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Hi @KenGlad, Welcome to the forum. Sorry to hear about your parents. A bunch of us archive as much early software as we can get our hands on. It's definitely worth asking if any of the software is still around; I'd be glad to help archive it. Unfortunately many folks of the early PC era are...

Welcome @keritech, glad you've joined the forum!

I love the diversity of the early 80's machines.

Welcome @Whiteprinter! Glad you said hello.

What system was that for @Chuck(G)?

I would be interested in option #3.

This isn't exactly what you're looking for @Jimbob81, but there might be some helpful bits for you. There's a shell to an empty device driver for openwatcom here: https://github.com/eduardocasino/dos-device-driver. I cobled together some code that @Chuck(G) (thank-you!) had posted a while ago...

Back in the day if an app wasn't scriptable, you could generally use QuicKeys to automate the manual controls. I did some crazy stuff between QuicKeys and AppleScript. You can tell it to click on particular x,y coordinates, type characters, like command s, and so on. It can be quite finicky, but...

I used AppleScript quite a bit back in the day to automate things. The easiest way to get a handle on the language is to use the recording capability, do your actions by hand, and then read the script that gets auto-generated. The AppleScript language is quite obtuse and a bit weird, but once...

Hi @1302L, I downloaded your image just to check if I could boot my machine, and it did indeed boot up correctly. I was only able to see the right floppy drive as drive B. Otherwise it worked fine.

You have to load the ansi driver. It's on several of the DOS disks as ansi.exe. You execute that and it's a program that stays around after it's run. Then you simply run type BADAPPLE.ANS I'll keep you posted. I'm using standard hardware so it's easy to put together. Applications that stick to...

I recently downloaded the ANSI version of Bad Apple and played it on my Victor just to see if it would work. It did, was kinda slow but displayed correctly. I got a chuckle out of that. It's the BADAPPLE.ANS file in the upper-right corner of the page. You have to load the ansi.exe driver from a...

I would suspect they're scanning the website for suspicious code. Some of the assembly or c code posted here probably matches something "suspicious" in their algorithm and they're marking the site due to the match.

Thanks for providing the PSU parts list, @mark0x01, I'm sure I'm going to need to refurb an Astec power supply at some stage. LMK if you'd like me to try and do any part investigation on a power supply I have. I might have components where the markings are more readable.

Hi @1302L, Sorry for the slow response. I was traveling for work and then visiting family and haven't had much time lately. I had never seen that procedure you found to update the keyboards in MS-DOS 2.1. I'm sure the general principle would work with 3.1, but the offset addresses they have are...

@1302L I'm glad you made so much progress. All the disks in the archive also have a .zip file that's readable on a modern PC. You should be able to transfer any of the files via kermit. I concur with @davidrg that you'll need to be careful about binary vs text mode. There is a RAM test on one of...

I am actually not familiar with the hdformat program. I've always used factoryf.exe followed by hdsetup.exe or autoset. I have a Plus5 manual that talks about using hdformat to format their drives, but that's a totally different controller. Have you tried running hdsetup on the drive?

I doubt you need a head alignment. These days the disks we're using are 40 years old. The disks themselves are fragile and just reading them is depositing parts of the binding material on the heads. The drives get dirty quickly due to the age of the disks. I think cleaning again will likely help...

Yeah, they upgraded the power supply with the hard drive model. My understanding is the Astec unit has a higher wattage to support the extra load. The schematic doesn't have values for all the capacitors. But hopefully you can still read the values off the actual hardware on the board. If not...

@1302L My first guess about your floppy drives would be that they need to be cleaned. Do you have a cleaning disk? If not, some isopropyl alcohol with a cotton swab would do the trick.