jmetal88

I'm definitely into DOS-Win98SE gaming. In fact, I specifically bought a Toshiba Satellite 400CDT because it's an early Pentium laptop with a native 640x480 display and has a sound card which uses a real Yamaha OPL of some variety (it's either the OPL2 or the OPL3). I run Windows 95 on that thing, though, 'cause it feels too slow on Windows 98. I do have a desktop computer that I originally built to run Windows 98 on, but currently it just dual-boots DOS and Linux, and I have a 4-drive floppy controller installed in it so I can access a 1.44MB floppy drive, a 1.2MB floppy drive, and a 360kB floppy drive all at the same time. EDIT: Forgot to mention one downside of the 400CDT. Apparently, its keyboard controller has some shortcomings, as it seems to lock up when being polled by one of my games (Space Chase III: Showdown In Orbit). The game will play fine if I dock the laptop and play using a Gravis Gamepad, though.

I tried cleaning one of my Dreamcast controllers with baby wipes a few weeks ago. I was actually pretty impressed with how well it worked.

I'd give you the ID and date of mine, but I'm about 100 miles away right now, haha. Maybe tomorrow. I used one I got off eBay for a while (I wanna say it was $20 or so, maybe $30), but eventually, for some reason, the group of keys electrically associated with the ENTER key would stop responding every once in a while. Luckily, by the time that happened, I had already purchased a spare from a thrift store (for $1 actually, if I remember correctly), so all I had to do was swap them out and it didn't cause me much downtime. The one from the thrift store was missing one key cap, though, so of course I popped it off of the malfunctioning keyboard and put it on the thrift store keyboard. I did get the eBay keyboard back out recently though as I'm trying to teach myself PIC programming by interfacing with a PS/2 keyboard, and I haven't seen the malfunction occur again since.

That sounds similar to the deal that happened with Unicomp. Unicomp basically used to be a division of Lexmark back when Lexmark was manufacturing IBM keyboards under contract. Then Unicomp became its own entity when another party purchased that division from Lexmark, and they re-branded the Model M keyboards under their own name.

And from that I just learned that Lenovo actually isn't owned by IBM. I guess I had always assumed that Lenovo was a division of IBM because they were making Thinkpads, but thanks to your statement I just now actually looked it up and discovered I was wrong.

I do buy Steam games, but not nearly on the same level as most other Steam gamers I'm acquainted with. I think I have maybe 10 games (okay, 12, I just checked) on Steam. For a long time, I did only buy physical copies of games, but since several of my physical copies (of PC games anyway) still require online activation, I figure there's not much difference anymore (other than I don't get a box with Steam). If the activation severs ever go completely down, I figure I'll just look for cracked versions of the games I still want to play out on the Web.

Well, if he's not willing to break up the lot, maybe I could buy it and sell a few back to you. I've had a CoCo 3 for years and have zero of the officially released games, so I'll probably want a chance to try them out first if that's what ends up happening.

If he sells those two to you, I'll take the rest. If he'll only sell as a lot, I'm definitely interested in the whole lot. Pending price, of course.

Wait, Radio Shack has one that converts composite to S-Video? Without detracting from the video quality? That's crazy, I'll have to check that out. I have a TV that shares an input selection between S-Video and Composite, so I have to yank out the S-Video cable on the back if I want to use a Composite source. So far, this has prevented me from hooking up any kind of video switchbox. It'd be really convenient if I could just hook up the S-Video cable and let a box do the conversion without worrying about yanking cables when I switch inputs.

That actually sounds like a really good idea. I think I'd want a really big screen before I tried it, though.

You don't have to be too picky about the drive you use with your CoCo controller. You can even use a PC drive if you want to, but you'd probably have to construct your own case and power supply for it. Bear in mind that a 1.2MB drive is going to be useless, though. A 5.25" 360k drive will work, a 3.5" 720k drive will work, and a 3.5" 1.44MB drive will work (provided you use 720k floppies or tape over the density hole of the disks you use). The third option is what I went for, and I housed it in one of the larger Radio Shack project boxes. I even added a switch and some circuitry to invert the 'side select' line so I could use both sides of the disk in Disk BASIC. It's like having a 'flippy' disk that you flip with a switch instead of physically flipping the disk. I need to reconstruct the thing at some point, though, as I took it apart a while back to use some of the parts for something else. I do have a couple of original single-sided Tandy disk drives, but they're in such awful shape that I never use them. The newer one doesn't work at all, and the older one does work but has a really rusty case. I took the older one apart to re-paint it at one point, but since the 3.5" drive was working so well (and I have no original software that requires the 5.25" drive) I never actually put it back together after I finished painting the top half.

Well, those chips are for the controllers, not the drives. You need a controller cartridge to plug into the side of your CoCo, then a ribbon cable runs from that to whatever drive you're using.

eBay. http://www.ebay.com/itm/LSI-MB8877A-Fujitsu-Floppy-Controller-40-Pin-8877P-/370288360080?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5636e7fa90

Actually, if you get one of those older drive controllers (as I did, because someone was selling unhoused PCBs of those controllers for quite cheap on eBay), there's a mod you can do that eliminates the need for 12V. I can't recall the details right now, but I did the mod to mine a while back and it worked great! If I remember correctly, all it involved was replacing the controller chip with either a slightly newer version of the chip or a similar chip and maybe cutting a few traces. I'll have to take the controller out of its makeshift case sometime soon and look it over to try and remember the exact details. EDIT: Actually, I was remembering incorrectly. When I first bought the controller, I had jumpered in 12V from an external source to get it to work, so what I was thinking I had removed was actually just that jumper. I didn't cut any traces. If you want to change it to 5V-only operation before using it, all you have to do is pop out the WD1793 controller chip and replace it with an MB8877A.

I would disagree, but simply because I still consider my PCjr 'vintage'.

I wouldn't take a flat-tube Trinitron unless it was 27" or under. I used to have a 32" FD Trinitron WEGA set and it was a nightmare to move anywhere (I'm in college, so I'm not really staying in the same residence for long periods of time). I replaced it with a 32" Toshiba that also has component inputs, but has a more classic-style curved CRT, and even though the picture isn't as sharp as the Trinitron, it's so much easier to move that I won't be replacing it any time soon.

I would really like a disk controller sidecar for my TI-99/4a. I'd love to be able to read and write floppies, but I don't want to commit the space to a PEB when the disk drive is likely all I'd use it for. Well, that and maybe memory expansion, but I've read about some internal mods you can do for memory expansion, and I'd probably rather try that than go for an attachment. I am also looking into the CF7+ and NanoPEB, though. I e-mailed the person making them, and they're surprisingly more affordable than I would have thought, so I might go for one of those and settle for disk images rather than the more authentic experience, but this is probably the only one of my vintage computers I'd be willing to do that with (though I was almost willing to do it with my CoCo 2 and 3 via DriveWire until I found a cheap controller PCB for sale on eBay that I was able to modify to suit my purposes).

So far, my cat hasn't destroyed any of my electronics, although I have to be careful to keep wires out of reach so she won't chew on them. Somehow, she managed to learn never to jump on the kitchen counters (although she does still try the table from time to time), which I'm pretty grateful for. What I haven't been able to get her to stop doing is walking on top of my computers/keyboard, knocking my remotes off on to the floor, or turning on my Atari 5200 in the middle of the night (which I was actually extremely amused by the first time I noticed it had happened). But even with all their annoyances, I find cats to be much more pleasant creatures than dogs, and I will always have at least one cat in my home.

I think I'm running a Western Digital at the moment. Maybe I should consider looking for another brand while it's still good, haha. Though to be fair, the only reason I'm using it is because my roommate had an external WD 1TB drive that he wanted to get rid of, and he offered it to me for $40. Little bit more than they go for on the Internet, but he assured me that he'd never actually used it (it appeared to be empty when I first checked it as well, and I know that dude doesn't know how to wipe a drive). I just took the drive out of the case and put it in my machine because I've been stuck with a 500GB drive for a while and wanted something bigger (and also I wanted to upgrade to 64-bit Windows without completely wiping my old hard drive).

Still looking for one of these. Will consider swapping for a US keyboard in worse condition (since US keyboards seem to be worth more than German keyboards) or swapping plus some cash. EDIT: Why on earth did this show up highlighted in blue? EDIT 2: I guess it just kept the formatting when I copied it over from my post on Atari-Forum. O.o Didn't know it would do that. Fixed it now, though.

I think the keyboard issue turned out to be part of the RF shielding shorting something out. Anyway, I ended up accidentally ripping off the whole ribbon cable coming from the keyboard when I opened the machine up to investigate. Had to re-solder the whole thing, but everything seems fine, now.

Alright, I solved it. When originally replacing the RAM, I had done a modification that allowed me to use 4164 chips instead of 4116 chips (because 4164s were easier/cheaper for me to get at the time). I didn't remember the colors being this messed up when I first replaced the RAM, but maybe they were. Anyway, I discovered that the 'bad' chip I was subbing in was a 4116, and I decided to measure the voltages on its power supply pins when it was inserted versus when I had a 4164 in its place. There was one difference. The pin that was originally -5V for the 4116, which I had simply disconnected from the -5V supply, was being pulled down to nearly 0V when the 4116 was inserted, but was floating around 2.5V when the 4164 was inserted. So I decided to try shorting that pin to ground with all 4164s in the machine, and that brought all the right colors back! I put a little solder bridge between the previous -5V pin and the ground pin on the motherboard and it now seems to be doing fine. Now I just need to troubleshoot my keyboard and figure out why it thinks I'm holding down the letter P all the time, I guess. I have a spare keyboard mech back at my parents' place that I could use if I need to, but if memory serves, it was actually in worse shape than this one, which is why I swapped them.

Okay, more weirdness has ensued. I went back through and checked the video RAM again. All the chips I had in there seem to be good, but here's the wacky thing. If I replace the first chip in the bank (well, I'm not sure if it's electrically the first chip, but it's the chip closest to the middle of the board) with one of my known bad chips, it makes the colors correct! It garbles the text, but it gets me correct colors. What's going on here?

Here is what it looks like. To my eyes, it's worse than what's in this photo, but you can see a bit of what's going on. The background blue looks almost grey on the screen, the square that's supposed to be green second from the left side of the screen is almost white (which makes the Munch Man title screen almost impossible to read), the reds are generally pink-ish, and the other colors just look a few shades too white. EDIT: Forgot to attach the photo.

I have a TI-99/4a that seems to have a video problem. I got it a few years ago for free, but the video ram was shot. I replaced it all, and it worked fine afterwards, then I put it in my closet and forgot about it. Today I happened to pick up a few games from a local shop for it, so I hooked the machine up to test them out, and now for some reason the video colors are all wrong! It seems like most (although not all, black in particular seems to be unaffected) of the colors are too light, or washed-out looking. No amount of adjustment on my TV alleviates the issue, even the color saturation adjustment. Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this? I'll take a picture of the output on my TV soon and I'll post it if it accurately captures what I'm seeing.