These Dolch machines are very impressive. I bet they were quite expensive back when they were new. I wish I'd had one back then -- it would've been very convenient for the work I did at the time.
I know this video is old, but I have a PCI GPIB card. I believe it's a general or international instruments card. Let me know if you want it. Works perfectly.
I certainly don't miss the days of setting jumpers for absolutely everything (I think I even remember having to set jumpers for the CPU voltage, which was also kinda cool because it was easy to overclock your processor), but I really do miss the days of just being able to move programs around by simply copying folders instead of having to install everything. Heh, when I was a teenager I had a poster of that image that's shown at @2:00. It was kinda cheesy, but I also kinda miss it.
+Marxyz: USB *always * plugs in the wrong direction! Then you switch it around, and it is *still * in the wrong direction. Then you switch it around once more and it might get in. One of the most frustrating connector design in the history of humanity.
At 0:50 "no such thing as plug and play for ISA", except for all of the ISA PNP cards. The National Instruments 183663C card is a Plug and Play version of the AT-GPIB TNT. One of those might have made things easier under Windows, although it might have been more work to get it configured under DOS with some sort of ISA PNP configuration utility.
Yep that is true (and Glen knows everything). NI has a so-called "PnP" version of the same card. It's a bit of a misnomer though. As you say, it's not really PnP, it's just that instead of jumpers you need to configure it through a software utility. Which I find much worse, since you can't configure it unless you have said utility. So I stick with the jumpered ones.
Having the right splash screen adds a lot to it. My boss was amazed a few weeks back when I tweaked some industrial touch panel my company sells with its systems (third party product, just with custom programming done by us) to show out logo on startuo instead of the original vendor's logo. ;-)
I don't miss messing around with ISA irq/address problems. I remember seeing these computers used as network analyzers in the late nineties, they were especially useful because our network had many FDDI rings, and loops to troubleshoot.
As someone who has a SCSI cable running from an external port to an internal tape drive as the card didn't have the right connector internally, I wholly approve of this connection method and the sound module. Edit: My home server OS disk died while watching this, must be some kind of curse transferred via UA-cam...
Setting up retro pcs 😲, I just installed w98, xp, and debian on an old ThinkPad, now hunting for pcmcia lan card so I can back it all up and have something other than USB 1.1 port to transfer files over 😀 👍👍👍
is your 2940UW firmware up to date? I can recall having large and small disk issues until I installed some firmware file for it from 2001 or 2002. they usually have one from 1997-1999 on them or something from memory. the firmware itself might be slightly unobtanium now, but it's still worth a looksie. Also, if you're gonna do XP, please do run Speccy on it for that video. it'd be interesting to know what that pulls up for information on the basic stuff installed (board and drives, I'm interested in seeing the listed drive temps if SMART is even being passed through.)
Hey Marc - I love the Dolch series. I’m going to start working on a PAC 60… I’m missing the keyboard cable, as the 60 goes from a 5-Pin-DIN to Mini-DIN, so I get ‘keyboard error’ at boot currently. Can I pick yer brain if i hit any issues? Maybe a ZIP of your DOS install if I’m lucky… cheers. 🎉
All my installs are available on my website: www.curiousmarc.com/computing/dolchpac-65-luggable-pc Don’t have a 60 so not sure now much help I could be, but you can always ask!
@@CuriousMarc thank you - I found your website before you replied, but it WAS very helpful. I’ve found a dolch pac60 user manual that’s also very very helpful. I’d you’d like my dolch collection just lemme know.
You could have put SCSI hard disks and a SCSI CD recorder in it and made your life (arguably) a little easier by disabling the IDE controller to free up some IRQ's and I/O ports. :)
Boy, are they overprotective... They have removed all the legacy drivers from the universe because they also work with older cards that use the same chipset as theirs. It's in order to protect *you *, they say ;-)
It's sitting quietly in the entrance hall, you'll see it in some upcoming videos. No one is eager yet to spend the large amount of time it needs. Ken was working on a Xerox-Alto-debugge-in-a-box, so maybe if project that succeeds it'll be the guinea pig. It temporarily lent some parts and cables to the haunted Diablo drive, so it has been useful in its own way.
Neat, that's got a good selection of expansion options. Seems like they're pretty uncommon sadly, especially for reasonable prices Those NI GPIB cards are great too, especially since some genius guy wrote a program to emulate old HPIB storage media (HPDrive)
Bingo! The GPIB primary use if for HPDRIVE/HPDIR HP storage emulation, from Ansgar Kueckes (I think he is a genius too, and we cooperated on the now included HP7970 functionality). The GPIB ISA card should be quite inexpensive (however the PCI versions are indeed expensive), and all the other cards should also be rather common and reasonably cheap. MIne were all from now defunct Weird Stuff - really cheap.
I picked up the same TNT ISA card for next to nothing some time ago, I hadn't touched interrupts and IRQs in ages so that was "fun" to relearn lol Sadly my HP 1630d logic analyzer doesn't detect drives at all for some reason (which is what I got the card for), I'm guessing some ROM issue since it doesn't even show the disk menu (yet it does communicate enough to control over HPIB just fine). Oh well... Should be extra useful for my HP85 too, since all the original program tapes I got were hooped. Hopefully I'll find an HPIB card for that some day at a semi-sane price As for the Dolch, were they commonly sold rebranded like this one? Might be easier to find a rebranded one in that case. Sure would beat the big ol tower I threw together with dusty old parts + the boat anchor CRT!
The original versions of the 1630A/D firmware had HP-IL mass storage support for the HP-IL 82161A cassette drive. Later versions switched to HP-IB mass storage support. If you can program a set of eight 27C128 EPROMs you should be able to update the firmware to the HP-IB mass storage support version if you want. I did that with my 1630D.
Yeah seriously, thank you! I found your post on the EEVBlog when searching for the ROM and got the images, I think I can program some of them. I wonder why it has HP-IB hardware but HP-IL software - maybe someone replaced the ROM card at some point?
code123ns well the odds of seeing a banion vines network are slim at best. And as far as I can Cecil Vines is the only network os that pulled default config and sharing info from z
Since your USB board was a internal and probably never will be used USB, why not put a USB Wi-Fi card on it? Just to have the only Dolch computer with Wi-Fi? (probably the signal inside will be horrible but a small hole for a external antenna and a pig tail could do the job. On XP and Linux it should work and maybe be useful, or just use a "big" internal USB Flash drive (SSD or HDD) for backups
Problem is there aren't that many WIFI sticks that support Windows 98 if at all. WIFI didn't reallly become a public thing until after Windows 98 was released and it was WIreless A and then Wireless B (G didnt come out until after the 2000s). Also Windows 98 doesnt have any wireless manager so one would need to get some wireless management tool for Windows 98
I had to stop watching this video when you started messing with interrupt jumpers, due to PTSD from working with network & SCSI cards back in the ISA days. 😬
Well mark i am pretty sure you could found audio out connectors on the SBLive, because i think even SBlive had those 5.5 inch front bays for audio? But maybe not all models had the connector. www.hardware-one.com/reviews/platinum/images/LiveDrivePanel_small.jpg
It is a shame we cannot use a more modern Micro-itx motherboard running something like an A10-7800k and 64GB of DDR3 RAM and use something like Windows 8.1 and you should be possible to have the old drive as the slave and pull the documents of it and onto the new hard drive then everything should work.
This Win95 startup sound is bringing back all the memories. 🙈
There's something very satisfying about seeing a computer become it's best version of itself. Both on the software and hardware side. Thank you Marc.
maybe he can upgrade it all the way up to windows 11 😲
That was a very satisfying journey down memory lane :)
Censor bar covers your notes long after you typed your password Marc
Dang artificially not so intelligent UA-cam-blurring-tool-that-does-not-work. Will be fixed (maybe?) in a moment.
C'est la guerre! At least while AI remains not so "I" maybe there's still hope for humanity :-)
These Dolch machines are very impressive. I bet they were quite expensive back when they were new. I wish I'd had one back then -- it would've been very convenient for the work I did at the time.
I know this video is old, but I have a PCI GPIB card. I believe it's a general or international instruments card. Let me know if you want it. Works perfectly.
It's probably a National Instrument, I'd be glad to use it. You can contact me at the address on my about page: ua-cam.com/users/CuriousMarcabout
@@CuriousMarc Oh no problem. I enjoy your content. Thank you for replying. Merci beaucoup !!!
seeing all those old school tricks breaks my brain.
I certainly don't miss the days of setting jumpers for absolutely everything (I think I even remember having to set jumpers for the CPU voltage, which was also kinda cool because it was easy to overclock your processor), but I really do miss the days of just being able to move programs around by simply copying folders instead of having to install everything.
Heh, when I was a teenager I had a poster of that image that's shown at @2:00. It was kinda cheesy, but I also kinda miss it.
It's nice to see that also computer experts like you can't get in an usb in the right direction at the first attempt like us mortals ;)
+Marxyz: USB *always * plugs in the wrong direction! Then you switch it around, and it is *still * in the wrong direction. Then you switch it around once more and it might get in. One of the most frustrating connector design in the history of humanity.
I believe they are the only 4-dimensional connectors in existence.
I was about to say exactly that. That's the only connector that only fits after rotating 180 degrees TWICE.
At 0:50 "no such thing as plug and play for ISA", except for all of the ISA PNP cards. The National Instruments 183663C card is a Plug and Play version of the AT-GPIB TNT. One of those might have made things easier under Windows, although it might have been more work to get it configured under DOS with some sort of ISA PNP configuration utility.
Yep that is true (and Glen knows everything). NI has a so-called "PnP" version of the same card. It's a bit of a misnomer though. As you say, it's not really PnP, it's just that instead of jumpers you need to configure it through a software utility. Which I find much worse, since you can't configure it unless you have said utility. So I stick with the jumpered ones.
Now would be a great time to create an image of the full drive with Ghost or similar software.
If you add Logo=0 under [Options] in msdos.sys then you won't get the Windows 98 splash screen during boot, which helps for a more DOS-like feeling :)
Thanks for the tip, I didn't know!
Or you can find some nice Dolch logo, put it into 320x400 256 color BMP, name it LOGO.SYS in C:\ and have fancy customized splash screen ;)
Ah, that's where it hides! Thanks, I didn't know either.
Having the right splash screen adds a lot to it. My boss was amazed a few weeks back when I tweaked some industrial touch panel my company sells with its systems (third party product, just with custom programming done by us) to show out logo on startuo instead of the original vendor's logo. ;-)
aw maaaaan what you reminded me right now... spending so much time tweaking with .sys options and parameters in .bat ... fucking ERRORLEVEL
Ahhh that startup sound.... those memories...
I love this series so much.
There are some very good DOSW Usb drivers, fior disks, the mouse joystick, and keyboard. Good luck.
I don't miss messing around with ISA irq/address problems. I remember seeing these computers used as network analyzers in the late nineties, they were especially useful because our network had many FDDI rings, and loops to troubleshoot.
This is exactly what it was like to use computers in the 90s.
As someone who has a SCSI cable running from an external port to an internal tape drive as the card didn't have the right connector internally, I wholly approve of this connection method and the sound module. Edit: My home server OS disk died while watching this, must be some kind of curse transferred via UA-cam...
Setting up retro pcs 😲, I just installed w98, xp, and debian on an old ThinkPad, now hunting for pcmcia lan card so I can back it all up and have something other than USB 1.1 port to transfer files over 😀 👍👍👍
That was scary to get the beep of death again :)
I nearly had a heart attack!
I already have PTSD from that last series of videos, lol. Had my sound up a bit too loud and it freaked the living hell out of me.
awww, that 32-bit signed long max in sound blaster installer
Ah, Win98, when men were men and computers were a pain in the ass
On my old ISA audio cards I'd use IRQ 7 because I was never printing and gaming at the same time.
7:01 a s c e n s i o n
that beep of death is like the alarm Chernobyl made when reactor 3 went into melt down.....probably
Id love a dolsh pac 65
I feel this is a really missed formfactor. I'd love to see a kit computer that takes a standard ATX or mini-ATX board inside a luggable formfactor.
I agree. USB and the laptop really killed this. Then we end up with unwieldy octopus contraptions with tons of cables and a myriad of wall warts.
That censor is long everdue
UA-cam blur tool at its best...
is your 2940UW firmware up to date? I can recall having large and small disk issues until I installed some firmware file for it from 2001 or 2002. they usually have one from 1997-1999 on them or something from memory. the firmware itself might be slightly unobtanium now, but it's still worth a looksie.
Also, if you're gonna do XP, please do run Speccy on it for that video. it'd be interesting to know what that pulls up for information on the basic stuff installed (board and drives, I'm interested in seeing the listed drive temps if SMART is even being passed through.)
+Sudos Thanks for the tip on the SCSI card firmware!
Are those speakers shielded? Because they are pretty close to the magnetic HDD.
Was there no line level out on the card?
Hey Marc - I love the Dolch series. I’m going to start working on a PAC 60… I’m missing the keyboard cable, as the 60 goes from a 5-Pin-DIN to Mini-DIN, so I get ‘keyboard error’ at boot currently. Can I pick yer brain if i hit any issues? Maybe a ZIP of your DOS install if I’m lucky… cheers. 🎉
All my installs are available on my website: www.curiousmarc.com/computing/dolchpac-65-luggable-pc
Don’t have a 60 so not sure now much help I could be, but you can always ask!
@@CuriousMarc thank you - I found your website before you replied, but it WAS very helpful. I’ve found a dolch pac60 user manual that’s also very very helpful. I’d you’d like my dolch collection just lemme know.
You could have put SCSI hard disks and a SCSI CD recorder in it and made your life (arguably) a little easier by disabling the IDE controller to free up some IRQ's and I/O ports. :)
NI cards are a PITA - especially if you don't have the drivers. Of course, NI will be happy to sell you a new copy at grossly inflated prices.
Boy, are they overprotective... They have removed all the legacy drivers from the universe because they also work with older cards that use the same chipset as theirs. It's in order to protect *you *, they say ;-)
CuriousMarc
Darn it, that sounds as bad as a number of consumer-focused tech companies not honouring the "right to repair"...
Love your work Marc 😃👍. Are you still working on the Digibarn?
It's sitting quietly in the entrance hall, you'll see it in some upcoming videos. No one is eager yet to spend the large amount of time it needs. Ken was working on a Xerox-Alto-debugge-in-a-box, so maybe if project that succeeds it'll be the guinea pig. It temporarily lent some parts and cables to the haunted Diablo drive, so it has been useful in its own way.
Did you check that Serial still works in Win and DOS?
pretty sure it does, have never seen a computer that has a serial port on it somewhere which does _not_ work
might have been just very lucky
I'm waiting for the Linux vids :)
oooh, Nortel
The soundblaster emulation and the gpib card are both using dma channel 5, better change the gpib card to something else
Neat, that's got a good selection of expansion options. Seems like they're pretty uncommon sadly, especially for reasonable prices
Those NI GPIB cards are great too, especially since some genius guy wrote a program to emulate old HPIB storage media (HPDrive)
Bingo! The GPIB primary use if for HPDRIVE/HPDIR HP storage emulation, from Ansgar Kueckes (I think he is a genius too, and we cooperated on the now included HP7970 functionality). The GPIB ISA card should be quite inexpensive (however the PCI versions are indeed expensive), and all the other cards should also be rather common and reasonably cheap. MIne were all from now defunct Weird Stuff - really cheap.
I picked up the same TNT ISA card for next to nothing some time ago, I hadn't touched interrupts and IRQs in ages so that was "fun" to relearn lol
Sadly my HP 1630d logic analyzer doesn't detect drives at all for some reason (which is what I got the card for), I'm guessing some ROM issue since it doesn't even show the disk menu (yet it does communicate enough to control over HPIB just fine). Oh well...
Should be extra useful for my HP85 too, since all the original program tapes I got were hooped. Hopefully I'll find an HPIB card for that some day at a semi-sane price
As for the Dolch, were they commonly sold rebranded like this one? Might be easier to find a rebranded one in that case. Sure would beat the big ol tower I threw together with dusty old parts + the boat anchor CRT!
The original versions of the 1630A/D firmware had HP-IL mass storage support for the HP-IL 82161A cassette drive. Later versions switched to HP-IB mass storage support. If you can program a set of eight 27C128 EPROMs you should be able to update the firmware to the HP-IB mass storage support version if you want. I did that with my 1630D.
Glen, you are a precious source of encyclopedic knowledge when it comes to HP! Thanks for your help.
Yeah seriously, thank you!
I found your post on the EEVBlog when searching for the ROM and got the images, I think I can program some of them.
I wonder why it has HP-IB hardware but HP-IL software - maybe someone replaced the ROM card at some point?
Surely after all those upgrades you should have labelled it a SuperPac 65
Marc, any reason you are setting last drive =z. No need to get to z unless you are running bannion vines. Save some space and drop down to r
I think one of the installers dropped that one in there, so I left it.
I guess it was custom to start network mapped drives from z:
code123ns well the odds of seeing a banion vines network are slim at best. And as far as I can Cecil Vines is the only network os that pulled default config and sharing info from z
... why does it say "fibre channel" !?
Since your USB board was a internal and probably never will be used USB, why not put a USB Wi-Fi card on it?
Just to have the only Dolch computer with Wi-Fi? (probably the signal inside will be horrible but a small hole for a external antenna and a pig tail could do the job.
On XP and Linux it should work and maybe be useful, or just use a "big" internal USB Flash drive (SSD or HDD) for backups
Problem is there aren't that many WIFI sticks that support Windows 98 if at all. WIFI didn't reallly become a public thing until after Windows 98 was released and it was WIreless A and then Wireless B (G didnt come out until after the 2000s). Also Windows 98 doesnt have any wireless manager so one would need to get some wireless management tool for Windows 98
I had to stop watching this video when you started messing with interrupt jumpers, due to PTSD from working with network & SCSI cards back in the ISA days. 😬
What version of Linux do you use for this?
Suspense! Coming up in the next video...
Haha. I was guessing memory card the first time it screamed. (part 1?) :)
Well mark i am pretty sure you could found audio out connectors on the SBLive, because i think even SBlive had those 5.5 inch front bays for audio? But maybe not all models had the connector.
www.hardware-one.com/reviews/platinum/images/LiveDrivePanel_small.jpg
Well a dos start menu to select dos, windows would been nice. I am lazy i know.
"I choose this sound card because it works on DOS..."
Retrogaming detected
Now just clone/backup hard drive.
Should have used a USB sound card ;)
It is a shame we cannot use a more modern Micro-itx motherboard running something like an A10-7800k and 64GB of DDR3 RAM and use something like Windows 8.1 and you should be possible to have the old drive as the slave and pull the documents of it and onto the new hard drive then everything should work.