NEC PowerMate SX/16 vintage 386 PC
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- Опубліковано 22 сер 2024
- Working on vintage computers can be challenging, especially when dealing with obscure hardware such as the TEAC CD-55A "SuperQuad" combination 4X CD-ROM and 3½-inch floppy drive, circa 1995: books.google.co...
After experimenting with various different interfaces and drivers, I was able to get it installed and working in my NEC PowerMate SX/16, but it doesn't recognize any CD-ROMs, even old ones that I know work in DOS. It just gives gives the error message "CDROM not High Sierra or ISO-9660 format". Any ideas?
This is the first time I see both CD and floppy drive built into one drive.
When I saw your comment initially, I thought you meant a floppy and cd drive in one case, when I saw the cd drive and floppy drive in one, I understood what you meant.
I'm sure you've figured this out by now, but for those that haven't - that CD-ROM drive is NOT IDE. It's a proprietary interface, similar to the one used by Creative Labs. I have a dead Creative 4x CD-ROM drive that could be mistaken for an IDE drive, but the dead giveaway is that it has four, not three (master, slave, cable select), jumper settings. That is what you have to watch out for on these older drives.
I had one of those too. It worked with a sound card.
I remember spending hours and sometimes days trying to get a new piece of hardware to work. I don't miss it at all.
The dark ages, setting up jumpers, configuring, hoping stuff would work and dealing with proprietary crap like shown here. The kiddies have it good today.
Things that i hate about vintage computers
Ni-Cad Batteries soldered on the board that are prone to leaking from inactivity over time or RTC Chips like the big Odin or Dallas chips on the motherboard
Riser cards with PCI and ISA slots that is in a propretary socket on some PC motherboards from some brands like Compaq, NEC, Packard Bell, Dell's Optiplex line, etc.
Proprietary power supply connectors on Dell Dimensions from the late 90s like the Dell Dimension 4100 and the XPS line that had 1 plug that looked like the standard ATX one and another one that looks like the AT psu connector but smaller but there are adaptors for the proprietary ports
Plastics that get brittle with age or get yellowish from being in the sun for too long
difficulty of finding support or drivers for hardware that is obscure and rare
Pre-internet, when the only way to get drivers was on the disks that came with the hardware. If you lost the disks or they got damaged you were very likely fucked, if you were lucky the manufacturer would sell you another set.
@@pentiummmx2294 IDE disk connections were also pretty inconvenient. And if you mounted everything and forgot to set jumpers for master/slave ... SATA saved us all :)
This brings back painful memories.
We've come so far with modern computing, it's nice to tinker with the old stuff from time to time - I think preferred this era, sometimes.
NEC was actually the first name brand big company to have the 1/3 height drives. They had them for 5 1/4, 3 1/2 and CD-ROM. They were great and allowed the cases to be smaller and still have all the drives.
I worked at a MicroAge retail franchise back when these PCs were fairly new.
You might have an address conflict with either the sound card or a motherboard LPT port, try with the soundcard removed, and also with different addresses.
It's also possible the drive was damaged when plugged into the standard IDE port.
Lastly, many CD-ROM drives from that era no longer work due to discoloration of the laser lens.
Yeah those TEAC drives were not IDE if I recall correctly. More info: www.experts-exchange.com/questions/10036966/TEAC-CD-55A-with-W95-and-SB16.html
always enjoyed watching your videos. informative and thorough, plus you don't act egotistical like some other tech youtubers do
This same company was making the amazing PC-9821 at the same time as this computer. I wish we had got some more of that Japanese flavor in our PCs back then.
I still remember those problems getting new hardware to work on my PowerMate 386 25MHz. I spent days and nights in front of this computer after adding new hardware.
Those RTC modules, I've had some success taking a dremel to them and disconnecting the battery internal to the module, soldering leads and using an external battery to make it work
NEC computers, also sold as "Packard Bell" in America were a particular pain in the behind. Surprising a reputable Japanese company made such junk. I had a problem with one after owning it 14 months, and when I went into Sam's Club to ask where to get it fixed, they told me it cannot be fixed and to just bring it back for a refund or credit towards another computer.......these computers were that bad that Sam's Club just took them back without argument.
The NEC computer in this video was made years before NEC and Packard Bell merged.
Your video shows a "Packard Bell" card in the thing.
Robin Sattahip
That was an Aztech sound card I added later, many years after the computer was built. Packard Bell used Aztech sound cards in their computers so that's why it has the logo on it.
Good luck with it, I was very glad to get rid of mine.
In the Japanese market NEC sold the PC-98, non-IBM compatible (but still x86) architecture where almost everything was proprietary. I think a bit of that design philosophy worked it's way in here.
Vintage PC's are always a load of fun. My Presario 2286 likes to run hot because of how Compaq did the cooling in it, so I had to pop the PSU open and make the fan blow onto the heatsink. Next step is buying a new heatsink for it.
You could buy a generic fan of the right size and wire it into a molex connector.
***** I was going to (hopefully) nab one of those fancy-pantsy Cooler Master ones with heatpipes and just run it at 5v.
Speaking of heat issues, my Linux machine would freeze up constantly, and I used my can of compressed air and blew it into the back of my PSU and dust was falling down from the internal fan. It hasn't frozen up ever since. Now my Retro PC needs a dusting in the PSU.
***** God I know that feeling. When I first cracked the PSU open on this... Dear god.
Yet the internals for the rest of the PC were shockingly clean.
a new vwestlife video? yes!
*****
spierdalaj marginesie społeczny
believe the jumpers on the drive have to be set as:
drive 0: oooc
dr 1: ooco
dr 2: ocoo
dr 3: cooc
this is JP1 on the back and o=open , c=closed in lines above
try that and see if it helps
dr 4: cock
SORRY I HAD TO
that's why some brands / custom built / clone, old PCs are common, at least in my country. Because they use standard hardware such as SIMMs, ISA and such.
Some of the old computers including IBM and NEC uses proprietary parts, which is why some models are a commercial failure, either the parts are sold in limited quantities or expensive, maybe even both.
my dad had a NEC versa M320 that basically had been through a lot, was beaten up and even had a broken power button (we turned it on using one of the shortcut hotkeys) and dead floppy drive but still worked, even though it refused to reinstall from its own recovery disk(I later learned that NEC put a hidden "tattoo" on the hard drive which may have been accidentally erased) so we just used it with a stock XP install(at least it didn't have that outdated real player g2 that couldn't be uninstalled because NECk only allowed most of their own apps to be uninstalled from their own smartrestore app, but there was no button to uninstall realplayer) until it reached the point where it would just shut off halfway through the first part of XP setup., so that NEC went in the recycling bin because I was not very experienced in computers and my dad was just frustrated that he couldn't get an OS installed on our PC.
clever title, made me chuckle when i saw it
I had an Aztec galaxy NX Pro 16 sound card way back when. It had a proprietary SCSI CD-ROM controller on-board for a 1x CD-ROM drive. Well it impressed the heck out of me in 1994. Then Windows 95 came along with absolutely zero driver support for it. I may have it and the SCSI CD drive kicking around somewhere in my pile of old computer junk
Nice pun in the title!
What's the pun? punjabi?
It was called "Pain in the NEC"
@@BilczaTheHedgehog What does that have to do with Punjabi?
Pain in the NEC: Vintage VWestlife video frustrations
What a pain in the NEC! Loved hearing the tray of the old CD drive, hope you'll get it working.
In my efforts to pull off the same sort of trick that you're trying to pull off, I had issues with getting a CD-ROM to communicate over the same IDE channel as the hard drive. The Oak CD-ROM drive that everybody uses has a tendency to not look for drives on anything other than the secondary IDE channel. I found that when connecting IDE optical drives (I've done this with DVD drives too!) to the primary IDE channel, the best driver I found was one the older FreeDOS drivers. The file I used was XCDROM.SYS, and I had success with that driver and the standard MSCDEX file on the on-board IDE connection
Looking back at this video, you can use a parallel port external SCSI CD-ROM drive.
Heh, I see what you did there with the video title :^)
Hi again! I see you in almost every video I watch :D
This was my family's first pc.. Great video! Brings me back.. Although I don't remember having this many issues with it. It played King's Quest, Jones in the Fast Lane and ran MS Paint and that's all I needed. 🙂
Does that multidrive have two separate connectors for IDE / Floppy or is it something else?
Yes.
VWestlife I assume the're powered by the same connector, though?
I have 2 of these Teac cdroms, though neither has the floppy disk. Now I understand why they look a bit funny and are a half-height drive with a full face. I had problems with this cdrom as well, but learned through google searching they require their own teac driver, especially if you ever want it to work in 95 as well, you have to download their win95 cdrom driver. Once it has the correct driver it works just fine. I run it off of the onboard IDE in my case at the moment. I added the driver to my 98 boot floppy for future use of it.
Somewhat fitting to have a Packard Bell sound card in it considering that they were owned by NEC at one point.
You should get a time machine that way you can buy new stuff
How about you shut up.
what is your problem
1marcelfilms You.
lmao 😂
I would go back in time to prevent the destruction of my grandfather's Olivetti M380-40 computer that happened in 2004.
I love the sound of that hard drive.
Have you looked at the various CF-ATA adapters? With these you can essentially just use a CF card as an SSD. There are some industrial CF cards available that use SLC flash, that last a long time and are very fast. Not terribly expensive for small ones (2-8GB) either.
I have a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 plus, and when I try to run the mouse driver cute mouse, it detects the mouse, and when I type in edit, everything goes south. It gives me a "not ready reading drive C" error. So my guess is a bad IDE cable or bad hard drive. MS-DOS did install without issues, same as copying the files as well. I got my CD drive to work after realizing the one IDE cable was shot, now all I need to do is get another IDE cable for the HDD if it gives me errors again or not. If it does, I always have a spare drive, or I can try to purchase PQI DOM.
I had an NEC Ready 9012 for a few years. When I ran out of hard drive space and decided to upgrade the hard drive I found the factory hard drive was riveted to the bottom of the case...another one of NEC's bright ass ideas to keep people from working on them. Back then it limited the hard drive size to 3GB. I had a 3.5GB Hard drive installed so I had 1/2 a GB that was on a 2nd partition as a result. However the 3GB HDD was a huge upgrade to the factory 1GB HDD. Can't remember too many of the specifications for that computer but I do sometimes wish I still had it just for playing some of my older games on which don't run on any newer system.
Have you tried temporarily removing the sound card, in case it's an I/O port conflict between the Teac interface and the Matsushita or SCSI interface? They all use I/O ports around the same range so it wouldn't surprise me if there was some overlap causing issues.
Some of those old CD rom drives have a potentiometer that you have to adjust the laser for it to read properly.
That TEAC CD-55A is an absolute disaster. I spent months trying to fix it and getting it to work.
I remember that I was able to troubleshoot my Dell precision m6400 laptop. One day, it just shut off and wouldn't turn back on, at first, I thought the motherboard was bad, but after swapping some parts with an identical model, I found that it wasn't the motherboard, but the graphics card that was bad. So I was able to replace the nvidia quadro fx3700m with an ati firepro and now 3d games run even faster.
Unless you definitely know the CD drive is working, I would first try it on another motherboard, one with a more standard BIOS and I/O chipset. If it's not working there either, I'd put it down to a dying laser, or some such. If it passes that test, try it with the interface card on the same motherboard.
Looks like a nice computer. Maybe FreeDOS will work. FreeDOS is free to download and might work. Keep up the awesome videos!
PC DOS works perfectly fine on this computer. It's just the CD-ROM driver that doesn't.
VWestlife I understand. I just thought that FreeDOS might interest you as well since you have many DOS computers. Since FreeDOS is still actively updated and maintained it may also interest you. Just a suggestion.
+VWestlife have you tried to clean CD drive lens? i revived a lot of CD drives only cleaning the lens
Another great video man! Keep it up!
Do you have a need for small ide hard drives below 2.1GB in size? I have a few left over from when I repaired older systems.
I need such hard drive, send me it to Poland. :)
Pain in the neck is the right name for this computer.
oh, the joys of retro computing. Makes you want to pull your hair out sometimes. That CD drive/floppy combo drive is very neat, did not know they existed, just the double floppy drives. To bad its been a hassle to set up.
I know what you mean mate we had a real challenge trying to get an O.S. on an old Abit BE6-II motherboard, took us so many hours to get an O.S. plus games to run on it but we got there in the end :)
Gotta love that old hardware.
I thought that 5.25" floppy drive was one of those old caddy-loading CD-ROMs, actually, because I've never seen a 5.25" floppy drive with a button mechanism like that. Definitely the weirdest set of I/O of any vintage machine I've ever seen.
Maybe it's worth trying to find a tech sheet for the jumpers on the back of the CD drive?
Try installing MS-DOS 6.22 on your computer. Some of the programs, like CD and sound card drivers require MS-DOS 6.22 to be installed.
I tried different versions of DOS and it made no difference.
My friend had this pc in 1998. The combo cd+floppy was not working. It has win95.
lovely video! do you use these computers for anything or is this pure passion?
Maybe the driver that you downloaded is bad. Try to find another version
I used to own an NEC Versa 6000H laptop a few years ago, was OK but not the best in terms of build quality/etc. (were NEC Versas also sold as Packard Bell laptops at any point? I know Packard Bell was owned by NEC during at least the late 90s)
Packard Bell was bought out by NEC in 1995.
I worked at NEC in Fife Wa. on their laptop assy line in 1995. Then they merged/bought out Packard Bell and moved to California never to be heard from again...
did you ever get this working? i had a lot of trouble with a scsi cdrom in an icl ergo pro with win 95, win 95's own internal driver would only let you read a disk once, then nothing, had to load 2 dos drivers in config.sys for it to work, got them off a floppy disk full of various cdrom stuff i got from a computer fair many years ago...
it was called 'cdrom god' , might be around on the net somewhere
I can't give this video enough likes.
thanks for showing that Drive on Module thing
Looks like that TEAC drive uses the MKE/Panasonic interface, not IDE.
Good news is you can ditch the interface card and use the Panasonic
header on the sound card. Perhaps the TEAC card is bad/broken? Also
another alternative for MSCDEX is FreeDOS's SHSUCDX driver.
Any particular reason why you are building up this 386? Seems a bit limited with only 2MB of RAM! Also what type of 386 does it have installed? Any of the weird steppings that don't work properly with 32-bit software?
I came across the TEAC drive and this was my best candidate for using it, even though it's not ideal for actually running CD-ROM software due to its limited specs (although it is MPC-1 compliant). Only the early 386-16 (even before they called it the 386DX) had the 32-bit multiply bug. The 386SX never had that bug.
Das Arbeiten auf Vintage Computern kann eine Herausforderung sein, vor allem, wenn es um obskure Hardware wie die TEAC CD-55A "SuperQuad" Kombination 4X CD-ROM und 3½-Zoll-Diskettenlaufwerk, circa 1995 geht.
Nach dem Experimentieren mit verschiedenen Schnittstellen und Treibern konnte ich es installieren und in meinem NEC PowerMate SX / 16 arbeiten, aber es erkennt keine CD-ROMs, auch alte, die ich in DOS kenne. Es gibt nur gibt die Fehlermeldung "CDROM nicht High Sierra oder ISO-9660-Format". Irgendwelche Ideen?
good translation. did you do it yourself?
you can use a sd or a compact flash card instead of the hard drive
There's one thing worse; Working on any computer that says "Tandy" on it (save for the later AST-built units, of course)!
BBISHOPPCM's World indeed Tandy's can be a nightmare to find compatible hardware for. I think mostly because radio whack back in the day wanted to be your source for all your upgrades and parts.
Easy. remove the mechanic HDD and the TEAC card and use a IDE-Flash compact HDD and locate it under the CD, then you can use the double IDE flat cable for the HDD and the CD. Good luck!
Watch the video again. I mention using an IDE DOM (Disk On Module). A Disk On Module is just another name for a flash drive.
I've had luck repairing floppy drives, but not with repairing CD-ROM drives.
I know this video is several months old now, but did you add /M:15 /E to your mscdex.exe line in autoexec.bat?
I tried every possible combination of switches.
memory address conflict with another device. Maybe the floppy drive?
Although NEC's PC-8x00 and PC-98x1 / APC III are wonderful,
Why is the company's IBM PC Compatible terrible?
I can not imagine it at all ...
amazing old pc
I remember servicing those. Never pull the PS/2 mouse or keyboard while it's on. They're known for blowing up the motherboard if you do.
My projector is a pain in the Nec. The bulb blew again
For the CD Drive, if the audio cable is connected to the sound card (depending upon how old the drive is), it'll cause the CD drive to either quit working, causing the system to freeze using its own drivers, or not get detected at all since the audio port on the CD drive can degrade overtime, causing errors when trying to get the listing of the files on the computer via MS-DOS. Try to remove the audio cable off of the sound card and CD drive, load a CD, and run dir D: to see if it'll work.
The audio cable is an analog connection. I don't see how it could possibly interefere in any way with the digital portion of the drive's electronics.
VWestlife uxwbill faced the same issue a few years ago on a 486 PC he got for free when the CD-ROM acted up with the analog audio cable plugged into the sound card, and it worked without it plugged into the sound card.
I had one of those WD 2120 hard drives previously. Never got it to work, it hadn't been powered on in probably 10 years as the bearings were completely seized up.
Neat looking FDD/CD combo, kind of want one now, not that I really need one!! :P
Maybe there is an IRQ conflict between the CDROM controller and the sound card or some other device. It's difficult to say with these old machines.
I know those pains. I'm trying to load Windows 98 on a pentium 4 computer with 40gb hdd. I can no longer access bios to change my boot order. I want to as I get a disk I/o error. I got through the first bit of install where it reboots. And I had to have a cd drive hang out the case. Both drives in the case don't work with the basic drivers. I want as a gaming computer for old games. Any tips? It ran Windows XP before. That's on a 80gb drive disconnected for now. But I can't access the bios anymore. I could before trying Windows 98. Man software sucks. That's why I'm not good at it.
I wonder if you'd have any luck using an external CD-ROM drive that connects to the Parallel port, like I believe the BackPack drives did, but then again I could be wrong.
My shot in the dark guess why there's a lot of finicky problems it sounds like NEC tried to make an IBM compatible from one of their native PC98 models to save on costs and such. So maybe there's a PC98 equivalent and you can gather more information that way?
No, this has nothing to do with the PC98 series. The NEC PowerMates were IBM PC clones.
Thats cool. I would love to find a system of that age. However, now only find pentium 4, pentium d and some of the core 2 lineup as well as the occasional i3 or i5 first generation. On those systems you really only have to plug in the sata cables and turn it on with a new cr2032. The only real challenge i have had is a pentium 2 system which i bought of someone recently.
Have you tried the generic CD-ROM device drivers like OAKCDROM.SYS? That one tends to be compatible with just about everything.
Yes, I tried every driver I could find.
Have you tried to remove /XMSSIZE=-1? Is "DEVICE=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS" exist in the config.sys file?
Yes to both.
Keep up the computer videos! :)
I wonder, is it possible to update the BIOS? Maybe doing that would help get things working?
No. It is too old to support flash BIOS.
VWestlife What about physically replacing the BIOS chip with one that has a newer BIOS release?
have you tried it without the sound card? maybe there is some conflict with the interface card
I have one of these. I never used it. Just bought for the sake of perhaps a man cave display. Wonder what the value is for one now . Also have several Compaq,Gateway,Dell, Hewlett Packard, Sony, at least ten years or so that my wife keeps wanting me to get rid of. I bought to upgrade and donate. Time has not allowed yet. Looking to sell as is.
I think it runs Windows 3.1 because it needs 1 MB or more of RAM.
So... When are you going to tie this machine behind your car and drag it? ;) This is the reason I don't get into old computers unless their being used for something or are newer then then 2,000. When they break it's a pain, and replacement part's are becoming more scarce.
Have you tried other DOS CD-ROM drivers like the standard one from Oak (OAKCDROM.SYS) or QCDROM? QCDROM works great with some weird drives I have, it could be worth a shot
The standard ATAPI driver that I tried was the Oak Technologies one that everybody uses. It did not recognize the drive.
Damn. Well, awesome video anyway.
I had a 486 with an old BIOS that wouldn't let me partition a disk over 504MB. I don't know if that's the issue there. Probably not, since this module probably has 512 000 000 bytes, which would bring it down to slightly under 500MB. Just a thought.
The 504 / 528 MB limit only applies to IDE (ATA) hard drives.
Did you check out OntrackDiskmanager 9.57 (This mostly works on every machine)
Do you have any extra sata desktop hard drives? I'm looking for one
Try with other IDE cable or modify the laser trimmer.
I had one of those in really sad shape. Someone had hacked up the case to fit a 3.5" disk drive. Its ultimate demise was a partially shorted component in the power supply: since it was so rough I just let it go.
CD-ROM software suggestion: adoxa.altervista.org/shsucdx/
I do like the sound that Samsung drive makes.
uxwbill I purchased a Packard Bell with the keyboard and mouse for $17 the other day, and the CMOS battery was dead, so I improvised by making my own external CMOS battery with a CR2032 battery, and old PC "squeaker" wiring. Now it has hard drive issues when trying to load my mouse driver (ctmouse) with this error: "Not ready reading drive C" which indicates a bad IDE cable or busted drive, which fortunately, I have a 30GB HDD that I can use, but only up to 2GB for MS-DOS 6.22 and my CD drive didn't get detected in DOS, and you guessed it, bad IDE cable. Looked like it was upgraded overtime in its life: original 210MB HDD was replaced with a 420MB Seagate HDD, memory was also upgraded (4MB built-in, plus a SIMM-72), and a network card was installed. No sound card(s) or optical drives, just only the HDD and floppy drive. Also, it's Y2K compliant since they used Phoenix BIOS, not the Award "lawsuit" BIOS. Plus, I use shsucdx (autoexec.bat) and xcdrom (config.sys) on my computer, and it works surprisingly very well and I ran Memory Maker to optimize the conventional memory. I'm planning on upgrading to a DX2-66 or DX4-100 sometime soon.
Do ya mean, Pain in the....
*N E C C*
more old pc's please.
Please spell out "please". This is not texting or Twitter; you have plenty of room to spell out your words.
VWestlife Well...i won't do that anymore on your channel :)
Load high might work
Poor man, well that's IT in a nutshell for ya.
Takes too much time and energy to get you nowhere or at least 1% further to your goal.
Why?
Hey Vwestlife... Sent you a message on TCL regarding a Tandy. Thanks for any advice you can give.
did you try OAK CD rom driver?
Yes.
Do the banana drivers work?
Good Job ;)
Try install DOS by using Floppy drives
best pun