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I have several vintage hard drives with unique patterns of 1's and 0's, that are found nowhere else in the world. One of a kind's. Super rare. Ok fine... best I really have is a Sound Blaster 1.5. Only ever seen one ever come up for sale, and I snagged it. Probably is nowhere near as uncommon...

Only one or the other? Sadly I'd have to pick PC/AT. My first machine was a PC/XT, I'd hate to be stuck with just that or less. Boy I sure would love to have the original though. Always wanted to play around with some cassette Basic, hear those relays, and generally explore the internals. I...

Cancelled. First I overslept. Funny part about that is I never oversleep... But today I did. Hurried up and tried to pack my backpack. Realized it was way too heavy to carry all day, and there were no items in there I was willing to leave behind. I just wanted to roll in the first day of...

When time allows... I'll admit, I'm doing a fair bit of game playing. However, that itself is not very fulfilling, so an increasingly larger chunk of time spent with my old machines nowadays involves learning to program with them. I like the quaint programming environments, or lack thereof even...

Taking the train there from Detroit. First time going to VCFMW, or any other such thing.

If replacing those FETs doesn't work, I would bust out the FLIR camera and find out which components are getting super hot prior to the shutdown. Sounds like a thermal shutdown scenario. You'll usually (but not always) see the culprit component get hot, along with a few incidental components...

Every once in awhile, you have to drop everything else in life and install the new thing someone made on some ancient machine. This is one of those times. The machine I most wanted to run something like this on would be the Tandy 1000 TL. Just as a reminder, it's an XT-class machine with an...

Don't forget to unplug the speaker, might be difficult to see if you're not looking for it. If you pull it out too excitedly without unplugging the speaker, could break the connector. Please don't ask me how I know this...

Makes sense. That's probably what I did. Especially x86 assembly... takes one of average intelligence such as myself awhile to wrap my head around how the memory segmentation works. Anyway, I'm sure it's going to be awesome. Your audience probably has at least some knowledge of assembly...

As far as soldering jobs go, this one is pretty easy. There are two ways I might approach this removal: First I'd try just solder wicking, next I would try the low-temp alloy solder method. Solder tip I use for pretty much everything is a Hakko T18-D12 chisel tip. This size tip would work just...

Thanks for that info. The final cut of the edits I made to the Sergey FDC BIOS ended up being just 2 instructions: mov al,94h ; Tandy 1000 SL/TL planar FDC, HDD, PPT "off" out 65h,al However there were some 4 or 5 instruction iterations I went through before settling on just these two...

Dig it! This is the good stuff. Learned something: Never knew about that checksum part. It is strange that some edits I made to Sergey's Floppy Bios and burned onto ROM actually worked (a few extra lines of instruction at the entry to disable Tandy 1000 SL/TL onboard FDC), but I never knew...

It is fine the way it is. Well, not really. I don't understand the constant drive to compartmentalise people. And many people don't like being labelled. I say, get rid of it completely. This is an old computer forum. So says the Jr.

There are at least a couple of places in mind you could go, sign up and be a member for a little while to gain trust, and then create these little "subreddit" like enclaves within the site. You could in theory start your new fan club gathering place at one of these sites, and not be bothered by...

After reading this thread, it has dawned on me what might be occurring whenever I run a particular demo on my Apple IIGS. The screen ends up looking very similar to what you're showing, but on an Apple IIGS monitor, after trying to run a certain demo on it. Thought my monitor was toast, even...

My first Atari... oh wow, oh boy, where do I start? It was about 3 or 4 months ago, I finally pulled the trigger on getting my hands on an Atari 400. This machine is well before my time, I was born in '85. It came with about a dozen carts. Have to say, it's probably the most...

We still have a small handful of vintage Fluke 77's being used as daily drivers, where I work. Still get calibrated yearly. For some reason, I keep accidentally turning the dial the wrong way (counter-clockwise) on these meters, and the dial definitely isn't meant to be turned in that direction...

I've got one of those big ol' 16-bit ISA RAM boards in my Packard Bell PB286 AT clone. Could not find the documentation listing the DIP switches anywhere. Had to brute-force trial and error the DIP switch settings. Eventually got it to detect 2048 KB in the entire system, which means it's only...

Chances are, the number of contiguous 1k memory blocks found at startup is stored in the BIOS data area at 0040:0013 [WORD]. If you run DOS DEBUG and type "d 0040:0013" and look at the first 2 bytes it returns, it should tell you how much RAM the BIOS found. For example, on my Tandy 1000 TL, I...

Thanks for the info. You're right. I'll go back to that little project and give that a shot. What I did was hijack the int 1C timer interrupt, to set a flag to read the joystick on the main loop. I'm used to programming microcontrollers, so that was one of the first things I tried to figure...