Unit. Does any text come up on the PC to indicate that there is a 5161?

    Try doing a low-level format by typing g=c800:5 into DEBUG. https://theretroweb.com/expansioncard/documentation/20239.pdf
  11. vwestlife

    Perifractic wants to buy Commodore

    Most school textbooks in the U.S. are written to conform to the educational standards of either California or Texas. For the other 48 states, it's cheaper to use the same textbooks that half the country is using than have ones written to your own standards. So obviously for the books intended...
  12. vwestlife

    IBM 5161 Expansion Unit. Does any text come up on the PC to indicate that there is a 5161?

    The Expansion Unit is just a passive backplane, and the Extender Card that links it to the main motherboard doesn't contain any ROMs. If something goes wrong it'll throw an 1801 error during POST, but otherwise it is transparent in operation -- you won't see any messages indicating it's...
  13. vwestlife

    Bye Bye, Google AI

    Another trick that works is to add &udm=14 to your Google search URL, or use this portal to do it for you: https://udm14.com/
  14. vwestlife

    The correct viewing angle for a computer according to Hayes

    How about this viewing angle?
  15. vwestlife

    Ebay just killed themselves

    FYI, you might want to go into your eBay Account Settings and disable the "Use personal data for AI development and training" that they just automatically opted everyone into. https://accountsettings.ebay.com/ai-preferences
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