Nice find. We, as a community of enthusiasts, need to do all we can to collect and preserve this exciting era of computing. I'll admit I have more old pcs than a sane person would have in ones house but I love them all :-) I especially love a good 486 machine. Can't wait to see your future videos.
My neighbour just brought over her pc for me to fix. It's a 20 year old Tiny branded pc ! 80gb hard drive is knackered so have a IDE to CF adapter on order, thanks for the idea. I think it's marvelous she still uses this old pc and don't want to upgrade to something modern :)
Placing a hole on pin 20 is perfectly safe, I've done it dozens of times for older pcs that had failing cables and the only cables available were the newer style with pin 20 blocked. Heated up a pin melted a small hole plugged in the cable.. devices functioned again every single time without fail.
Dang! This brings back memories. I started building PC's in the 80's. MFM, RLL hard drives. There were a ton of different CPU's back then that came out in rapid succession. 8088, 286, 386, 386SX, 486, 486SX etc. Good old days.
After I get my SCSI to SD adapters for the vintage Macs I am working on, I think I'll grab some of those IDE adapters as well for when I get back to my PCs. They're SO convenient for retro computing!
i had a dx4 100, which was my main workhorse in high school. i wish i had held onto it. would've been fun to do some modifications like this to it. great video.
I think I built 4-5 desktops from throw away spots in my current city. Kept one because I want to see some old items work sometimes and I need to fix the sound blaster this year. It is useful for retro transfers and diskette jobs for newer computers including VMs. I believe mine is a 586 overall.
I got a CF to IDE adapter per the advice of this video along with LGR and 8-bit guys success with em. windows 98 SE on an older pentium 4 based HP Compaq I had, boots up almost instantly and only bogs down when I do a speed test on the CF card.
I had a Packard Bell which I upgraded to a DX4-100, in 1993. That little thing SCREAMED. I paid I think $160 to upgrade it to its maximum of 20 MB of RAM (4 soldered + 4 x 4 MB 30 pin SIMM). My friends got their first Pentium 60s and then they started melting holes through their own motherboards, while my cool little DX4 ran Slackware and WFW 3.11 neat as you please. Wouldn't have traded it for the world. I learned a LOT from that cheap little Packard Bell. Wish I still had it, and can't remember what happened to it.
That's such an awesome invention! I'll have to look further into procuring an old P.C, so I can play all my old games. I still have original installation disks for DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.11
Go for MS-DOS 6.22 over 6.20, the pause command comes in handy on batch files and it includes drivespace which is faster than doublespace (oh and it has a better version of scandisk!)
Just recovered my 2005 Abit AV8 gaming machine. 4 hours ib the loft, 24 hours cleaning. It's running XP. Upgraded to SP3. However going to virtualize it and install 64bit ubuntu.
I have these in my Compaq portable 1 and 2, Tandy 1000 and a 3100. This is like upgrading from a SATA to m.2 on a new machine. My 1000 boots so fast into Tandy Deskmate. Love old machines. I tried to use a CF on a Pentium class machine. The problem there seems to be the computer writes too quickly for the CF to handle. I could never get Win95 or 98 to install. It always stopped somewhere early on.
Last time I went to the Space Way Feltham By Heathrow Dump they had loads of keyboards full sized and toy and smaller computer gadgets and small 14" tvs in the electronic waste bins. Guess no matter what dump in the UK you go to there will always be some tresure in the small electronics bins and big ones.
You could, not that you would, desolder the HD activity light from the new controller and either solder the HD like cable to it or solder in some pins to plug it into.
Great episodes! Lovely to watch! Quick question: What are (if any) disadvantages of using CF-to-IDE adapter, instead of having a real native IDE hdd? Like incompatible with older mainboards, too much write/read makes the CF less durable, etc?
If I recall correctly, back in that era, sound cards included an ATAPI connector exclusively for the CD-ROM. Your IDE card may not support the CD-ROM directly. Then again, I may be thinking of 386, not sure with your 486 - depends on the BIOS, I suppose. Also, look on the IDE card for an HDD activity light pinout.
David Jaundrew good idea I'll check the controller for an ide light pinout although I would have expected that to still be wired up with the original HD. Sound card controller isn't a bad shout, I remember creative used to do a CD Blaster pack with a sound card and CD ROM combo. I am finding though that with the flash card I'm not really missing the CD drive
been a year i know, but you can make a hole into that cable without worry. it will work just fine. i think it is not even connected to anything. just so you know for future. i've did that everytime on my retro machines.
I wonder what the COREdisk was. I googled out of curiosity and was surprised to find no information whatsoever - which made me even more curious. What sort of device is significant enough that a benchmark uses it as an example, but also not significant enough to not appear on a search?
If you could solder out the activity LED and replace it with 2-pin jumper headers, you could connect it to the case LED - at least that's what I would do.
I just installed ws ftp on my win 3.11 486 to get the files from the modern computer with filezilla server, no need to replace the HD, just use the LAN card for what it was designed
Doesn't seem to be a link to the 486 dumpster find video in the description, as promised in the beginning of the video, although it can be easily found on the channel.
After the installation from Dos 6.22, fdisk told me the partition is only 503MB big? At the Bios configuration the cf card is correctly with 1903MB listed.. what is my mistake ?
Should I count myself lucky by not using MS-Dos, I mean I know of its existence but I started with being regular guest at a friend how had 95 and when I got my Pc I was on 98, I did use dos on some games but was I lucky to have the simple interface and not use the infinite list of commands to do stuff?
i hate those cable that ship with a pin in them. I just use a Sewing needle and pop it out! great ideal tho, i don't have any PC older than a P2 350Mhz. i have no use for a CF yet because there speeds are limited via the ATA Specfications of the IDE controller. If the CF Card can go 95MB/sec but your PC has ATA33... you are going to only get 33/MB a second. The PC's controller is the bottleneck not the CF Card.
This is an old video, so there's little chance of you seeing this, but I can highly recommend JP Software's 4DOS if you like playing around in DOS. You can either run it on top of MSDOS or point your system to use it instead of COMMAND.COM. It's totally compatible with MSDOS but can do a whole bunch more. I used to use it for writing really complex batch programs. I even used it (along with a few extra tools I coded in Turbo Pascal) to create an email system for my college's network.
@@RMCRetro Just checked. JP are still around and you can still download 4DOS from their site. Now THAT'S long term support! jpsoft.com/all-downloads/previous-versions.html
You do have a maximum partition size of 2gb. However, if you map a network drive which is terabytes it will work, and then when you 'dir' you should see the amount of numbers on the 'total size' bit lol
I think the size reported by the bios has nothing to do with the partition size, it's a bios limitation. maybe you can flash the bios to a newer version. you should do some tests to check if the full partitions are usable even if the bios reports the cards incorrectly. (I would boot with 98 DOS boot disk so I'd have fat32 support just to create and format a single 4gb partition). maybe it works until you hit the 1.8gb size the bios reports and after that mark the data gets corrupted?
Josh Mason they exist but I couldn't find one in stock at the time and had no drive bay rails. The rear one was also tricky to get it appears most are to be left inside the case but I wanted easy access
Being an old modder myself, I instantly thought of taking a bay cover, put my trusty old Dremel Pro to it and epoxy the bracket to it from the inside. I have done many a mod with my Dremel and some needle files. :)
I was working on an old pentium pc yesterday and i wanted to remove a faulty cars but i ran out of blanking plates so i used one from my modern pc, now there is a black plate in the back.
I think Total Commander allows file transfers over serial cable between DOS, Win3.x, Win95/98 and Win NT variants. The swap out card is a good idea though. www.ghisler.com/
CF memory cards use a subset of the IDE command set, so making a bootable adapter is cheap and trivial. SD to IDE card adapters need a chip to bridge to the IDE interface so there is more scope for compatibility problems. Having said that, I'm sure it won't take much research to find a solid SD option that will work. Personal preference I guess.
Personally, I think using storage like this is cheating... Although if I want to get a HDD into my Tandy 1000 HX, I may be forced to do this, since MFM hard drives are insanely expensive, and the people who sell them often don't know if they work or have been parked correctly.
Tricky isn't it. If this was an IBM I might be more of a purist about the components, but as it's your typical beige box clone from the era I thought flexibility would be permissible to get a good stable system working for some serious gaming. A lot of fun has been had, and is still had on this system.
I've already gotten a serial/parallel ISA card to work in that Tandy by making a PLUS to ISA converter ribbon cable. The Tandy RS-232 PLUS card is insanely hard to find, and so my only hope of making a mouse work, other than using the joystick in DeskMate, was to install a generic ISA card. They really should have just designed it with a ISA riser rather than this convoluted proprietary PLUS system where the expansion boards have to plug into the memory/DMA controller i.imgur.com/B8q31QN.jpg it's basically a mirrored pin-for-pin rip-off of ISA anyways (pin A1-B1, A2-B2, etc). Retro enthusiasts are these days making PCB kits so you can build your own 8-bit ISA IDE cards. I figure if I can get the smallest one (there's not a lot of room in there) www.lo-tech.co.uk/product/lo-tech-isa-compactflash-pcb/ , and pair it with a IDE-FlashCard board hidden somewhere else in the case, I'll have a hard drive in a machine that was never meant to house one. I saw a TH-cam video (can't remember where) where somebody had an MFM controller bodged into his 1000HX going to an external MFM hard drive. That's a project for another day.
Always happy to see long-unloved machines like this getting a new lease on life. Good stuff!
oh hello clint
unexpected Clint! great to see you dropping by LGR
+Lgr funny Clint i have been just watching you go though nearly the same process with you're 486
LGR love the channel, but what does LGR stand for?
Nice find. We, as a community of enthusiasts, need to do all we can to collect and preserve this exciting era of computing. I'll admit I have more old pcs than a sane person would have in ones house but I love them all :-) I especially love a good 486 machine. Can't wait to see your future videos.
This is awesome, will definitely be following the series 😀
My neighbour just brought over her pc for me to fix. It's a 20 year old Tiny branded pc ! 80gb hard drive is knackered so have a IDE to CF adapter on order, thanks for the idea. I think it's marvelous she still uses this old pc and don't want to upgrade to something modern :)
Placing a hole on pin 20 is perfectly safe, I've done it dozens of times for older pcs that had failing cables and the only cables available were the newer style with pin 20 blocked. Heated up a pin melted a small hole plugged in the cable.. devices functioned again every single time without fail.
Dang! This brings back memories. I started building PC's in the 80's. MFM, RLL hard drives. There were a ton of different CPU's back then that came out in rapid succession. 8088, 286, 386, 386SX, 486, 486SX etc. Good old days.
""and next episode we will upgrade the sound.. "" soundblaster/midi/Roland. Heaven sent. Game on!
After I get my SCSI to SD adapters for the vintage Macs I am working on, I think I'll grab some of those IDE adapters as well for when I get back to my PCs. They're SO convenient for retro computing!
i had a dx4 100, which was my main workhorse in high school. i wish i had held onto it. would've been fun to do some modifications like this to it. great video.
I was just thinking "I drilled a hole to the blanked pin" before you said that, and yeah, it worked just fine :)
I think I built 4-5 desktops from throw away spots in my current city. Kept one because I want to see some old items work sometimes and I need to fix the sound blaster this year. It is useful for retro transfers and diskette jobs for newer computers including VMs. I believe mine is a 586 overall.
I got a CF to IDE adapter per the advice of this video along with LGR and 8-bit guys success with em. windows 98 SE on an older pentium 4 based HP Compaq I had, boots up almost instantly and only bogs down when I do a speed test on the CF card.
I never knew that these were available. I'd love to upgrade my DOS machine with a CF drive.
Yep. Drill it out. The pin was never used in any IDE machine. Works fine.
I had a Packard Bell which I upgraded to a DX4-100, in 1993. That little thing SCREAMED. I paid I think $160 to upgrade it to its maximum of 20 MB of RAM (4 soldered + 4 x 4 MB 30 pin SIMM). My friends got their first Pentium 60s and then they started melting holes through their own motherboards, while my cool little DX4 ran Slackware and WFW 3.11 neat as you please. Wouldn't have traded it for the world. I learned a LOT from that cheap little Packard Bell. Wish I still had it, and can't remember what happened to it.
That's such an awesome invention! I'll have to look further into procuring an old P.C, so I can play all my old games. I still have original installation disks for DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.11
Go for MS-DOS 6.22 over 6.20, the pause command comes in handy on batch files and it includes drivespace which is faster than doublespace (oh and it has a better version of scandisk!)
Just recovered my 2005 Abit AV8 gaming machine. 4 hours ib the loft, 24 hours cleaning. It's running XP. Upgraded to SP3. However going to virtualize it and install 64bit ubuntu.
I have these in my Compaq portable 1 and 2, Tandy 1000 and a 3100. This is like upgrading from a SATA to m.2 on a new machine. My 1000 boots so fast into Tandy Deskmate. Love old machines. I tried to use a CF on a Pentium class machine. The problem there seems to be the computer writes too quickly for the CF to handle. I could never get Win95 or 98 to install. It always stopped somewhere early on.
Last time I went to the Space Way Feltham By Heathrow Dump they had loads of keyboards full sized and toy and smaller computer gadgets and small 14" tvs in the electronic waste bins.
Guess no matter what dump in the UK you go to there will always be some tresure in the small electronics bins and big ones.
This must be the third time i'm watching this series
Aw that's so cool thank you
the lifesaver of retro pcs. Ms DOS. Who needs win?
I ordered some adapters for CF to IDE few weeks ago, just waiting. Plan on using it for a new build, maybe a 386. Still part hunting.
Project Geek Awesome looking forward to seeing that, let me know if you make a vid
Oh I will. I must say I'm enjoying your videos. Top quality.
I drilled an ide cable out before, it worked fine.
Andrew Littleboy Excellent thank you for letting me know, I'll be trying that in the next video
Wow! 😳
I did that a few times as well. No issues...
You could, not that you would, desolder the HD activity light from the new controller and either solder the HD like cable to it or solder in some pins to plug it into.
Nicholas Glendening tempting, I may explore that in the final episode when I clean it up and sort any odds and ends out for the final setup
Great episodes! Lovely to watch! Quick question: What are (if any) disadvantages of using CF-to-IDE adapter, instead of having a real native IDE hdd? Like incompatible with older mainboards, too much write/read makes the CF less durable, etc?
3:00 100% safe. Done it a thousand times even back in the day. It's just plastic covering an empty chamber.
Yep done this plenty of times
Love this video!
You could solder/jumper a small 2 wire cable and connect it to the HDD led light on the front. I like the blinky led lights on the front. 8-)
It's a good idea... and we do that in the final episode :)
If I recall correctly, back in that era, sound cards included an ATAPI connector exclusively for the CD-ROM. Your IDE card may not support the CD-ROM directly. Then again, I may be thinking of 386, not sure with your 486 - depends on the BIOS, I suppose.
Also, look on the IDE card for an HDD activity light pinout.
David Jaundrew good idea I'll check the controller for an ide light pinout although I would have expected that to still be wired up with the original HD. Sound card controller isn't a bad shout, I remember creative used to do a CD Blaster pack with a sound card and CD ROM combo. I am finding though that with the flash card I'm not really missing the CD drive
been a year i know, but you can make a hole into that cable without worry. it will work just fine. i think it is not even connected to anything. just so you know for future. i've did that everytime on my retro machines.
This looks good for the system 573 hardware as it's known for being pretty finicky with optical drives
I wonder what the COREdisk was. I googled out of curiosity and was surprised to find no information whatsoever - which made me even more curious. What sort of device is significant enough that a benchmark uses it as an example, but also not significant enough to not appear on a search?
Does that Connor have any bad sectors? I'd be completely surprised if there weren't -Those drives were shait.
If you could solder out the activity LED and replace it with 2-pin jumper headers, you could connect it to the case LED - at least that's what I would do.
David Refoua keep watching the series :) we do just that
OMG Ryzen desktop! :D this deserves a thumbs up and subscribe :D
I would use the CF reader in tandem with the Connor. I doubt that connor drive would last that much longer. but I love the sound of it
I just installed ws ftp on my win 3.11 486 to get the files from the modern computer with filezilla server, no need to replace the HD, just use the LAN card for what it was designed
It wouldn't be difficult to connect that CF adapter's drive activity LED to the case's LED. And it would make a good video for the series.
Doesn't seem to be a link to the 486 dumpster find video in the description, as promised in the beginning of the video, although it can be easily found on the channel.
You could just use WD-40 on the outside gears to help the hard drive operate with less friction.
Almost all modern OS will eat any kind of raw flash in several days because they have many logs that are frequently updated.
Think I want to pull my dad's 486 SX 25 out of retirement and try it out now!
After the installation from Dos 6.22, fdisk told me the partition is only 503MB big?
At the Bios configuration the cf card is correctly with 1903MB listed.. what is my mistake ?
Should I count myself lucky by not using MS-Dos, I mean I know of its existence but I started with being regular guest at a friend how had 95 and when I got my Pc I was on 98, I did use dos on some games but was I lucky to have the simple interface and not use the infinite list of commands to do stuff?
i hate those cable that ship with a pin in them. I just use a Sewing needle and pop it out! great ideal tho, i don't have any PC older than a P2 350Mhz. i have no use for a CF yet because there speeds are limited via the ATA Specfications of the IDE controller. If the CF Card can go 95MB/sec but your PC has ATA33... you are going to only get 33/MB a second. The PC's controller is the bottleneck not the CF Card.
Would 133x be enough for a Windows 98SE machine? The current hard drive in my machine is an EIDE.
Should have left the hdd inside. Does not take space, but enables a future re-use on the original hw.
+novoiperkele not a bad idea. I could leave it plugged in to the power just to hear it spin up
Gotek also saved the vintage pc as well.
This is an old video, so there's little chance of you seeing this, but I can highly recommend JP Software's 4DOS if you like playing around in DOS. You can either run it on top of MSDOS or point your system to use it instead of COMMAND.COM. It's totally compatible with MSDOS but can do a whole bunch more. I used to use it for writing really complex batch programs. I even used it (along with a few extra tools I coded in Turbo Pascal) to create an email system for my college's network.
I'll check that out thank you. Turbo Pascal at college, those are good memories.
@@RMCRetro Just checked. JP are still around and you can still download 4DOS from their site. Now THAT'S long term support! jpsoft.com/all-downloads/previous-versions.html
I like your monitor attachment. Was that homemade?
on the old IDE controllers, cut off the key pin, don't try to drill the cable.... its just faster....
Hi, I would also like to put it on my 486, but add it to the Hdd that is already there. can this cf card reader be used as a second hdd?
What if the compact flash card is not recognised in the BIOS? I havea Gateway PII that won't detect the adapter or card.
You do have a maximum partition size of 2gb. However, if you map a network drive which is terabytes it will work, and then when you 'dir' you should see the amount of numbers on the 'total size' bit lol
Formating with EZ-Drive you could use FAT32 and add 1x4GB partiion even your Bios cant show whole capacity of drive
I think the size reported by the bios has nothing to do with the partition size, it's a bios limitation. maybe you can flash the bios to a newer version.
you should do some tests to check if the full partitions are usable even if the bios reports the cards incorrectly. (I would boot with 98 DOS boot disk so I'd have fat32 support just to create and format a single 4gb partition). maybe it works until you hit the 1.8gb size the bios reports and after that mark the data gets corrupted?
Did I mis the part where you partitioned the cf card and added the ‘D’ partition?
udma7 167mb/s cf card worthwhile?
I bought an i386 but I think it only has MFM drives, can I do that too?
Nice 👍🏻
I just watched the whole series, but I couldn't find the video about the origins of this computer. was it deleted?
Here you go th-cam.com/video/pn8bavtxVps/w-d-xo.html thanks for watching the series I'm glad you enjoyed it!
thank you for the link!
I always just pushed the ide connector hard enough to push the pin through the connector
Just a curiosity, but couldn't you get a CF reader that could be accessed from the front through a 3.5" bay?
Josh Mason they exist but I couldn't find one in stock at the time and had no drive bay rails. The rear one was also tricky to get it appears most are to be left inside the case but I wanted easy access
Being an old modder myself, I instantly thought of taking a bay cover, put my trusty old Dremel Pro to it and epoxy the bracket to it from the inside.
I have done many a mod with my Dremel and some needle files. :)
I was working on an old pentium pc yesterday and i wanted to remove a faulty cars but i ran out of blanking plates so i used one from my modern pc, now there is a black plate in the back.
Oh well, so long as you're happy with it, a black plate is better than a computer full of dust :D
That 4gb cf card is actually 3.95gb
How did you get the floppy disk drive working ? I have this error and can't fix
+DeGingerNinja Gaming the cable was the wrong way around
I'm doing the same thing with a G3 Macintosh
can it work with 64G also ?
Install boulder dash, Happy Days
Your voice is sick
Gamebag Hehe thanks I guess
Refurbishment? Pah! Wouldn't be a "real" 486 without an incomprehensible tatty address label on the front.
Lovely video. It's not an HAITCH it is an aitch.
Sorry about that, I'll try to be more pacific with my enunciation in future :p /s
Do you sell ceranic CPU I need one and Cant find in Sweden
In old dos versions type in Qbasic
I think Total Commander allows file transfers over serial cable between DOS, Win3.x, Win95/98 and Win NT variants. The swap out card is a good idea though.
www.ghisler.com/
a video from the future wednesday june 30 2094
+bnerd1 and still no HL3 confirmed
Why use CF and not SD?
CF memory cards use a subset of the IDE command set, so making a bootable adapter is cheap and trivial. SD to IDE card adapters need a chip to bridge to the IDE interface so there is more scope for compatibility problems. Having said that, I'm sure it won't take much research to find a solid SD option that will work. Personal preference I guess.
Is that cpu an overdrive version ?
Yes Daniel Son, wax on wax off
Nice ☺
And lol ☺
Btw I have a son called Daniel so the first name I could think of for my first youtube account was Daniel son ☺
Plus I watched Katate kid alot in the 80s until i got a cpc464 then an amiga of course 😊
It's sad that someone would throw this in a landfill. At least recycle it if you are not going to repair it.
I bust the pin off on all my boards
any one has a link for the adapter
OS/2? are you mad...
Personally, I think using storage like this is cheating... Although if I want to get a HDD into my Tandy 1000 HX, I may be forced to do this, since MFM hard drives are insanely expensive, and the people who sell them often don't know if they work or have been parked correctly.
Tricky isn't it. If this was an IBM I might be more of a purist about the components, but as it's your typical beige box clone from the era I thought flexibility would be permissible to get a good stable system working for some serious gaming. A lot of fun has been had, and is still had on this system.
I've already gotten a serial/parallel ISA card to work in that Tandy by making a PLUS to ISA converter ribbon cable. The Tandy RS-232 PLUS card is insanely hard to find, and so my only hope of making a mouse work, other than using the joystick in DeskMate, was to install a generic ISA card.
They really should have just designed it with a ISA riser rather than this convoluted proprietary PLUS system where the expansion boards have to plug into the memory/DMA controller i.imgur.com/B8q31QN.jpg
it's basically a mirrored pin-for-pin rip-off of ISA anyways (pin A1-B1, A2-B2, etc).
Retro enthusiasts are these days making PCB kits so you can build your own 8-bit ISA IDE cards. I figure if I can get the smallest one (there's not a lot of room in there) www.lo-tech.co.uk/product/lo-tech-isa-compactflash-pcb/ , and pair it with a IDE-FlashCard board hidden somewhere else in the case, I'll have a hard drive in a machine that was never meant to house one. I saw a TH-cam video (can't remember where) where somebody had an MFM controller bodged into his 1000HX going to an external MFM hard drive.
That's a project for another day.