Author Archives: Michal Necasek

PCI Voodoo

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Michal Necasek

A while ago I tried to set up Voodoo 2 SLI on an old Pentium system running Windows 98 SE. I used two seemingly identical Creative CT6670 boards (Voodoo 2, 12 MB RAM) which should have worked just fine. But … Continue reading →

Posted in 3Dfx, PCI | 31 Comments

Children of the Bus Wars

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Michal Necasek

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the so-called Bus Wars raged. A few years after the PC/AT was released, it became clear that the ISA bus could not keep pace with faster CPUs and peripherals, especially graphics cards … Continue reading →

Posted in ATi, EISA, MCA, PC history, PCI, VLB | 11 Comments

Fixing a Graphics Ultra Pro

Posted on March 13, 2016 by Michal Necasek

Just a few weeks after successfully repairing a trivial problem with a Roland LAPC-I caused by improper storage, I happened to run across another troublesome board, a VL-bus based ATI Graphics Ultra Pro from 1993. It’s a nice enough card … Continue reading →

Posted in ATi, Hardware Hacks | 4 Comments

Seagate ST-225: Just Wow

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Michal Necasek

A few weeks ago a Seagate ST-225 drive more or less accidentally landed at the OS/2 Museum. The drive is nearly 30 years old (manufactured in late 1986) and rather interestingly, this particular unit comes with a label declaring it … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware, Storage | 35 Comments

Periscope Manuals

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Michal Necasek

Some time ago I recovered a latter-day Periscope manual from storage. Since some readers might find it useful, I decided to scan the manual and convert it to PDF. It covers the basic Periscope debugger, variants and add-ons (remote Periscope, … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Documentation | 7 Comments

Fixing an LAPC-I

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Michal Necasek

A few days ago my almost new (i.e. not quite 25 years old) Roland LAPC-I arrived. It’s essentially a MT-32 synth on a stick. I plugged it into a Pentium board, tried playing some music and… nothing. Was it perhaps not jumpered … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware, Roland | 12 Comments

Playing Football

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Michal Necasek

The Super Bowl is long over and it’s time to look at different kind of football. In Winter 1986/1987, Microsoft initiated a small skunkworks project called “Football”. The objective was to take “Sizzle”, a development branch of proto-OS/2 that would eventually … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, IBM, Microsoft, OS/2, PC history | 21 Comments

ThinkPad PC Card Boot?

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Michal Necasek

I have several 1990s ThinkPad laptops which all have PCMCIA slots. Some have a built-in CD-ROM and no floppy drive, and no support for CD booting. It would be rather useful to boot them from PCMCIA ATA cards, and the BIOS … Continue reading →

Posted in PCMCIA, ThinkPad | 23 Comments

So This Actually Works…

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Michal Necasek

In a discussion on a previous post, Richard Wells suggested that an ATI VGA Wonder-16, a 16-bit ISA VGA card, should be able to operate in an 8-bit slot. I can confirm that yes, it does: Note that the card … Continue reading →

Posted in ATi, PC hardware | 22 Comments

Basement Finds

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Michal Necasek

The other day I attacked an old and long forgotten 286 PC stashed away in the basement. The PC is dead because the power supply blew years ago and the motherboard has a non-standard power connector. But the case was … Continue reading →

Posted in 286, ATi, PC hardware | 10 Comments