Anyone else remember VLB

[jumper]

For drives less than 1GB, FAT16+Drivespace makes them bigger and faster.

[Goodmaneuver]

I made a mistake as I have never seen a parallel port drive. SCSI had a similar interface that looks like a parallel port but it is SCSI. SCSI came first before IDE. If the drives really are driven from a parallel port then I would try non-bidirectional access as bi-directional is later technology and only later devices work this configuration. Bit serial interface sounds like it needs serial and not parallel. Early serial can have 25 pin connectors. If they show as removable disks then perhaps ME is treating them as zip discs or there is an IO error. The ST506 interface which used discs with MFM technology used an add on controller card which was derived from the floppy disc controller. Although unrelated a USB to IDE converter on USB 1 can get some drives to be accessed even when they show as having IO errors when they are connected on faster interfaces. If it works in Win98 or Win95 then I guess it really is a driver issue and not compatible or has the access timings changed like Win7, hardware connected to the parallel port was nearly impossible to get working I found.

Edited August 3, 2020 by Goodmaneuver

[Rodney Dawn]

I'm thinking its an I/O error, or driver timing issue.  I'll have to try setting the port to non bi-direcctional and try that. Might have to try dropping the fsb as well, although I believe the paralell port, being an extension of the ISA bus, should be clock locked to 8.333 mhz on this board.  I can try 25x4 to maintain the chip stock freq of 100, and see if that changes anything.   What makes me suspect a driver timing issue, or missing/incorrect driver is they all seem to work fine being accessed from a DOS startup disk. 
I belive windows is trying to treat them as floppy drives, and then the driver gets ''confused'' by the capacity.   Perhaps forcing the drives to run in ''msdos compatibility mode'' would fix the issue, if changing the port to non bi directional, and fiddling with the busclock fails.

        Unfortunately I don't currently have a drive with windows 95 on it to hook up as a slave, and point the new hardware wizard at to see if it finds a more suitable driver, so I can't easily try that. (probably would not be a very stable solution even if it worked though).  I may have an old drive with 98 (original non SE) on it around here somewhere to try, but its unlikely as I have always upgraded every machine I get to ME as soon as possible.  

Its definately a paralell port connection, not 25-pin serial.  The machine does have a 25 pin serial port, which used to connect to an old dial-up modem but is currently unoccupied. 
 
This computer ''can'' have a SCSI port too, as I have two free ISA slots and a handful of old SCSI and MFM ISA cards I could try to see which have drivers for ME.

   THe USB to IDE adapter idea would likely work well, except the 486 has no usb.  If such a thing existed, I would need either an ISA, VLB, or rs/232 to usb add-on in order to try that on the 486.   I doubt they make any of those as I have never seen one, of course.

  THe ATA6 controller to support larger drives would be great, but I am hindered by the lack of PCI.  The only bus with enough bandwidth for such a controller would be the VLB, assuming anyone made an ATA6 VLB card, that is.

[Goodmaneuver]

I am fairly sure now the MFM add on cards you are mentioning were the ones I could not get going. I could get going ISA sound cards with IDE ports on them to work the hard drives from the Sound cards IDE with WinME. It is a winner in that the sound and IDE and Floppy drive controller were on the one card. I have several of these.

It has been so long since I have worked on small drives. I think now the drives if under a set size might default in format to Fat16. I think the usable size difference would be in the order of kilo bytes between Fat16 and Fat32 if using the lowest cluster size if Fat32 format is possible.

Edited August 4, 2020 by Goodmaneuver

[Rodney Dawn]

Thats what I was afraid of.  On the plus side, I already have a soundcard with IDE installed which I had been using for the cdrom connection.  Just to test I'll have to swap the cable and try that.  Its PIO mode 3 I think. I'll have to double-check though.  I'm pretty sure the max drive size it supports is 1.3gb but it runs a slightly newer 4x cdrom just fine (averaging between 2x and 3x speed).  I have others to try as well, but I would rather not replace the soundcard if its avoidable. Its one of the better ones, with a lot of memory chips on it.

No luck by changing the LPT1 settings in BIOS.  The drives behave the same, only working from the DOS startup disk, but disabling bi-directional mode made my zip drive stop working. (I tested it for compatibility reasons). 

Disabling bi-directional data did get the 8" floppy working however, and the one good disk that I have appears to be some sort of early DOS program as it has .bat files on it.   At first I thought it was making Explorer hang again, as attempting to access the drive made the system momentarily unresponsive, but the drive light was on and making access noises so I let it sit a bit and after a minute or so it finally opened an explorer window containing the disk contents.   It works, but the old 8" access time makes even the 5.25 look fast by comparison.  
I copied the disk contents to a 3.5 floppy to explore further without stressing the aged 8" disk, while trying to determine what sort of program it contained. 

[Goodmaneuver]

An 8" floppy drive is something I had never heard of as well. I have a SCSI tape drive but no tapes. The old main board BIOS used to treat a floppy drive as a virus disk and would delete the drive on start up. If floppy seek can be disabled I do not know. I did not know this and lost Red Baron the game. The web replacement was too big to fit on a 5 1/4" floppy. I have only 1 ISA SCSI controller that works 100% now.

Edited August 4, 2020 by Goodmaneuver

[Rodney Dawn]

Yeah its one of those oddities, likely from an 8086 machine from the age of it. 

I have a few IDE and SCSI tape drives, and even one of the floppy-controller driven oddballs (30 meg).  I have tapes for most of them but only managed to get one of the IDE models working in windows.

Yeah I've seen that early form of ''virus protection'' on a lot of older boards. There should be an option to disable it in BIOS, but undoubtedly some OEM's omitted that function.    I've never played Red Baron, but its a shame to lose anything like that, especially difficult to replace software that hasn't been made in ages.   Of course having suffered through windows 95's (lack of) stability when running any ''demamding'' apps, running them on ME is truly a blessing.  Back in the day I gave up on quake and Doom cause of w95 crashes, and didn't complete them until years later when I discovered they ran beautifly on Win ME, and never had a single crash to desktop.  Sure, its not perfect. every os has its flaws, but when properly installed, on sensible hardware (avoid SX chips,in 386 and 486, and celeron/duron/sempron as well, and shoddy hardware in general) it can be even more stable than win 7.

As for the game, if your drive supports double-density 5.25 disks, you might be able to fit it on one of those.  ME will read them properly, unlike a certain other 9x OS.   I've also compressed and subsequently read many 5.25 and 3.5 disks, and even zip disks without any trouble.

      One thing I have yet to try is assuming the 8" will hold the data for a bootdisk, booting from it.  the 486 supports booting through LPT1 and will treat the zip drive as a big floppy for that purpose.  I made a windows bootdisk from a zip 100 disk, and loaded it with a few extra dos utilities like memtest for mantinence work.  I havent tried booting windows from zip on the 486, as I couldnt get it to recognize an IDE zip750 drive, but I did successfully boot into windows (copied a fresh install from C: onto a zip750 after making the disk bootable by first using it to create a startup disk) under DOS from a startup disk.  then disconnected the hdd and let it boot from the zip. This was on an Athlon 1ghz machine, and the slow zip access time took forever to boot, but it did work.  sort of a dirty hack way of making a ''portable'' windows ME.  No real practical application as it would take forever detecting and installing hardware if booted on any machine other than the original athlon (due to zip speed limitations) which defeats the purpose of portable windows but berhaps someone could adapt the idea to boot from something faster like a modern flashdrive of usb SSD to make it more useful. (there'd still be the issue of hardware detection/reboots, but it wouldnt take forever).   I could see that being very useful for testing new motherboard/cpu combinations for 9x compatibility before doing a proper format and install in the normal manner.

Edited August 4, 2020 by Rodney Dawn

[Rodney Dawn]

Another thing that would be interesting to try would be extracting all the files form the setup CD, and creating a spanned volume floppy install for ''really'' ancinet hardware that had no cd drive.  Loading 600 floppies would hardly be ''fun'' but it would be neat just to see if it was doable. 

   If possible, you could even create similar spanned volumes on a mere six zip100 disks, or 20 30mb tapes.  just interesting ideas to toy with getting ME installed on something like say, a 286, just for fun.  It would be a way of seeing the Absolute minimum hardawre you could install it on. 

Oc course it might be easier to hack something together using a usb CDrom (oldest avalible for compatibility) and a dev board to create a functional usb to serial, paralell, or IDE conversion board.  The idea being for machines that the BIOS doesnt know what a cdrom is, so you ''trick'' the BIOS into treating the cd drive as if it were a hsrddrive.

Edited August 4, 2020 by Rodney Dawn

[jaclaz]

35 minutes ago, Rodney Dawn said:

Another thing that would be interesting to try would be extracting all the files form the setup CD, and creating a spanned volume floppy install for ''really'' ancinet hardware that had no cd drive.  Loading 600 floppies would hardly be ''fun'' but it would be neat just to see if it was doable. 

   If possible, you could even create similar spanned volumes on a mere six zip100 disks, or 20 30mb tapes.  just interesting ideas to toy with getting ME installed on something like say, a 286, just for fun.  It would be a way of seeing the Absolute minimum hardawre you could install it on. 

Oc course it might be easier to hack something together using a usb CDrom (oldest avalible for compatibility) and a dev board to create a functional usb to serial, paralell, or IDE conversion board.  The idea being for machines that the BIOS doesnt know what a cdrom is, so you ''trick'' the BIOS into treating the cd drive as if it were a hsrddrive.

Well you can watch it (actually 98 not Me, but close enough) in real time:

2 hours, 16 minutes (and 11 seconds) of pure fun . (and that is 39 disks, not 600)

jaclaz

[Rodney Dawn]

Thanks  

I would have thought it would take more.  Even factoring in disk compression it would still take approximately 290 disks for a ''full'' inastall of ME. (assuming a conservative estimate 2.3mb compressed into each 1.44m disk.)

[roytam1]

On 8/1/2020 at 6:19 PM, jaclaz said:

Should you want a small, simple, no bells and whistles, working worksheet running on *any* windows AND Excel/.xls/.xlsx compatible, check this SPREAD32:

http://www.byedesign.co.uk/

(portable, can run even from within a .zip)

jaclaz

wonder if there is something similar, but for word files.

[jaclaz]

2 hours ago, roytam1 said:

wonder if there is something similar, but for word files.

There is (was) a freeware one, It is (was) called Atlantis Nova:

http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page14.html

Later it grew a bit and became Commercial (there is 30 day trial anyway) and was renamed to Atlantis Word (but still it remains more than "manageable" and "affordable"):

https://atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/

Please take note that latest-latest version is compatible starting from 2K, so it has to be seen if earlier versions are available compatible with 9x/Me:

https://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/help/system_requirements.htm

jaclaz