New Toys!

Seek advice, give advice or tell others about your repair and restoration projects

Re: New Toys!

Postby SpidersWeb on Thu May 17, 2012 9:24 am

New toy shinnanigans.

So few new bits - either arrived or still in the mail - preparing for my week off coming up soon:

- SimCity original in packaging with 3.5 + 5.25 disks
- Cyberia CDROM (game I played on my first multimedia computer, thanks painterman)
- Toshiba 440CDX (sssh it was twenty bucks and works great)
- NEC 20Mb MFM (ten bucks off trademe, yey for wrong category)
- 50 1.2Mb HD diskettes (found on my porch this morning)
- IBM 5153 (behind me, still in box)
- WangPC (with ST412 + Shugart 360)
- Windows to Amiga keyboard adaptor (from our firends in China, so I can use my A2000HD properly)
- USB to Serial adaptor (project I plan to start, Windows 7 to XT/AT DOS file transfer application, I'm a software dev btw)

Also my random 386 laptop - 2 weeks after auction I got the postage quote and paid - 4 weeks later nothing and no response to email. Giving them a few more days before posting bad feedback and saying goodbye to wasted funds.
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Re: New Toys!

Postby caluser2000 on Sat May 19, 2012 4:39 pm

Goodness you'll be needing an extension. Seriously good stuff.

When you got the A600HD you did you get the "Install" disk with? If so, any chance of getting a copy of it?
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Re: New Toys!

Postby Carcenomy on Sat May 19, 2012 5:15 pm

What you want, an install disk for WB2.05?
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Re: New Toys!

Postby caluser2000 on Sat May 19, 2012 5:25 pm

The A600HDs(not the A600s without hdds, which I have) came with an extra disk labeled "Install" specifically for preparing hdds for installation of WB 2.05 on them. I'd like a copy of it. I have the 3 WB 2.05 disks.

So I guess the answer is yes, I would like the WB2.05 hdd install disk.
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Re: New Toys!

Postby Carcenomy on Sun May 20, 2012 2:10 am

Hmm, just had a look through my ADFs and I don't have a 2.05 install disk, I do have the complete 2.1 set though including the install disk. I can make you up a set easily enough if you're keen, you'd need to organize me some 3.5" floppies if you don't want me to use old skanky used ones though :)

Sorry for the hijack SpidersWeb.
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Re: New Toys!

Postby SpidersWeb on Sun May 20, 2012 3:08 pm

No probs.
Only install disks I have are for the Amiga 2000 (which appear to work fine). A600 came with almost nothing.
I'd go with Carcenomy's offer if needed. Do you just get the images from the net and write them to floppy? I never looked but just assumed there would be some huge Amiga resource out there.

Ton of news/photos/videos to update my progress but I'm moving the computer room in to a larger room so have been rather flat out this weekend (and tired :P ). New room gives me more space and have assembled two new desks to allow 3-4 more machines to be permanently setup.

I also have two of the new ROM boards from pearce_jj to assemble, basically brings Flash style extension ROM's to 8 bit ISA, could be quite handy for loading XTIDE BIOS ROMs etc - no more 27C64's and configuring network cards.
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Re: New Toys!

Postby Carcenomy on Sun May 20, 2012 3:37 pm

SpidersWeb wrote:No probs.
Only install disks I have are for the Amiga 2000 (which appear to work fine). A600 came with almost nothing.
I'd go with Carcenomy's offer if needed. Do you just get the images from the net and write them to floppy? I never looked but just assumed there would be some huge Amiga resource out there.

Precisely. I have ADFs of the major Workbench releases (I have the Amigas to match so I don't think it's a copyright issue?) and transfer the ADFs to my real A1200 then use ADF2DISK to generate real floppies. I then test them in both the 500 and the 1200 to ensure they're readable over a fair cross section of machines. I do this for both the 500 and the CDTV when I need to get new games to them, trouble is finding good quality, clean floppies to create onto.
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Re: New Toys!

Postby SpidersWeb on Sun May 20, 2012 3:52 pm

Yeah finding floppies can be a pain.
I've stocked up on brand new disks when they've come up 1.44 (20), 360 (70) and 1.2Mb disks (50) but no 720's (although I haven't needed 720's).
Used 3.5" dsisk are usually ok though, as long as they have no bad sectors, but 90% of the used 5.25" disks I've found have grown mould or similar inside the jacket, frustrating because I have over 200 and like 5 work without clogging drive heads!
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Re: New Toys!

Postby Carcenomy on Sun May 20, 2012 6:11 pm

Yeah I hear that man. Most my C64 stash reeks of mould and to tell you the truth, is probably what's munched my 1541s.
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Re: New Toys!

Postby SpidersWeb on Mon May 21, 2012 3:43 am

Yeah as a result of running mine through I had to clean a few drives, one of which still wont work, so am going to be much much more picky about what I feed them from now on.

Anyway big thing last week was the arrival of my IBM 5153 CGA display, I took the time to make a video on a proper camera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ioAwKAfpHM
The IBMs are set up in my new office/work area - and there will be room for a 5170 when I get a case sent over - but for the moment I'm going to use that spot for the Amiga.
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Re: New Toys!

Postby Carcenomy on Mon May 21, 2012 6:41 pm

Wooooah, what's up with the snowy artifacts? That's not a super positive sign.
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Re: New Toys!

Postby tezza on Mon May 21, 2012 8:43 pm

SpidersWeb wrote:Anyway big thing last week was the arrival of my IBM 5153 CGA display, I took the time to make a video on a proper camera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ioAwKAfpHM

Good to watch the video. Who does the camera work?

Interestings cards the CGA. They are an historic IBM PC and XT accessory but boy they were horrible. Snow could be an issue and I certainly wouldn't have wanted to work in front of a CGA machine for any length of time. For serious stuff a hercules or even an MDA gave a much nicer image to look at. Ironically that didn't stop me wishing I could afford one back there...simply because all the games (what little there were) were for CGA.

But then, there was always that little handy utility SimCGA.com . It allowed all those CGA games run on a hercules card. Mono only of course. :)
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Re: New Toys!

Postby SpidersWeb on Mon May 21, 2012 11:37 pm

Cheers for watching, will make another channel when (and if) I get better at it. I quite enjoy watching other peoples videos so thought I'd start making some contributions.
Although I wish I'd explained the board switches better - I was going from OFF OFF to ON OFF - so forgot to mention switch 6 is part of the video setting too.

Person behind the camera is my girlfriend, who stood there for 17 minutes! (I cut out most of the video where I was fluffing about). She takes a partial interest, gets bored of me rambling on but when I'm working on something or showing something off she's actually all over it and hovering about.

The snowy artifacts apparently only effect the original IBM CGA cards and it happens when a program updates the video memory directly - there are programming tricks to avoid it. In XtreeGold there is a "Flicker Free" option which completely eliminated it. For Direct Access 5.1 my only option was to disable the clock, so it only gets a touch of snow when you change menu options. In games etc there is no snow - I ran Leisure Suit larry on it - which defaults to black and white CGA, disappointing but when you engage 4 colour mode you see why :S Really want EGA or Tandy/PCjr for nice colour.

So yeah dispite the snow, it's actually working 100% as it's supposed to.
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Re: New Toys!

Postby Carcenomy on Tue May 22, 2012 6:37 pm

Would it make you feel better if I told you I found an EGA card in my stash?
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Re: New Toys!

Postby SpidersWeb on Wed May 23, 2012 9:47 am

haha it would if I had an another monitor to go with it, then I could buy it and use it for my 5170 build instead of VGA.
I'm trying to keep the 5150/5160 boxes as original as possible - so CGA snow and crappy colour is part of that :) I'd have liked a Tandy 1000 or IBM PCjr - but neither are terribly affordable.

5170 situation is kind of annoying, because I have a complete and tested 5170 minus the case, just need a case!
Getting one sent over with PSU works out around $260-280NZD. Last week it's MFM controller and ST251-1 arrived.

Woke up this morning to a package, SimCity original in mint condition (even the registration cards etc), can't wait to get home and pop those disks in the 5160!
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