Mike's PCjr Page

Hey Mike...

Well, I finally got around to trying out the PE3-10BC adapter I bought and it seems to work just fine with mTCP! I popped in for just a second using IRCjr to the #vc channel and it seemed to work (although no one was around to respond to me, the server responded to commands), as well as the FTP client using an address served up with DHCP. I did this with the floppy drive only... no hard disk, 640kB RAM and DOS 3.30.

This afternoon I did the hardware mod for EPP mode on the sidecar I have. I tried using the utility in the Xircom archive and it didn't recognize the port as EPP capable (I presume because it's probing the BIOS rather than the hardware?), but I did notice that there was an EPP.SYS driver in the archive as well. Are you supposed to load this to use bidirectional mode first?

mTCP looks pretty awesome. Kudos!

geoffdaddy wrote: This afternoon I did the hardware mod for EPP mode on the sidecar I have. I tried using the utility in the Xircom archive and it didn't recognize the port as EPP capable (I presume because it's probing the BIOS rather than the hardware?), but I did notice that there was an EPP.SYS driver in the archive as well. Are you supposed to load this to use bidirectional mode first?

As far as I'm aware, the mod doesn't make it EPP compatible, just PS/2 bidirectional.

Thanks. mTCP is basically the project to run a Telnet BBS on a PCjr one day. The BBS exists but it needs a lot more work. The rest of the apps are just to fool people into testing my code for me. ; - 0

The jr Parallel port is "standard" until you make it bi-directional. Bi-directional improves the read speed by a factor of two. EPP and ECP are not possible; they need more advanced parallel port chipsets. I have used an EPP card on a Jr before with limited success; ECP is out of the question without DMA.

Just do the bi-directional modification and be happy. One day we'll figure out how to get Ethernet on a sidecar or in the modem slot.

Ah, okay... I was thinking I read that the mod made it EPP compatible. I guess that explains it.

Brutman wrote:Thanks. mTCP is basically the project to run a Telnet BBS on a PCjr one day. The BBS exists but it needs a lot more work. The rest of the apps are just to fool people into testing my code for me. ; - 0

Ha! I was thinking this would be an awesome thing to do. I used to run a BBS ages ago using the RemoteAccess BBS package. I was thinking about setting one up to run again using an old Windows PC (there are several fossil drivers that were used for running DOS based BBS systems over the internet via Windows). Seems like it should be possible to make a networking-aware fossil driver/com port redirector for DOS.