Wanted: Ethernet, VGA, and Sound Card for my C= PC10-III 8088 System

[vwestlife]

Well look at that! I couldn't find any copies on anything smaller than 1.44MB disks. I wonder if there was ever a non-upgrade version released on lower capacity disks...

The retail box came with 3.5" 1.44 MB disks and a coupon you could send in to get a free set of 5.25" 360K or 3.5" 720K disks. The "ugprade" part is pretty much meaningless. It doesn't actually require a previous version of MS-DOS to be installed; all it requires is the hard drive to be formatted before you install it, which you can easily do by booting from Disk 1, exit out of the Setup program, FDISK and FORMAT the hard drive, then run the "upgrade" and it'll work fine.

 

[Krille]

I *may* try to increase the crystal at some point, but my initial goal is to reach the 460.8K speed by using a higher speed serial port on my PC.

I would be stoked to hear about it if you try it sometime. BTW, this could be an option if you don't have a high speed serial port available at the server end.

EDIT: This might be a bit cheaper actually.

 

[SkydivinGirl]

You motivated me to give the higher baud rates a try.

I had a Prolific PL2303 USB to Ethernet adapter sitting around so I installed it in my system to test the higher baud rates. Serdrive immediately handled the higher 460.8K baud rate I set and the PC connected without issue. I immediately recognized the speed increase and disk images felt like they were as fast, or faster, as they would be on a real floppy drive. :thumbsup:

Overall, I'm extremely happy with these results and I hope this helps others who may be interested in using Serdrive.

Heather

 

[SunDown79]

Are you still looking for an ethernet card ? I have some 8-bit cards that work.

 

[SkydivinGirl]

Sure! Drop me a PM to discuss the details.

Thanks,

Heather

 

[SkydivinGirl]

I ended up building most of the cards that I used in this system. You can see my post on AmiBay for full pictures and details if you like. SunDown79's offer for network cards were great, but I simply didn't have enough slots. He suggested one of the Xircom PE3 parallel devices which works great. Michael's mTCP software works amazingly well and I was able to configure a batch file to start the network only when needed.

http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?64820-My-Commodore-PC10-III-Project

Thanks everyone!

Heather

 

[cr1901]

I ended up building most of the cards that I used in this system.

All we need now is a custom 8-bit ISA Ethernet card. I wonder how difficult it would be to emulate one of NEC's old Ethernet Controller 48-pin DIPs (I can't remember the part name for the life of me right now)?

 

[mikeslot2]

What price are you willing to pay I have a few isa cards and maybe all the ones your looking for I think I even have a 20 meg hard drive and floppy from a old ibm.

 

[Scali]

If you have the hardware for it then you should be able to reach 921.6 kbps but it would require a CPU running at approximately 10 MHz

That part should be easy. The PC10-III can run at 9.54 MHz. Press ctrl-alt-d to switch to this speed (ctrl-alt-s switches to 4.77 MHz, and ctrl-alt-t switches to 7.16 MHz).