Like most of you, I spent several hours this weekend bringing an old dead DOS computer back to life.<\/p>\n

(Wait. You guys didn’t do that this weekend, too? Man, you missed OUT!)<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I bought this old desktop machine years ago at a thrift store for (I think) five bucks. The last time I used it was to transfer my old Commodore 64 diskettes to D64 disk images using an original X1541 cable. According to this blog entry<\/a>, that was ten years ago.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ten years of sitting hasn’t been good for the machine. The hard drive spun up, but spins more loudly than I remembered. Also, the machine wouldn’t pass POST or display any video at all. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I forgot that this was the machine that had the dead on-board floppy drive controller, which explained why that card was installed. There was also a network card still in the machine. Based on its previous task there was no soundcard in the machine, so I dug around out in the garage until I found one.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While I was swapping things in and out, I decided to pull the 5 1\/4″ floppy drive (which was also working once I put the FDD controller in) and replaced it with a CD-ROM drive. I’m not 100% set on this decision, and I wish this case had slots for both. Currently I have very little software on 5 1\/4″ floppies, and if I do I can copy the data over to a 3 1\/2″ floppy using my FC5025 and a USB 3.5″ floppy drive, or simply copy the floppies over to the machine via the network and use the SUBST command to run them. I do have several DOS CD-ROM programs I want to run, so that’s why I went with the CD-ROM drive for now.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

After that, I still couldn’t get the machine to fire up. I think what finally fixed it was re-seating the RAM.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Once the computer was up and running, I copied Rogue over to it and played a quick game. Rogue is my “go to” DOS game. It doesn’t have sound and doesn’t require a joystick or a mouse, so it’s a quick one to fire up for testing purposes. The game ran, I played it for a few minutes, and was quickly bashed to death by an Orc on level 8. Stupid Orcs.<\/p>\n

The machine dual boots between Windows 98 and DOS. <\/p>\n

TO DO list for later this week:<\/p>\n

– Configure networking (both in DOS and Windows 98)
\n– Tweak config.sys\/autoexec.bat (free up RAM)
\n– Track down soundcard drivers
\n– Install USB card; get USB working in DOS (for software transfers)
\n– Install modem?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like most of you, I spent several hours this weekend bringing an old dead DOS computer back to life. (Wait. You guys didn’t do that this weekend, too? Man, you missed OUT!) I bought this old desktop machine years ago at a thrift store for (I think) five bucks. The last time I used it was to transfer my old Commodore 64 diskettes to D64 disk images using an original X1541 cable. According to this blog entry, that was ten years ago. Ten years of sitting hasn’t been good for the machine. The hard drive spun up, but spins more… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144,146,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-ibm-pc","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8572"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8575,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8572\/revisions\/8575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}