XT-IDE on PCjr

[jmetal88]

Alan is the one with the parts on hand. Send him a message, and I'm sure he'd be glad to sell one to you!

EDIT: Here's Alan's profile, you can click the private message button on this page: http://brutman.com/forums/memberlist.ph ... file&u=132

[logic2u]

I only have DOS 3.2 disks... Originals go for crazy amounts on the net, so purchasing a copy makes no sense. In any case, DOS 5 seems to be doing the job just fine, and I can live with the occasional delay in drive space recomputation
I'm a very happy person right now

Vorticon,

Some guy up in Washington has new copies of IBM DOS v3.3 on eBay right now for $35.00 each with free shipping:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-Disk-Operat ... d=ViewItem

He also has opened copies for $25 (search for his other listings).

-logic2u

[cewsmoke]

Yeah, I bought one from him about a month ago. Unbelievably good price as far as I am concerned. It is brand new in the shrink wrap and had both 5.25 and 3.5 inch disks.

[jmetal88]

I got lucky. I happened to find two 5.25" MS-DOS 3.3 disks in my house and nobody remembers where they came from, so I'm at liberty to use them as I please.

[Vorticon]

I only have DOS 3.2 disks... Originals go for crazy amounts on the net, so purchasing a copy makes no sense. In any case, DOS 5 seems to be doing the job just fine, and I can live with the occasional delay in drive space recomputation
I'm a very happy person right now

Vorticon,

Some guy up in Washington has new copies of IBM DOS v3.3 on eBay right now for $35.00 each with free shipping:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-Disk-Operat ... d=ViewItem

He also has opened copies for $25 (search for his other listings).

-logic2u

I went ahead and purchased a new copy. Thanks for the tip. $35 is certainly better than what I have seen in the past for DOS disks, and I like the fact that both 3.5" and 5.25* disks. I'm still going to stick with DOS 5 for my IDE drive though and reserve DOS 3.3 for floppy boot if needed.

[logic2u]

I only have DOS 3.2 disks... Originals go for crazy amounts on the net, so purchasing a copy makes no sense. In any case, DOS 5 seems to be doing the job just fine, and I can live with the occasional delay in drive space recomputation
I'm a very happy person right now

Vorticon,

Some guy up in Washington has new copies of IBM DOS v3.3 on eBay right now for $35.00 each with free shipping:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-Disk-Operat ... d=ViewItem

He also has opened copies for $25 (search for his other listings).

-logic2u

I went ahead and purchased a new copy. Thanks for the tip. $35 is certainly better than what I have seen in the past for DOS disks, and I like the fact that both 3.5" and 5.25* disks. I'm still going to stick with DOS 5 for my IDE drive though and reserve DOS 3.3 for floppy boot if needed.

You're welcome!

[Hargle]

Hurray!

As of yesterday I am finally a member of the IDEjr club!

I gutted a 128k memory sidecar and put in Alan's PCB, upgraded my bitfile for the CPLD, and then flashed in the latest BIOS. Once I got everything working, I closed up the sidecar completely, so my machine is now "done". One thing I'd thought about is drilling a small hole in the car and mounting an external LED. Currently I can see disk activity from the LED on the PCB through one of the slots in the top of the sidecar, but it's a bit tough to see.

My sidecar has a Kingspec 8G DOM module, running DOS 5.0 (patched to run on the PCjr), and it all seems to work quite nicely.

I've created a ton of 1G partitions on the drive, and moved my game collection onto 1 of them. So now I have a few thousand games I can play on the box. I have absolutely nothing else to put on the other partitions, so yeah, a 8G drive is a little overkill. I'm thinking 2G would be a bit more realistic, but the cost difference between a 2G DOM and 8G is almost nothing though.

Now that it's done, I don't really know what to do with it!
I would love to play games, but I don't want the time suck that playing them requires. I'd rather be more productive in my free time right now. I guess the fact that it is ready to roll anytime I want is the satisfaction that I'm looking for.

Anyway, thank you Alan and Mike. It's an awesome project and I'm super happy to be involved with it.

[Hargle]

Where is the real time clock mapped on this hardware?
I think this is the only bit left to do on this project; feels like we might as well wrap it up/test that bit of hardware out.

what do we do to make it work? A small setclock.com utility to let the user set the values into the RTC and then a BIOS tweak to pull RTC data out during boot and push it into the system? Is that it?

I feel like we all wanted this project to get off the ground, and now that it has been proven out to the point of being useful, everyone abandoned it. I realize summer puts things into a different priority, but summer has rainy days too...

[Brutman]

I thought there was a clock set utility already ...

I've got a bug fix for the BIOS for when a hard drive is not connected - right now it loops in an error state. Now it will correctly report that no hard drives are attached.

Next I am going to start working on adding the AT real time clock BIOS calls to the BIOS so that we would get native timekeeping through DOS without a command line program. But getting started is tough during the summer because there is a lot going on.

[jmetal88]

Yes, there is already a program for setting/reading back the clock.

But it's definitely going to be neat having AT clock support whenever you get that finished, Mike!