Possibly getting an M24 - keyboard options

[bobba84]

In which country you are? Maybe I can help you with a keyboard.

Thanks! But I'm in Australia, it's a long way!

 

[bobba84]

I figured some pics were due. I always like seeing a machine I'm talking about

 

[bobba84]

Yay! The COM port redirection worked! I made a boot disk with "ctty com1" in autoexec.bat and set up terminal on my 286, and I got an output!


I was able to LLF and format the drive and install DOS on it... although got some interesting quirks in the output. I guess some aspects of the LLF and format utilities address the screen directly!


Anyway, at least I know now that it's working... I just need a keyboard! :D

Thanks to all for help and advice, as always

Bobby.

 

[1ST1]

Well done!

 

[bobba84]

A keyboard is finally on it's way to me I'll post some pictures once it arrives!

I'm also keen to see if my homemade VGA adapter can get colour out of the factory video card...

 

[Trixter]

Awesome, keep us posted!

 

[bobba84]

As promised, here are some pictures!




I couldn't find the VGA adapter cable I made, so I had to make another one. Please excuse the image being off-screen, it was the first LCD I found that liked the timings and I hadn't gotten further than that. But yes, colour works! Will post more pics as I get around to setting up software / games on this beast.

On a side note, are there Windows 3.0 drivers for the factory video card? I'd love it in colour!

Thanks to all for your help with this... this was the model of my childhood PC and I'm absolutely stoked to be able to relive all those memories. I still have programs I wrote in GW-BASIC on disks on an M24 in primary school, I'll have to see if they still work!

 

[Trixter]

That's great! You even found the correct keyboard for the M24, nice!

There are Windows 1.x drivers for the 640x400x2 video mode, but I'm not sure if they extended that support to Windows 3.x or not. Windows 3 is not the correct version for that system as you'd need an EMS board to make it usuable beyond simple things.

Unless you have a Display Enhancement Board (DEB), the 640x400 mode is not in color.

If your GW-BASIC programs used SCREEN 100 for the 640x400 mode, make sure you're running the M24- or 6300-specific version of BASIC each computer came with. Regular generic GW-BASIC doesn't support the special 640x400 mode.

 

[bobba84]

Cool, thanks for the info!

I still have the Olivetti MS-DOS 2.11 that came with my childhood PC, so I'll be sure to use that version of GW-BASIC.

 

[bobba84]

This thing's being a pain... freezing when trying to INTERLNK or start quite a few programs...

I believe it has a very early BIOS (version 1.1) - the list here doesn't even contain it.

So two questions:
1. Does anyone want a copy of the 1.1 BIOS? If so, just let me know how I can dump it using GWBASIC or DEBUG or the like
2. Is the BIOS upgrade to 1.43 as simple as changing the ROM chips? If so, I want to do it.

Thanks!

 

[1ST1]

With the BIOS update the harddisk type table changes. So you need to set the dip switches for hard disk type afterwards.

And yes, a dump of this BIOS is welcome.

 

[Jackson]

1.1 BIOS is very much needed. Can you post photos of the EPROM labels, if any?

 

[bobba84]

Sure can!

Can someone give me instructions for dumping the ROMS (debug etc)

Bobby.

 

[2icebitn]

You're probably going to need some sort of utility to do that. Iirc debug itself can only save files of 64k-1 or 65535 bytes. Or you would need a way to append that last byte. If you're saving only 16 or 32k roms I guess it isn't an issue. A utility that runs under dos (and most preferably that isn't hardware specific, i.e used bios and dos calls where the hardware is accessed) that joins files would be most useful in general.