Greeting cards on a floppy, a dead CP/M card, California Beachgirls, and some strange disks
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ค. 2024
- Welcome to Midweek Mini Mail Call #30! This time a bunch of goodies from the Netherlands.
0:00 Intro
2:10 Unboxing stuff from the Netherlands
7:54 Californai Beachgirls for the Atari ST
13:35 Alien 3 for the Amiga (boxed with game catalog)
18:59 My IBM PC 5150 and a recycled Model F keyboard
23:06 Testing old IBM diskettes on the 5150
29:43 PC Tools from Central Point Software
32:31 TurboCAD for the IBM PC -- failing to run
36:27 CardWare Animated Greeting Disks on the IBM PC
42:43 CardWare Animated Greeting Disks on the Apple II
45:45 Fixing a Microsoft Softcard (Apple II CP/M Card)
56:00 Buzz Off for the MSX
57:06 Amstrad Floppy Disks
1:00:09 Outro and summary
--- Video Links
Link to the Atari Erotica disk image
Please email me about this
IBM PC 5150 Deep Dive including the cool CGA/MDA card:
• The IBM PC 5150 -- Get...
The Draw:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw
winworldpc.com/product/the-dr...
ANSI IBM logo:
github.com/misterblack1/ansil...
Apple II+ video with Z80 card
• Apple ][ plus: VIDEX 8...
Tandy 1000EX V20 CPU upgrade and benchmarking:
• Tandy 1000 EX RAM and ...
--- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
Jonard Tools EX-2 Chip Extractor:
amzn.to/2VazxDS
www.jonard.com/Products/EX-2-...
Wiha Chip Lifter:
amzn.to/3a9ftWw
www.wihatools.com/precision-c...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorecomputerclub.com/
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino
Outro Music:
Abyss by | e s c p | escp-music.bandcamp.com
Music promoted by www.free-stock-music.com
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
creativecommons.org/licenses/... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![fellow fellow - Proud [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9uZF7BlUQPE/mqdefault.jpg)
Easy ways to tell Dutch from German: Dutch has 'ij', 'uw', 'oe', _lots_ of double vowels, the diminutive ending '-je' everywhere, and if you see something that looks like an umlaut, it's actually a _trema_ and indicates that the vowel it's on is meant to be pronounced separately from the preceding vowel (and there's always a preceding vowel).
That's not an "easy way". Easier to spot is that German has all nouns uppercase.
Jepp. I wanted to point that out as well.
Glad you did already. Great job!
31:52 The interrupt stack thing: That was a problem in the earliest 8086 processors (I would have to look up the history of that to be exact). In x86 real mode, the stack is located with two registers, SS and SP (actually that is still true in protected and long modes, but the meaning of SS has become progressively vestigial as time went on). So that means, when you need to load a new stack, you need to load something into both of these register.
In more recent models (and to this day), when a new value is loaded into the SS register, the recognition of interrupts is disabled for one instruction. This allows you to load a new stack by first loading something into SS and then something into SP. In fact, in those processors, there was not really a way to load both SS and SP in a single instruction. LSS was added later (which does allow you to do that, but in a cumbersome way, and any processor that support LSS also supports interrupt suppression). But the early 8086 did not do that. So it is indeed possible to get an interrupt between loading SS and SP, causing garbage to be written to an arbitrary location in memory. Obviously that can cause problems. Even if the temporary SS:SP in the middle there points to RAM, it could wind up overwriting important stuff. And if it doesn't point to RAM, interesting things can happen with the hardware. Since the time window is so small, even with a stable setup you would have a hard time getting the interrupt to fire at the exact right time for the bug to happen. Now, interrupts can be disabled, and some software was written to disable interrupts during a stack switch. But not all software did that, some software assumed a later 8086 or 186 or 286, and in any case, none of those can do anything about NMIs.
Thanks for the shout out Adrian! Great video, and the PCW is a great machine 👍🕹️
Oh! Those keyboard stickers, that isn't Greek (I mean, there ARE Greek letters in there, but not for actually writing in Greek), those are symbols for the APL programming language! Whoever had that was an APL programmer!
In others videos Adrian has called other letters "Greek" it appears that if he does not recognise something he calls it Greek.
19:40 - the greek symbols aren't for writing scientific papers, that's an APL keyboard! The APL programming language uses those symbols as its syntax, and IBM used to be one of the biggest proponents of APL!
Symbolics LISP machine Space Cadet terminal keyboards were similar. The abundance of meta keys influenced the development of Emacs, in the same way that the position of the Escape key on ADM-3A terminals influenced the development of vi. (Restating factoids from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard )
The text is dutch, not german and it says:
These profile options are loaded by the emulator when started. There are two separate programs that can be started to establish 5250 emulation. Each program provides a different collection of functions. Below are their names and their functions.
DE5250.COM -> single or double image station session
DP5250.COM -> double session-emulation
Type the next to start emulation with profile options for 2 imagestation sessions without printer session:
DE5250 i=your profile file specification
If you do not provide anything at the parameter i=, the program DE5250.COM will search a file called DE5250.DAT
approved by kris form belgium (dutch speaking also)
I died a little inside when he said it was German. Haha 😂
"it looks like it's in German"
You've heard of Das Boot ,
now for... DOS boot
Take your Like and get out.
oh man.... Dune 2, the mother of all RTS
Anytime you say 'Super serial' card I just think of Manbearpig :D
Excelsior!
"I'm super cereal!"
Really wished South Park would come up with some new episodes.
..thankyou for taking the time & effort to produce this type of content, I absolutely love watching you fix up & show each of the mailbag submissions. Just wonderful..... and I had no idea Canadians pronounce "Zed' the correct way ;-) what a marvelous country!
Very rare keyboard - those are APL stickers. I remember APL for MS-DOS - my favorite computer language ever. One of the rare programs that required a math coprocessor. APL is the creation of one man, Ken Iverson, and started life as a way to express algorithms. From the 1960s. My first ever experience interacting with a computer was an APL system with an IBM Selectric terminal and APL typing ball.
29:48 I grew up using PC Shell 5.5 as our family's file manager program. Amazing that I now get to see the building where it was made!
I'll never get tired of that charming intro and tune.
"That was quite HENTAI-climactic." Well played mr. Adrian.
I remember using those disks in an Amstrad PCW at work when I was 17/18 (so about a million years ago).
when I was about 18 - I was on a job training scheme (YTS in the UK) and was once asked to show some paying customers how to use the Amstrad PCW 8512 for word processing. lovely green screen.
Dune II is an amazing game. Some would say that there would be no Warcraft or Starcraft without the utterly stellar Westwood Studios Dune II I played the DOS version on all three campaigns at least three times.
This. Even with its issues, like the comically bad AI, I played this game for so, so, so long. The most frustrating thing was accidentally running out of spice on the map, because you spent too much time on the level (maybe got unlucky with the enemy, especially when the Harkonnen are lobbing missiles at you). I remember spending FOREVER shooting my own harvesters so that the home office would send me another one. A brand new harvester came with 7 units of spice in it..... Also - Ordos = best house. I can still remember all the units in the game. Raider Trikes were so weak and stupid but so fun (racing through the enemy base dodging every bullet), and the mind control was also a constant source of comedy (sending the big harkonnen tanks back into their base to self destruct).
That is an ST mouse, they're just awful. We quickly gave up with them and bought replacements.
PC Tools was very very popular here in Argentina! You basically had the PC Tools team vs. the Norton Commander/Norton Utilities team. I was on the NC/NU team. Thank you for your great content Adrian!
When I saw that you used PC Tools. It made me happy as I have a Boxed copy of PC Tools Pro 9 that I found at a Thrift Store for around $5. Thanks for this and Have a Nice Day!
"And then all that's left is Ripley, she has to go down to a planet, there's a... it's... ah, the whole movie is just dumb." -- Adrian's Movie Reviews 2021
It warms my heart when I see a little MSX cassette from Nederland :)
"Emulation Station" was often used to simulate terminals on mainframes like the 360 series. Banks and financial often did this rather than rewrite already secure banking applications, as it provided an another layer of security as a bonus to not having to replace hardware. The entire mainframe would be emulated in PCs servers eventually. You may be able to hack a Dutch bank with that Adrian!
I had an Atari 1040ST and upgraded it to 4MB by piggy-backing the RAM whilst in school - fond memories!
The 5250 terminal emulation was used with a Twinax cable to allow the PC to connect to an IBM Mini such as the AS/400. The cable was/is a coaxial type of cable. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5250.
IBM mainframes as well (like 360/MVS etc)
10:59 That is an Atari ST mouse. I think you might need to look inside to see if the potentiometers are calibrated right or if they're gunked up.
There's also a laser upgrade kit available, if the innards are totally shot.
There are no potentiometers, but the opto-encoders, like in most ball-mice... it is either dirty, or has a broken cable.
You have to clean them with alcohol. They then need cleaning more and more often. Mice that needed constant cleaning were called alcoholics.
Yeah, this is typical of ST mice... need lots of cleaning :)
I worked for Toshiba on the mid 90's and walked hundreds of customers through cleaning the mouse. 😁
Beautiful ST. Good to see a CP/M card being fixed.
This was a good one (as they all are), Adrian. The Aliens game looked great.
I loved the positioning of the ST ports, they were very neat. And you never really changed them once installed. Most games used a joystick on the other port so you never needed to change them over often.
The problem was if you had friends and used dual joysticks and then needed to switch back to mouse..
The 3in CF2 disks were brilliant. They were used on the Amstrad (Schneider branded in Germany) CPC & PCW machines & Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3.
If you look on the side, there is a white slider, that operates the disk cover. Also, I may be biased but the CPC was the best home for the Zilog Z80... Great video again Adrian :)
It's marvelous how you manipulate the Amstrad CPC discs as if it were relics from ancient Egypt. I'm French and here in France, Amstrad sold even more CPC computers than in England (thanks to the very good work of Amstrad France). Nowadays, we suppose that Amstrad sold near to 2 millions CPC. So these floppy disks are well known to a whole generation of European users of the 80s, particularly in England, Belgium, France, Spain and Germany.
What you have in your hands are 3 inches floppy discs format created in Japan and also use by Nintendo for it's Famicom Disc System (with minor modificatyions of the case to be sure that only the Nintendo disc can be used in the FDS). This format was chosen by Amstrad because it was less expensive than Sony's (no royalties to pay). The surprise for the end user was to have to put their hand in their pocket to acquire expensive floppy disks much less popular than the 3'1 / 2.
But the disadvantages ended there because on the other hand, they were particularly reliable, much better designed than those of the standard of SONY with a mechanism which kept the magnetic disk well safe until the floppy disk was inserted in a drive.
One day I forgotten a 3 inches floppy disk in a pocket of a jeans and put it all in the washing machine. The floppy disk came out in perfect working order after drying! Indestructible !!!
As the format was not standardized, Alan Mickael Sugar had the good idea to take care of the distribution of the floppy disks in order to ensure that no shortage comes to tarnish the image of his machines (with more or less success). Other companies then imported their own floppy disks, but Amsoft (the publishing company created by Sugar to distribute floppy disks, official cassettes and games at the launch of its machines) will still remain the largest supplier. To justify a little the high selling price of floppy disks, they have long been distributed in rather classy individual plastic cases, which made it possible to neatly store floppy disks which users held dear as the apple of their eye. For the last few years, they've been slipped into more inexpensive flexible plastic cases, but they still look better than 3'1/2 floppy disks bought in bulk.
On CPC their capacity was 178kb per side but this constraint was linked to the CPC which could only read single density floppy disks (red label like the one you have in hand). The PCW could read double density floppy disks (blue Amsoft label) and there were even double-sided drives allowing to benefit from 712Kb per floppy continuously, which was the same as a 3'1/2 floppy disk formatted under MS-DOS. By using more exotic formats, some CPC game developers have managed to squeeze much more than the original 178Kb limit.
These 3 inches floppy disks are all my childhood with my beloved CPC 6128. Nowadays I got lot of them in my personal stock and I sometimes play games from the copy I made 35 years ago when I was a child. Incredible, I tell you!
Dune 2 was Awesome! Played lots on my 386dx33 back in the day. Kinda like C&C, fantastic back in 94.
TheDraw!!! I haven't thought of that since the late 90s and the days of BBSes. Wow.
Adrian, the disk is Dutch language.
You beat me to it ;-)
It reads 'Extended 5250 Emulation Program'
Dutch and German are pretty close languages. At least for an English speaking person.
@@starsundsternchen802 Even though Dutch people might not like to admit it, the two languages are very closely related indeed :-)
I can't speak Dutch, but I can certainly recognize it. The fact I learnt some German years ago also helps, I guess.
It's easy to tell if it's Dutch, it sounds like English spoken backwards.
Nooooo, just when I thought I wasn't behind anymore on watching these! :D
Love these mail call videos! Another great video.
That glass of drink was making me nervous. xD
Thanks for the video! You can use those 3” floppies also in the Spectrum +3.
Oric also used them at some point.
Haha! I used to live just around the corner from that building on Capitol hwy. Great MMMC Adrian!
I remember the CardWare software for the Apple II! I had forgotten all about it until your video showed the baker with the cake.
To open the metal window on those Amstrad disks you slide the metal spring on the side/edge down. Great video 👍
The music at 38:15 is "Daisy Bell" the first song/music to be played on a computer (IBM 704) in 1961.
I didn't know that about Daisy Bell and the IBM. I knew that's what HAL 9000 sings in 2001: A Space Odyssey as it's powering down, but now I know why they probably picked that particular song.
@@shinyplaid Yeah IBM showed Arthur C. Clark the IBM 704 playing Daisy Bell in 1962 and that's why he had a computer made by IBM playing Daisy Bell in 2001 Space Odyssey.
I work in telecom adrian when you said That's PCI compliant I chuckled a bit just awesomeness.... Laughed way to hard at that!
I remember fitting a memory upgrade to a mate's Atari ST back in the 90's. It involved soldering a daughterboard onto the motherboard to double the ram.
PC Tools was a wonderful set of tools, not just their file manager! I was practically worshiped in many places I did on-site support, since I would use PC Tools on IBM & compatibles, and would do wondrous things to recover deleted files, accidentally formatted hard drives, and restore Master Boot Records and partition tables. About the only thing I couldn't recover was from a low-level format...
Tatung Einstein used those compact diskettes as well. They were pretty decent if I remember correctly.
That doll in the greeting card app on the apple 2 is the thing of nightmares...
When I got my brand new C128 I remember the diskettes had the seal “Read the user’s license before breaking the seal” or something similar and I recall myself reading all the legalese for a few hours! Nothing was more boring than that! EVER! LOL!
If us Yanks have to say Zed when referring to the ZX Spectrum, then Brits and Canucks can say Zee when referring to the z80. It only seems fair.
Z80 processor was designed by Frederico Faggin, who was born and studied in Italy. Therefore it is Zed80 :p
@@cbmsysmobile Ha ha, nice.
@@cbmsysmobile Nice try. ;) But "zee-eighty" straight from the man's mouth to your ears: th-cam.com/video/1Ik9_ORz3qQ/w-d-xo.html
The 3" inch floppies were used by the Amstrads and the Spectrum +3's, the little white slider on the side of the disk pulls the shutter open when inserted in the drive.
Atari ST owner here. Yup, that's an original ST mouse. Check the side rollers after taking mouse the rubberised steel ball. Usually full of crud and rust.
no love for Alien 3 :( I loved that movie, it's a lot more subtle and more back to the horror roots of the original Alien, Aliens (2) was a good action flick though.
David Fincher also directed it. His movies are an acquired taste.
It was definitely not the worst movie in the franchise though. Alien 4 might take that title.
I love the Atari ST. I did find an Atari STe in a charity shop (thrift shop) for £3, it came with a mouse, manual, power cable and 2 games. fully working too
For 3 quid? An excellent find! 8) I miss the days of charity shops having that sort of thing, but very few carry any electricals now because they don't want to bother with (or the expense of) the PAT testing. 2nd hand shops in the early 90s were a lot more interesting, more like what LGR shows in his thrifting vids.
The Maxell CF2 disk has Locoscript written on it, that is Amstrad PCW 8256/8512 word processor software written by Locosoft; it shipped as default with the PCW. The disks were also used on the Amstrad CPC range of 8 bit range of computers. To open the metal disk cover, you slide the white tab down on the side of the disk. The drives are actually pretty reliable but they are belt driven and the belts turn to goo. Any original belt needs replacing now.
I remember the frustration of realising all you could use on the Amstrad 6128+ was those 3" disks, with no way to connect a tape drive. Also the fun feature of the disk being corrupted if you forgot to take it out of the drive when power cycling the machine.
Adrian, that is definitely an Atari ST Mouse. The only other non-ST/STe/Mega/TT/Falcon030 computer they bundled it with was with some of the Atari PCs [PC Compatibles]. It was never sold for the Atari 8-bit line but that didn't stop some 8-bit owners using them with software like the "Diamond" GUI software [it was named "Diamond" as an in-joke since the Atari ST used the GEM GUI]. At one point, Atari Corp did entertain the notion of bundling the 65XE and 130XE with Diamond - like Commodore did for the C64c with GEOS - but it never came to market. And since then, there's even pro homebrew software and mods to existing titles for using the Atari ST Mouse with the 2600. AtariAge's "Missile Command-TB" - which added native Trak-Ball support to it - also provided support on some versions for using an Atari ST - or Amiga - Mouse instead of a Trak-Ball or a joystick. Atari Corp stuck the Mouse/Joystick ports in that cubby so the ST would look slightly more "professional" with better cable management but instead, it infuriated us users. Practical Solutions sold a lot of "Mouse Master" adapters that plugged into both of those ports and provided a switch so you could plug in the ST Mouse and 2 joysticks at the same time and then used provided velcro to mount the adapter usually under your computer table. Practical Peripherals also sold an adapter called the "Monitor Master" that allowed you to plug in the Atari SC1224 Color Monitor and the Atari SM124 Monochrome Monitor into the single monitor port and then toggled them with the adapter switch. Of course, as you pointed out, Atari Corp could've moved those ports to the right side of the case. After all, your ST is an STe and it has the 2 Enhanced Joystick Ports mounted to the left side of the case. Those ports were later re-used by the Atari Falcon030 and the Jaguar so ST Power Pad/JagPad controllers can be plugged into them. The problem with your ST Mouse is most likely the ball being dirty or actually requiring replacement. I'm sure Best Electronics or MyAtari on eBay have NOS replacement balls. Or like with the Amiga Mouse, there are modern board replacement solutions that use lasers that you can retrofit into that ST Mouse case. Third party mice were popular back in the day like with that "Beetle" mouse in multiple colors. If I recall, there were some drivers available to use serial mice too so long as you didn't need your RS232 Serial Port for a Modem or Null Modem Cable Connection [for gaming mainly]. That software you had was probably public domain/freeware/shareware. As you mentioned, it was rather odd it was monochrome. I was actually surprised it actually worked on an STe. So many games wouldn't run on those computers since the software publishers didn't patch pre-existing titles that often although modern enthusiasts certainly have done so for a lot of the commercial software. There are also several different modern monitor adapters to connect that ST up to a VGA monitor. Of course, you'll need to pick a VGA monitor that can sync the 15KHz RGB/Monochrome signal. Nice Gotek. Although for future use when receiving discs, perhaps you should pick up an external working Atari SF314 external double-sided disc drive...
A brief flash of "Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker". I loved playing it on my mate's A600. I "somehow ended up with a copy" of the game, but unfortunately it wasn't supported on my A1200, and would crash at the slightest hint of a 3D graphic calculation. It did get re-released, however, and I bought a proper copy. Definitely one of my favourite Amiga games.
Nice to see some rare Atari content. Adrian you really need to feature some Atari 8 bit computers--very interesting and capable machines.
Those 3” CF-2 disks are for an Amstrad PCW 8256. It should say Locoscript (excellent word processing program). I’m the guy who made up Perifractic’s Gotek for his PCW.
The Amstrad PCW was quite popular in the UK, I remember using them in school especially the ones with ball printers (that's not the right name I suspect but it's what's coming to mind :) ) which were insanely loud. In a classroom with 30 people printing at the end of the day the noise was extreme to say the least. I can still hear it now - whir, thump thump whir thump
ah, old amstrad 3 inch disks - that takes me back to the late 80's
Fantastiche!
I remember playing the demo of Alien 3 on the Amiga 500+ when I was a kid. :)
My evening is made. 😁
You could always plug in an external drive and fit the old drive-flip-switch mod to that ST. Oh and, you can set the ST to the high res mode if you just pin the monitor port out to a VGA monitor.
Hahah Gerbrand Sterrenburg; mooie inzending en goeie grap met je naam :)
Dune II: Battle for Arrakis, also known as Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty also came out for PC and Genesis, and was a precursor to Command and Conquer from Westwood Studios. It might have been the first Real-Time Strategy game, but I'm not certain of that. It spawned 2 sequels (Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle for Dune) and still has a following to this day. If you get the game, you can use the data files with source ports for modern Windows systems as well, which add some useful features that didn't exist in the early RTS games (drag select and assigning numbers to groups).
My 520ST had 2 megs added by a friend who soldered a ram sandwich board into the main board in the late 80s. You couldn't close the case with screws because the ram took up space but the top case would still fit.
It worked flawlessly but I didn't have much use for the extra ram over the life of it. I used Revolver software to task switch between open programs and could load enormous graphics slide shows with a program (Spectrum 512??) that could take higher color bit depth from Amiga .ham files and with some graphics trickery, could display them interlaced which preserved most of the image quality from the Amiga on the Atari ST. It was amazing but was interlaced to mimick the Amiga display so it gave you a headache.
I could also render small samples of audio in 22khz with the extra ram. I think it was about half the quality of a cd music track.
I think there were demos that took advantage of more ram towards the end of its lifespan.
The ST was a great machine. People don't give it the credit it deserves.
Those are amstrad/hitachi 3" disks, the famicom disk system is a varation of quickdisk.
I think you are right about the disks, that format was from old Amstrad PCW and CPC machines. It was also used in the Spectrum +3 as this was an Amstrad model.
I remember the mouse driving the train! They may have re-used the mouse driving the train in a Merry Christmas greeting card? I seem to recall the mouse in Christmas context versus birthday context. Hi Rami! Baaaah!!!! :)
At 34:15 @Adrian's Digital Basement... Adrian something I learned recently .. (after decades of this) .. that when you do DIR with the cleaning disk.. the heads do not move.. they only try to read the FAT.. that is.. the "zero" track of the Floppy..
So if you don't put a drop of alcohol in the area of the cleaning disk were the "zero" track would be..
the heads will rub against the dry surface (and dirty from previous cleaning)..
therefore.. programs like HD-Copy or DCopy Plus (professionally diskettes copy programas) have an option "use cleaning disk"...
and they send the heads several times.. back and forth over the entire surface of the disk..
making them go through dirty surface.. through wet surface.. over and over..
helping clean the edges of the heads when they go forward.. and then when they come back.. not only using rotation of the surface...
You realize this when you are working with a floppy drive without the lid... it's very different and interesting to see ..
The Amstrad disks contain Loco script files. A word processor from Locomotive software.
used pc-tools a lot back in the day - useful for attribute setting and the like. was part of my toolkit but as you say it was superseded by other programs...
Hi there, you can use Xcopy (nibble copy) on an amiga with a gotek to create an image of your ST-disk. Then you can use that image with the gotek in your ST. Also works for MSX floppies. Xcopy on the amiga wasn't used for the amiga platform only ;)
I had one friend who had an ST... It was the first time I saw the game "The Black Cauldron" from Sierra Online. Also, 7th Guest was a lot of fun... My sisters and I solved it together. Otherwise... Good memories about my post-C64 PC days...
Early 8088 chips had a bug which allowed interrupts to occur DURING a stack setup, which would cause corruption. We had to be defensive and disable interrupts manually....
CLI
MOV SS, StackSegmentValue
MOV SP, StackPointerValue
STI
The stack address (any addresses really) is in two parts - the segment (which multiple of 16 bytes the data the type of data started) and the pointer (the place within that 64K). There was a Code Segment (the program), a Data Segment (for data), an Extra Segment (handy for other data) and a Stack Segment (which holds things like return addresses for called functions. A program on .COM format started with all these pointing at the same 64K chunk of memory - just like CP/M !
8086 chips (and later) automatically disabled interrupts from a change to the stack segment register until after the next instruction.
Never used PCTOOLS ? Come on Adrian. Awesomest tool ever ;-)
:-D
Yes those 3 Inch Floppies have a disk protection that slides open while they are being inserted. Check the SIDE of the floppy, there is a small rail with a notch that pulls the slider open ;-)
BtW, the Alien Game looks awesome
Looks good as a side-scroller/shooter, but it doesn't really fit into the Alien timeline.
5:15 😮 then I quickly fast forward to 7:54 eager to see what it is! 😁
Adrian you need to get your hands on an Amstrad PCW 9512, then you can explore the joys of LocoScript! I remember being so disappointed when my step-father came home with a PCW 9512 and not an IBM Clone ,but soon got stuck into learning CP/M and messing with Amstrad Basic and LocoScript.
The disc labeled LogoScript should be LocoScript. It' a word processor for the Amstrad PCW / CPC. Digital Research CP/M was a pack-in disc that came with Amstrad's disc drive. I used CP/M on my CPC 464 to play Infocom text adventures.
MUSICA is for the PCjr. With some tweaking it could be coaxed into working with an EGA and BASIC 3.2.
I think nobody mentioned yet that 3" discs were used also with Oric Atmos computer (more popular in France than in UK) and with the Elan Enterprise 128 (again more popular in Hungary than in UK), but both drives are super rare and expencive as hell. You can open 3" disk by sliding the white slider on the side of the disk.
If I remember right, the x86 is suppose to inhibit interrupts for the next opcode after you set the stack segment, allowing you to set the stack pointer without having to manually disable interrupts. If this isn't working, it's possible for an interpret to happen between setting the stack segment and the stack pointer, resulting in the interrupt information overwriting random parts of memory.
I had bad (cracked) solder joints on the port that kept my 1040STF mouse from working. As you can imagine, from the weird placement it puts a lot of strain on the port. After reflowing them, the mouse started working again. There is mouse-key support, as well, using the numpad and I think one of the accelerator keys together.
3" discs are common on UK machines ... Amstrad 6128 or even Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 (machine put out by Amstrad after they bought Sinclair). You can find those everywhere on this side of the pond.
The 3” amstrad disk were also used in the ZX Spectrum +3. The white thing on the side would move the cover when you placed the disc in the drive. The red tabs at the top where the write protect.
I think I preferred the layout of my old original Atari ST which had the mouse and joystick ports on the side. Sure, it meant that the disk drives were external, but to me that is far more usable than having to flip over the machine any time you want to switch out a mouse or a joystick.
Dang. I really wanted to see you run turbocad.
Central Point Software started out in Central Point, Oregon. I had a friend who worked there, and when the company would throw out disks he would send them to me.
Man, the steps one used to have to go through to see a bit of 16 bit titillation 🤣
I'd love to see a feature of the now seriously required Dead Parts 2.0 bin. I'm sure someone out there could make/donate something along the lines of those bygone age Money Boxes where a skeletal hand would come from a grave and could drag the deceased Chip to its crypt!!
👻
An Atari 1040STe, the exact model I had, even a memory upgrade. I didn't realise that it was so much harder on the previous models.
LocoScript, not Logoscript is word processing software from Locomotive Software, I used it on the Amstrad PCW 8512...
STM1 mouse is for the atari ST
if you have problems with mouse movement, clean the rollers
Some of the Amstrad CPCs (8 bit home computers) and PCW (word processor) series worked with those 3-inch disks. Some other computers used them, but not many.
The 5250 Twinax terminal is used by the midrange IBM system AS/400 and its successors iSeries, System i, i5. I like this strange and weird but interesting system. I wish I had a 5250 emulation card to connect my old AS/400 to my even older PC/XT. But at least I have a real twinax 5250 terminal.
I think it's kind of cool that I was not the only one going to college/university in 1993 with an A2000...
I Still have the Amiga :D
Cheers,
keep up the great work Adrian