Mike's PCjr Page

I am now successfully using a total of 4 MicroSolutions BackPack Parallel Printer Port Devices on my PCjr! This was a goal I have been working on for many years, as it took a very long time to get my hands on all of these devices. They are (1) 4X CD ROM Drive; (2) 3.5" 1.44MB Diskette Drive; (3) 5.25" 1.2MB Diskette Drive; and (4) A QIC40 40MB Tape Drive. Devices (3) and (4) are shown on page 14 of the PC Enterprises 1994 catalog posted under the software section of this web site. I had thought that these two devices, which are older BackPack Products in metal cases (later products were in plastic cases), were broken. Actually, the power lights on those devices in the metal cases just don't come on until you actually use them.

As a test of the tape drive yesterday, I was easily able to format a cartridge, and then I did a backup of my E: hard disk, a Maxtor 212 SCSI drive (which is mostly empty). I backed up 21,141,892 bytes in 1 file set, according to the BPBackup utility that comes with the tape drive. The compression ratio was 1.7 to 1, and the total time for the backup was just over an hour, 1:05:34. The tape cartridge I used is a 3M DC2000 mini data cartridge, on 1/4 inch tape. The tape drive makes very cool noises, too, both while formatting as well as at the start of the backup job. Sounds like the special effects audio of a 1950's science fiction movie, or maybe somewhat similar to the 2005 War of the Worlds movie when the Martian space ships power up! No kidding! But it works!

Hard to believe, but all these daisy-chained devices are on a modified LPT1 port, which then goes out to an AB switch for an IBM Graphics Printer and an HP Laserjet 6MP printer. It turns out that what I thought was an intermittent printer problem was actually remedied by the tip I found in the BackPack tape drive manual, which says to make sure the BackPack devices are powered on when using your printer. Once I did that, both printers operate quite reliably. My modified LPT2 parallel port side car is used exclusively for the Xircom ethernet adapter.

I also have a BackPack hard drive new in the box. I will need to test it eventually, but now that I am booting from hard drive via SCSI controller, it would only come in handy when quickly bringing up a second PCjr for a new project.

All those accessories on you rig always leave me amazed. Btw, how well does that optical drive perform while it's connected to the PCjr?

I have not collected any benchmarks on the MicroSolutions 4X Parallel Printer Port CD ROM drive. I guess I could use PC TOOLS version 5. or Norton Utilities version 5.0 to get some benchmark data. So all the information I can share at this point is anecdotal. Taking a look at playing audio CDs on the PCjr using that CD ROM drive, and realizing that the sound audio is going from the CD ROM drive via sound cable to my PC Enterprises GameMaster Adlib sound card and then out to my stereo, the audio sound is smooth and clear. Speaking as a rhythm guitar player, the audio sound indeed rocks! Also, running the "Trkplay index" command gets a very fast response from the audio CD Table of Contents (TOC). Playing and stopping the tracks on the PCjr is also fast.

From a software perspective, I have played some games from a CD ROM and the game performance is okay. The games were "Loopz" and "Gin King" from the Software Toolworks CD Game Pack. I got that Game Pack from PC Enterprises back in 1993 when I actually had a bootable Future Domain PCjr SCSI Card capable of SCSI CD ROM multimedia. That was my personal experience gold standard of PCjr optical media performance. However, I wound up trading in those PCjr components for a 486 PC Enterpises clone system. However, I did keep the CD ROM game.

The negative of the Microsolutions BackPack 4X CD ROM Drive is that after loading it (and this is the problem with ANY CD ROM Drive on the PCjr, even SCSI) is the usable memory after loading the drivers in config.sys and autoexec.bat. I believe I have around 490K after loading it. I could run a lot more CD ROM games in DOS that are PCjr capable if I could get up to 512KB or more of memory. That's why I would love to get my hands on a PCE Megaboard user manual. I do have that sidecar but have no idea what to do with the 8 DIP switches. I have quite a few Sierra DOS PCjr capable CD ROM games that will take advantage of the extended or expanded memory that card will offer.

From a file transfer perspective, just copying files from the CD ROM drive to the PCjr hard drives seems okay. I will try to run some benchmarks in the future. Others may have some additional comments. For example, I got real fast response times using the Adapatec Mini Parallel SCSI Cable on a PCjr parllel printer port with 200 MB Syquest Drives. And Mike and many others got really great response time over the parallel printer ports using Zip drives.

Nice. It seems more functional than I expected. It's probably an effective way to tranfer files to the hdd if the system is off the network for some reason.