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VTECH Laser XT now operating but still need some clues...

M

marc.hull

Experienced Member
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May 26, 2007
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107
For a while I have been fixing an old XT clone and am seemingly at a good point. Mobo is working now as well as is the monitor (last time I ever screw with one of those.) They both tested my very limited skills but hard hardheadedness won out in the end. The Hard drive seems to be hopeless but I plan on going the XT-IDE route when that gets completed and in a more friendly form (assembled.)

Keyboard seems completely dead. No lights no response no nuttin. It's one of those mushy foam jobs so I'd like to weight that out before I tackle it.

Anyway.... questions....


1) Can I use a 3.5" drive on an XT machine if I use double density disks or am I stuck at 5.25" ?

2) What additionally can someone add to an XT (such as sound card etc ?) Currently it only has a CGA video card and a Multi IO card attached. Several open slots begging for attention.

3) (Sorry if I break etiquette on this one) Is there an XT warez site anywhere ? I have very little software other than DOS. I can transfer with an old WIN 98 machine (hence the 3.5" drive question.) Again sorry if I offend with that question.
 
1 - yes, and you can use a 3.5" drive, but chances are the machine will treat them as a 360Kb drive, so you'll need to use driver.sys to take advantage of the larger capacity. 1.44 will be fine with the driver assuming you're using a more modern floppy controller (sounds like you are), but if it's an old style you'd be limited to 720KB.

Edit: Microsoft still have the howto in their knowledge base, awesome, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/60091

2 - Sound card, serial, parallel, network - many 16 bit cards will work in the 8 bit slots too - however you have to manage resources like IRQs etc - personally I don't like stretching XT's too far - 2 serial ports, 1 parallel, CGA, and maybe a sound card is all good.
3 - heaps!
 
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FWIW, you can probably read a 720K floppy in an XT wtih 360K floppy support, but you won't be able to format one to full capacity without DRIVER.SYS.

So, if it's a matter of "how do I get something onto this machine if I don't have any 360K boot floppies?" you know the answer. And if you can read/boot from a 3.5" drive, you can install DRIVER.SYS to complete the picture.
 
Chuck(G) said:
FWIW, you can probably read a 720K floppy in an XT wtih 360K floppy support, but you won't be able to format one to full capacity without DRIVER.SYS.

So, if it's a matter of "how do I get something onto this machine if I don't have any 360K boot floppies?" you know the answer. And if you can read/boot from a 3.5" drive, you can install DRIVER.SYS to complete the picture.
Click to expand...

DRIVPARM is better because it doesn't take up any RAM and keeps the original drive letter:

ftp://ftp.epson.com/desktop/APXPFD.TXT
 
vwestlife said:
DRIVPARM is better because it doesn't take up any RAM and keeps the original drive letter:

ftp://ftp.epson.com/desktop/APXPFD.TXT
Click to expand...

Depends on the version of DOS--earlier ones had DRIVPARM, but it was "hidden" and some versions were buggy. DRIVER.SYS isn't very bad as it just hooks into existing routines in DOS (via INT 2F, function 8 ). It also allows you to "alias" a drive to an alternate format.
 
PC/MS-DOS 3.2 was the first version to officially support 3½" 720K floppy drives, and 3.3 added support for 1.44MB drives. However, some OEMs were able to add 3½" drive support to older versions of DOS, such as Tandy, whose 1000HX model uses 3½" 720K floppy drives and has MS-DOS 2.11 in ROM.
 
I've got a version of MS-DOS 1.26 that supports 720K and 800K 5.25", but it's not 5150-compatible--and let's not forget the 8" versions for the NEC APC--what, 1.26MB?

OEMs could extensively modify the BIOS support (e.g. IO.SYS) in the early days. Microsoft supplied OEM DOS much like DRI did with CP/M--you got a disk that would boot on some system as a reference, but it was anticipated that you'd roll your own I/O support.

I think I still have a copy of that particular IO.SYS source somewhere.
 
Thank you all for the pointers. Especially about the 3.5" drives. 360K is just fine in my book. That's what I am used to on my TI stuff. Will make transferring easier as well since I am all ready set up.

The multi I/O card has FDC, parallel and serial now. So I would be interested in the more esoteric add-ons.

The keyboard issue is starting to gnaw on me a little though so perhaps after the holidays I'll start on that.

Again thanks and happy holidays.

Marc
 
If you will end up using HD / 1.44 MB diskettes in your drive as 360 KB or 720 KB ones, make sure to cover the density select hole (one without sliding write protect tab) with a piece of adhesive tape. 1.44 MB drives detect diskette type using that hole (more precisely using a switch that goes into the hole) and they will not work correctly if a diskette with a hole is being accessed as 720 KB disk.
 
sergey said:
If you will end up using HD / 1.44 MB diskettes in your drive as 360 KB or 720 KB ones, make sure to cover the density select hole (one without sliding write protect tab) with a piece of adhesive tape. 1.44 MB drives detect diskette type using that hole (more precisely using a switch that goes into the hole) and they will not work correctly if a diskette with a hole is being accessed as 720 KB disk.
Click to expand...

Thanks Sergy.

The TI disk mechanics are almost identical to the IBM standard so I was aware of that and used to do it (actually found it more convenient to glue down the HD select switch but same principal.) It seemed to work for the most part but was unreliable and ended up losing data from disks that could no longer be read. Lesson learned so I stocked up on DD disks. Relatively cheap to find used on Ebay.

Never understood the reason for the unreliability of HD disks in a DD drive but there's a lot I don't understand ;-)....
 
marc.hull said:
Never understood the reason for the unreliability of HD disks in a DD drive but there's a lot I don't understand ;-)....
Click to expand...

HD and DD disks use different material for magnetic coating. And it is quite possible that erase/write current (or some other characteristics) are different. It worked well for me, but I didn't try to keep such a media for a long time and test readability after that (I don't keep any valuable data on floppies at all, I always have a backup elsewhere). Still works quite well when I need to boot an old XT system from floppy (e.g. to install DOS on another hard drive / CF card).
 
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