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PC-98 – Yahoo Auction Floppy Disks

To the winner of recent Yahoo Auction f1100292216, I salute you! It was a PC Card Support Software Disk for PC-9821Ne, titled in Japanese as NEC PC-9821Ne カードサポートソフト ソフトウェア FD.

Now, I have no idea if it'd work with my NS/A, as its contents were listed as follows:

SSDRV.SYS? We're expecting an SSMECIA.SYS for anything PCMCIA 2.0... as per the information in my other post.

But whatever... I went for it anyway. I prepared a budget for around AUD$80, but I was obviously dreaming.

If you bought this disk, please make it available to the world for preservation! That was my plan.

Update: Actually.. the same seller has just listed a PC-9821Nm PC Card Support Disk and the picture of the disk listing shows PCMCIA LAN Card drivers?... so it's been overwritten. It seems I've dodged a bullet above, as it really didn't have the proper PC-9821Ne drivers!

Update: Actually actually.. This installation document seems to indicate that SSMECIA is part of SystemSoft Cardware and that SSDRV is part of NEC's drivers. Could this be any more confusing? There's another auction up and it has the NS/A PCMCIA Support Drivers in there. The screenshot lists SSDRV.SYS, with a much smaller file-size than what we've seen before... this must be it!?

PC-98 – PC-9801NS/A – CPU, SCSI and Windows 95!

After failing miserably with the previous CPU upgrade, I scoured Mercari and YafuOku and found another accelerator. It's a HNS-25T DX4 75mhz module created by Buffalo/MELCO.

This time, after reading numerous pages online, I'd decided it didn't need to be IPL'd and would just work.

And well, it just bloody worked! Even the RAM count on post felt zippier! Of course, it's not actually able to run at the full clock speed thanks to the system bus speed in this laptop?

So, in the same care package, I also picked up an ICM IF-2660 SCSI module. This bulky unit screws onto the 110pin "C-Bus" connector on the rear of the Laptop.

I initially had no-end of trouble with it, as the HDD I'd plugged in was actually badly partition/formatted and caused the whole laptop to lock up. It wasn't until I connected up the same CD drive (as when I was mucking around with the PC-9801VX) that things started to work.

I could see the drive get init'd, and so I went on the hunt for drivers. SENRI's 98Station seems to have gone offline again, so the drivers are back to unobtanium. I swear this page had been online two weeks back when I was looking for the other accelerator drivers. I found other drivers here, but didn't have much luck with them. Update: SENRI's site is back again!

The ASPI driver loaded and listed connected devices, but no ASPICD.SYS that I could get my hands on would init the CD drive. Just for fun, I tried the same NECCDB.SYS from the DOS folder (they're all sitting in there on a standard install) and rebooted.

Hilarious... it just worked! This made it much easier to get data onto the unit.

Further down the track, whilst mucking around and re-installing DOS 6.22, the CD drive was simply found and NECCDB.SYS was installed by the DOS installer. It didn't even need the ASPI drivers?!

Windows 95

Just for shits-and-giggles... I gave the installer a spin...

All was going well until that last shot! Not enough space on A:! What to do?

Add more disk! Doing so caused the SCSI boot menu to appear.

But the drive wasn't in the right format... so I installed DOS on it (this is when I realised the DOS installer would just set up the CD drive by itself with zero help.) Of course.. problems always come out of the woodwork... I replaced LEDs and tidied up the HDD housing whilst it was taking its sweet time to format.

And then we were off and racing again...

Oh yeah, it was now installing to B:\ as A:\ was the internal IDE drive.

It crashed when it tried to install the video drivers... on a second install attempt it actually asked which driver to install. I had to choose "other" from the bottom of the list as there was no actual driver available.

And then we were off again...

Upon reboot, it crashed and rebooted itself again into safe mode.

Thanks to the internet, other users have already tried to do this before me. There's a driver over here by nanabon which simply uses the safe-mode driver as a real driver. You can find it at vector.co.jp also. I 'installed' the INF whilst in safe-mode and rebooted.

And so yeah, Win95 was up! I wanted to then muck around with network cards but, due to the PCMCIA 2.0 hardware, the two I had on-hand would just crash out badly. I thought about scouring buyee again for an older PCMCIA card, like a PC-9801N-J02, but then I remembered I don't have the PCMCIA PC-Card Support Software and that the network would only work under Windows 95 and... and... it'd be fun but pointless. Maybe if I go for another care package, then I'll add the PCMCIA card to the loot.

PC-98 – PC-9801NS/A – RAM, CPU And PCMCIA

This story doesn't have a happy ending. I went on a buyee-spree, trying to find all the parts I needed for this laptop... including a single (obviously-not-legit) floppy drive that contained the PCMCIA driver software needed to get the PCMCIA slot working in DOS. The goal was to then load up a SCSI PCMCIA card connected to a SCSI CD Drive to get data flowing. There were also RAM and CPU upgrades and they looked awesome! Who didn't want a DX2/66 laptop? Who cares if the internal LCD is monochrome.

Anyway, the crap arrived...

RAM and CPU Upgrades

The RAM module was clean and tidy, but the CPU (PK-NSA66/C) not so much.

They're both add-in modules that slot in underneath the unit.

No issues powering up... and the RAM was obviously working!

Very nice... +11mb? There was already a 1.2mb RAM disk in this thing, so the additional 11mb was a bit weird. Maybe it's 10mb? Or maybe it totally replaces the onboard RAM and it's +12mb? Anyway, I went into MSD.EXE and CPU info showed...

No dice... no amount of cleaning or re-inserting got it to say anything different. There was also no heat in the board, so I can't quite tell if it's kicking in... or if it needs an IPL like the PC-9801VX. It seems there are many hardware benchmark softs and other CPU tools on vector.jp which I'll play around with later. Thanks to this thread on another upgrade for pointers.

Update: Yeah, I was right... this specific upgrade board for the NS/A is the only one that needs an IPL! Of course, the drivers at IO-Data are just updates... just like the hell I went through with obtaining the IPL for the PC-9801VX. See more about the available upgrade boards here, and an even better write-up over here. It seems I need to find PKNSA.EXE. How insulting.

Anyway, I suppose I might as well go ahead and install Win3.1 via floppies... since I'd already created them. Later.

PCMCIA

So, I'd received the disk from Yahoo Auctions with an original manual. I still cannot work out what that image/logo is on the manual? Anyway, I eagerly got everything set up.

I slapped the disk in the laptop and DIR'd.

Get stuffed. What is TAKAHOUSE? I tried to boot it...

GRRRR... AUD$60 for an over-written floppy ... but I got the manual!

Marcin to the rescue!

If you jump to the comments below, you'll see two pointers from Marcin to drivers that might-just-work. I tried the MECIA3ATA driver first from PC-98 Tips, using a PCMCIA to CF adapter that I had lying around.

First screenshot is with no card in the slot... and a complaint from the driver saying it can't find anything. Second screenshot above is a switch to D:! What's in there?

Random Macintosh stuff that I had totally forgotten about! Useless for this unit, but we can read a PCMCIA ATA card! Unfortunately the second link just provided SSDRV.SYS which doesn't work with this hardware. Maybe it'll work on the 9821Np/540W that I'll whip out next.

Thanks Marcin! We've made progress!

PC-98 – MIDI

During the most recent trip to Japan, I managed to pick up an SC-55 Roland Sound Canvas. Once back in Australia, and once I had the PC-9801NS/A up and running, it was time to get it outputting MIDI signals. The SC-55 has a serial port, and it turns out that many games can support MIDI over RS-232.

Many moons back, during a trip to Japan that I've nearly forgotten about, I actually managed to pick up this unit.

It's the COME ON MUSIC MA01.

I had originally thought it was for PC or Amiga, but, this time around, whilst searching for RS-232 MIDI options, a photo of this unit appeared! I quickly dug through the boxes to find it.

Of course, the serial port on the PC-9801NS/A isn't a standard DB-9...

It's a mini-centronics something-something and it'd need a serial converter cable to get it to connect to the MA01 above. Fortunately, here's one I prepared earlier... hilariously also found at the Hard-Off in Okayama where I got the PCMCIA SCSI card.

Not feeling like finding the right game from the initial list above, I instead searched for a DOS MIDI player that supported RS-232. vector.co.jp had a great list of software to choose from and Fu-Music Player 1.03 mentioned RS-232 compatibility in the description!

A standard DIN-5 MIDI cable was used between the MA01 and SC-55 and.. the rest is history... and CANYON.MID.

PC-98 – PC-9801NS/A (98-Note)

This beast was sitting next to another PC-9821 Note (more about that one in the future) at a junk shop in Den Den Town, Osaka. They were cheap. The shopowner gave me a huge WTF?! are you doing when I asked to purchase them. "No return, no refund!" he exclaimed as I told him I just wanted them for decoration.

I don't know what I expected when I brought them home, but the mofos (plural, there's another PC-9821Np/540W) fired straight up, asking for system disks. I used the 3.5" DOS disks I'd previously created.

And I was in DOSS Hell before I knew it! Next up I'd want Windows installed, but I wasn't doing that via floppies... I needed a better file transport mechanism.

PCMCIA Under DOS

I managed to pick up an IODATA PCSC-F PCMCIA SCSI Card from Hard Off in Okayama, which just happens to support the PC-98 Note series.

The drivers are over here and I thought I could just install them and go. Unfortunately, when you try, it exclaims that PC Card Services are not running.

A quick read of the manual tells you that you need PCカードサポートソフトウェア (PC Card Support Software) installed prior to trying to install the driver.

Is this disk available on the Internets? Hellz no. It's unobtanium... unless you google for closed auctions on Yahoo.

Then you see an auction for a SINGLE DISK going (buy-it-now) for well over AUD$60. Isn't it pretty? Anyway, back to the manual above, it notes that we need SSMECIA.SYS loaded in CONFIG.SYS... but this file is also NOT on the internet. All bulletin boards mentioning any of this software just contain people begging for it, asking everyone else to email them a copy!

For fun, I scoured the PC-98 Win3.11 disks, but they don't contain the DOS drivers. Nor do the DOS disks.

I thought I had something after googling for "PCカードサポートソフトウェア". I got here and saw a promising link to the NEC Lavie support site. Unfortunately this is just an ATA HDD driver to be used AFTER loading the support services!

So, back to where we were at with the PK-486 for the PC-9801VX.... drivers lost to time.. or scalpers! But then I realised something.. There's quite a list of laptop models noted in the manual for the SCSI PCMCIA Card, which all use the same driver? Maybe we can find another support disk on Yahoo... Maybe for the NX/C instead of the NS/A?

And shit, there it is, sitting on Yahoo Auctions right now, ready for me to spend money on! A dodgy copy for the bargin-basement price of AUD$65! It's a huge gamble, but let's see what happens when it arrives. The best part is that it's also coming with RAM+CPU for this unit and a new HDD caddy for the other Note. Anyway, in the meantime...

UPDATE: The gamble didn't pay off: The floppy was over-written with other shit.

Can it play A-Train?

A-Train needs two floppy drives.... this unit only has one. I was curious though, as the unit has a very specific RAM Drive activity LED? Oh right! That RAM Drive is specifically designed to act as a second floppy drive. NEAT! But, how do we use it?

PC-98 Machines start lettering from A:\ and just keep going... usually HDDs first and the Floppy Drives. A:\ is the internal HDD and B:\ is the floppy, so does C:\ exist?

Yes, yes it does... let's format it? Ok, sure... and a quick text file with SEDIT persisted after power cycle!

So... let's dump the "DATA" floppy over to C: and then boot the real floppy in B:. Do excuse the LCD refresh vs. my shitty phone camera.

Crisp! The animation was smooth also... what is this magical power from a tiny 486 SX?

Shiitttt.... it works. There was one weird thing though. I initially booted it with no mouse, so I couldn't do anything in-game. I then powered off and booted up with a mouse plugged in. During boot it just presented the "Please insert the system disk and press a mouse button" screen. Even if I clicked the mouse, the screen kept appearing... I'm guessing a RAM issue?

So I disconnected the mouse, rebooted back into the game... then plugged the mouse in after the game had loaded and all was well!

Amazing. (Excuse the dither/blur on the LCD. I ASSURE YOU there's a train in the last shot above!)

Let's try Windows...

You could tell what was going to happen next...

Unfortunately, Windows installer baulked at zero Extended Memory...

I suppose I could disable the RAM drive and start again, but I don't think 1.2mb of RAM will cut it. I'll make another post in the future regarding PCMCIA shennanigans. Actually... regarding MIDI also... if I can do it.

PC-98 – Working With 3.5″ Disks

So far, I've only really had to deal with physical 5.25" floppy disks, as my PC-9801VX does not have 3.5" drives. My external Gotek was an emulated 3.5" set, but there was never a need to write actual 3.5" floppies. This all changed once I picked up other PC-98 machines.

Above are three BIOS screens from two 98-Notes and a PC-9821, all complaining that they want you to "Set a System Disk". The term 'set' is a little misleading, as they're really asking you to insert one. None of these machines have 5.25" drives, and all the disk images I have in my arsenal are 1.22mb images!

Make a 3.5" Floppy Disk think it's a 5.25"

To get anything to boot, we'll need to write one of these images to a 3.5" drive. I assumed this would all be simple and used the same technique as I did over here. Turns out that, even though the image will write fine to the disk, the machines needing the floppy won't be able to read it.

This is because standard 3.5" floppies are, by default, formatted as 1.44mb. Writing a 1.22mb image to a 1.44-formatted drive will mismatch the data and the receiving PC wont be able to correctly read the tracks. Or this is what I understand. Prior to all this, I'd assumed that the format of the disk was in the first track and that writing an image would also re-write the format... but this isn't true. Instead, we have to re-format the disk prior to writing the image. You can read all about disk formats here.

(Update: Oh lol... if I'd read the link above I would've realised that 1.22mb 3.5" disks are normal... they're known as 2DD, not the 2HD I'm used to!)

Of course, this is the internet, so someone has already done all of this for us. The basic idea is to re-format the disk to the correct format using a tool called ufiformat, convert the image to raw bytes with no header and then dd the image over. There are supposedly only a limited number of USB floppy drives that can do this, but my Teac FD-05PUW worked perfectly.

First up, connect the USB floppy to the machine you'll use. If you're using Virtual Box (like I was, on my NAS!), then you'll need to map the USB device through to the guest OS in settings. Once it's up and your machine is alive, make sure to update your package manager with the latest sources. I did this with:

swh@virtual-deb-nas:~$ sudo apt-get update
Get:1 file:/run/live/medium bullseye InRelease
Ign:1 file:/run/live/medium bullseye InRelease
...
Hit:7 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye InRelease
Get:8 https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb stable InRelease [1,825 B]
Get:9 https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb stable/main amd64 Packages [1,078 B]
Fetched 2,903 B in 1s (3,537 B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Next, let's install ufiformat:

swh@virtual-deb-nas:~$ sudo apt-get install ufiformat
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ufiformat
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 265 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/14.4 kB of archives.
After this operation, 42.0 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Selecting previously unselected package ufiformat.
(Reading database ... 214799 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../ufiformat_0.9.9-1+b1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking ufiformat (0.9.9-1+b1) ...
Setting up ufiformat (0.9.9-1+b1) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.4-2) ...

Once that's installed, we need to find the floppy drive. The best method is with dmesg.

swh@virtual-deb-nas:~$ sudo dmesg | grep "removable disk"
[    5.065667] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Nice, so the floppy is loaded at /dev/sdb. Now we need to get our images ready. I'm wanting to install DOS 6.22, so grab your images from whereever you need to. Depending on the image format, use any of the d88split tools over here to get the images into the correct format.

swh@virtual-deb-nas:~/dos622$ ls -l
total 9888
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1265664 Jun  6 18:53 DOS1.FDI
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1265664 Jun  6 18:53 DOS2.FDI
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1265664 Jun  6 18:53 DOS3.FDI
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1265664 Jun  6 18:53 DOS4.FDI
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1265664 Jun  6 18:53 DOS5.FDI
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1265664 Jun  6 18:53 DOS6.FDI
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1265664 Jun  6 18:53 DOS7.FDI
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1265664 Jun  6 18:53 DOS8.FDI

My DOS images were in FDI format, so I needed to convert to Mahalito and then to RAW. For each of the images, this required:

swh@virtual-deb-nas:~/dos622$ ../fdi2mhlt.pl DOS1.FDI DOS622-1-MHLT
FDI: 1265664 bytes (4096 header + 1261568 body)
77 cyls, 2 heads, 8 sectors/track, 1024 bytes/sector => body 1261568 bytes
writing to DOS622-1-MHLT.2hd and DOS622-1-MHLT.dat
swh@virtual-deb-nas:~/dos622$ ../flatmhlt.pl DOS622-1-MHLT.2hd DOS622-1

This results in the following files from one disk image:

swh@virtual-deb-nas:~/dos622$ ls -l DOS622*
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh   10175 Jun  6 18:58 DOS622-1.2hd
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1261568 Jun  6 18:58 DOS622-1.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh   10175 Jun  6 18:57 DOS622-1-MHLT.2hd
-rw-r--r-- 1 swh swh 1015808 Jun  6 18:57 DOS622-1-MHLT.dat

You can ignore everything but the final DOS622-1.dat. We need to write this to our floppy, but beforehand we need to format our floppy! Slap a disk in and enter the following:

swh@virtual-deb-nas:~/dos622$ sudo ufiformat -f 1232 /dev/sdb
geometry: track=77, head=2, sector=8, block=1024
formatting track=76, head=1...
done

Once it's done, we can write or first image:

swh@virtual-deb-nas:~/dos622$ sudo dd if=DOS622-1.dat of=/dev/sdb bs=64k
19+1 records in
19+1 records out
1261568 bytes (1.3 MB, 1.2 MiB) copied, 27.4431 s, 46.0 kB/s

Done! 1.3mb Written! Did it work?

Rinse and repeat for the rest!

A 66mhz PPC603 BeBox!

Never, in my wildest fantasies, would I have thought I'd be the owner of one of these! Of course, caveats-be-caveats: it was listed as non-working and needing-work. How much work would it actually need?

First thing's first... a proper source of information was required. Thankfully, The BeBox Zone has been recorded by the web.archive in all of its glory!

Which revision?

Prior to receiving the unit, I asked which Revision it was, just so that I could get ahead of any problems. Turns out these machines had quite a lengthy Revision history and, well, I could be in for a lot of pain. For even more information, here's a great page with information on the differening revisions. Also, if I was to receive an earlier revision than v6, here's what happens when you try to upgrade a Rev.05?. Fortunately, the answer came back that it was to be a Revision 6! This meant any BeOS would work on it... as long as the CPUs could hold out.

Video Card?

The author had mentioned that the machine probably needed RAM and a new video card. I started googling and found a lot of conflictcing information... or just information that only pertained to newer x86 BeOS versions. Fortunately, if you go way back, there's a cache of the old Be site here with a list of the valid hardware for the BeBox! The good cards listed are:

• Cirrus Alpine 5434
• STB Systems Nitro PCI 1.5 (5434)
• Cirrus J6NGD543XPCI (5434)
• Number Nine GXE64 (864)
• Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM T PCI (Trio64)
• Expert Color Trio64 PCI

Now, I'm sure that newer/cooler video cards are supported for BeOS, so I'm thinking this page is dated somewhere around BeOS 3.0? It's listed as 1999. I also know that I had a beautiful Diamond Stealth in the junk box last year and sold it. What was I possibly going to use it for?!

So, actually, it seems that BeOS R4.5 was the last known good OS for this model of BeBox. What cards does it support OOTB? There's a hardware compatibility list here, and it's sad to see that's the last version of the page... seems the domain expired not long after! Here's the PPC-specific notes which then points to a Q&A URL for the BeBox that was never captured. But, slapping that into Google brings back the original page... and we complete a loop as it's the same link as the first one above!

Based on list above, I managed to source a Diamond Stealth in PCI format, prior to even receiving the BeBox!

Sound Card?

You don't need to worry about sound as it's all on-board. There's even an internal speaker, just like any good Macintosh.

RAM?

You'll find the requirements here, but the basic idea is 60nz 72-pin non-parity. Parity will work, but the parity function won't be employed. Sizes can be mixed and matched in pairs.

The author mentioned that RAM might be an issue, so I also purchased a few matching-sticks in advance.

Network Card?

There was no mention of an included network card, so I started googlin'. Looks like I'd need an NE2000 compatible ISA card. The other alternative is the DEC 21040/21041 on PCI. You'll find 3Com 3C509 drivers over here. I just don't have one of those cards anymore... yes... I sold one last year also! I really think I'll be able to install an RTL8139 ... but the bebits archive only has a version for Intel.

Reviewing other people's problems...

Just because there was time... and that this is a very vintage machine... and that google returns some quickly-damning results, I fell down the rabbit hole of other user's tales of woe. Not to be discouraged, it's great to read through such articles to understand what I might have been in for?

Pick-up day!

This is all in hind-sight, so I need to come clean. I was visiting Canberra to see my grandfather in hospital. It was the first weekend I was there that I also arranged to pick up this unit, and, call it bittersweet timing, but it was serendipitous that I grabbed this and got to say goodbyes. I can't word this well, but there was extra value added to the unit.

It even came in the original box!? Pretty rotten, but a great momento! Would you believe I never took a pic of the whole unit fresh outta the box? Instead, I delved straight into the issues...

Being away-from-home, a quick inspection was really all that I could do. The whole unit was in amazing condition! The only real physically-obvious issue was the "jack nuts" (as I now find they're called) on the ports on the rear and they were quickly replaced.

I take that back... not so quickly..

And then...

Only needing a little bit of extra effort!

Powering the beast on!

So, I got back to Melbourne and gave it a once-over. All checked out, so I slapped in a power cable and hit the switch on the rear. Fans spun up, HDDs also, but no life. Thanks to the previously-received RAM, I swapped out the existing two SIMMs with another pair. Before long... we had POST!

What? It just works? There was no video output on my shitty little VGA LCD, so I plugged in my nearest Trinitron. Whatttttttt.....

I had no input devices... so I just hit the switch with a STUPID grin on my face.

Upgrading BeOS

I grabbed a 3.2 BeOS BOOT ROM UPGRADE from some random site and wrote it to a floppy... which booted!

From there, I skipped ahead to BeOS 4.5, as I'd bought the box back in 1999 with two other friends from The Software Shop in Phillip, ACT.

The floppy was useless, but holding down spacebar let me get the boot menu...

And yes, the CD was visible, and even booted!

Such a familiar screen! A spare SCSI HDD was inserted to install 4.5 onto. This required the removal of two screws, allowing access to the tray...

Haha... you should've heard the noise when power was applied to that revolting Apple SCSI HDD. It was quickly replaced. Note that this unit also has an IDE bus, so I can easily upgrade to larger disks in the future... and proper burners!

Time to tinker...

Networking...

The OS installed in no time and rebooted to a familiar desktop. The unit came with an RTL8139 ISA card which happily worked as an ISA NE2000?

And I could ping away!

What's next?

DOOM is next. WON, from the experimental folder, failed to find my AFP and SAMBA shares, so I need to find a proper SMB client from somewhere. All links are turning up 404 so far. Sheepshaver also needs to go on there with a captive version of Mac OS 8.5. This page also hints at other software I should install.

NEC PC-9801VX – SCSI Devices

So, I've gotten my PC-9801VX to power-on, boot a floppy disk and then initialise the 486 upgrade... the next step was to get a HDD attached. Luckily, the unit already came with both SASI and SCSI cards, so I just had to choose one and connect things. SCSI was chosen, as I don't even know what SASI is and, perfectly by chance, I'd purchased an external 4.3gb SCSI HDD with the matching HD50 plugs!

Upon searching the usual boxes'o'junk for a cable, I attempted to plug the unit in and, to my surprise, the connector on the SCSI card wasn't actually HD50.

Turns out it's a mini-centronics HPCN50! You can learn all about SCSI connectors over here. It seems this connector type is very popular amongst PC98s. With this new information, I went scouring the web for an adapter. I found one from my usual favourite seller in NSW (RetroShopBox on eBay) and then also another full SCSI cable (HPCN50 to HD50) from the UK... but that was to take a lot longer to arrive.

I adjusted the HDD to SCSI ID 0 and, with everything connected, booted the IPL disk and then MS-DOS 6.20 Disk #1. The installation was painless, thanks to the Gotek, and before long the machine rebooted and failed miserably. This was due to MS-DOS 6.20 trying to start without the 486 Accelerator initialised and so I rebooted and installed that via the Installation disk. Before long, the machine had rebooted into DOSSHELL!

Removable Media

I grabbed my nearest Magneto-Optical drive and chained it onto the SCSI bus. It happened to be set to ID 6 and I just left it as-is and attempted to boot. Before long it threw the following error:

No system files!

To add insult to injury, it just continued to emit a high pitched squeal. Seems it thinks/knows this is a removable drive and expects removable media to be bootable. The disk in there certainly wasn't... I didn't even know what was on it.

Just for fun, I slapped in the IPL disk, installed DOS, installed the accelerator and then voila!, the disk started booting.. But the fun didn't last long. It failed with an error initialising MSDOS.SYS? How does that even fail?

No matter of mucking around got me further... Until I switched the MO's SCSI ID from 6 to 1. I had no idea why, but on ID 1, the MO booted to a command prompt! Unfortunately, once booted, I couldn't get to the internal HDD. The MO was mounted as drive A: and the floppies were mounted straight afterwards. No HDDs to be seen.

I had initially expected this unit to show up as a second HDD, so was a little perplexed as to how to make it act as one. A few emails back and forth from Adachi-san saw me realise that I either had to configure the drive into HDD mode, or force the SCSI controller to treat it like a HDD.

The SCSI controller is a TEXA HA55-BSW and, whilst booting, there's an initialisation screen that shows the devices found on IDs. During this process, there's no hint that it's able to be configured. After a little bit of googling, it turns out it can be configured, but only if you hold down the T and S keys at the same time whilst it's initialising.

Inside the configuration menu, you'll find drive options in the second choice. From here you can tick through the IDs and set the parameters accordingly.

I happened to find that the drive type could be set to MO Small Image and, well, this worked! I now got to the SCSI boot menu instead of just booting directly from the MO.

From here I booted into DOS on the main HDD at SCSI ID 0, but I still could only see that HDD (and other partitions on that SCSI drive), and no other SCSI devices. After a few more emails, it turns out there's a requirement with PC98 SCSI IDs: they need to be consecutive! That explained the issue above with MSDOS.SYS, but not this new one. Adachi-san also passed me a formatter that could format 230mb MOs up to 218mb and I went for it. Actually, it was obvious that the format was wrong as this is how the MO showed in the SCSI boot menu:

Similar to USB keys of nowadays with multiple partitions, this MO has been partitioned+formatted in "removable mode" and therefore shows up corruptly in HD mode. I re-partitioned and re-formatted the drive in the current HD mode with (RMUTL (Now MOUTL) from Adachi-san, received 218mb free and drive C appeared! Yesssss...... We can now copy from MO to HDD.

Thanks to my MO USB drive on my main machine, I could start expanding HDI files onto MOs and tinker...

CD-ROMs

I thought I might have needed the latest CD Drivers from archive.org, but DOS 6.20 just installed NECCDB.SYS and MSCDEX.EXE and my SCSI CD drive was mounted! I could even list the contents of the CD in the drive! Looking more-closely, it's actually an NEC CD-3010A which is somehow covered by the driver installed. Note that upon installation, DOS copies the driver it wants to use to the DOS folder as NECCD.SYS. Just match the sizes to determine which one it's actually using.

The Final SCSI Stack

Somehow I had enough cables, with the correct SCSI connectors, to join all of these together and terminate them!

It all works perfectly and I'm actually really impressed with the tech-level of multiple-booting and boot-menu of my PC-9801VX.

NEC PC-9801VX – PK-X486 CPU Upgrade

So, this PC-9801VX came with the weird sticker on the front indicating that it was powered by a 486 CPU.

It was a pretty random claim seeing as that the base system is built from a 286. How could you possibly upgrade an 8-bit CPU to 32-bit?

A quick inspection (see the over here) saw that the 486 was contained on a daughter board which used a PLCC-socket adapter to hijack the 286 socket!

The upgrade happens to be an IO-DATA PK-X486/87SLS (IOD2Y284), consisting of a Texas Instruments TX486SLC 25mhz CPU coupled with a Cyrix FastMath CX-83387 33mhz 387 Math Coprocessor.

As that this CPU actually replaces the existing 286, it's always been active and operating the system but, regardless of this fact, the system still reports as a 286!

Trying to install DOS 6.20 very quickly throws a "You cannot install DOS 6.20 on a machine with a 286 Processor."

So, a little googling later and it turns out there's a TSR which needs to be loaded. That link indicates the TSR is named PK486.COM, but no amount of googling resulted in such a file. Instead, PK486D.COM showed better results, like this Interrupt Extender for this CPU Upgrade, but that software still didn't include the TSR!

Finally, a little more googling brought up this Japanese forum post indicating that there was an old oldsoft/98.htm page at the IODATA website that had derelique drivers. Of course, this page no longer existed, so web.archive.org to the rescue! Finally, there it is, down the bottom of the page.

Unfortunately, the files are just upgrades and want the original setup disk to hack some bytes. So, next up I started clicking random links on the iodata library site and found this page. It's full of random Win95 stuff, but one file seemed to be valid for a newer upgrade card than I had.

The COM files looked great... so I just renamed and executed... and the CPUCHK.COM even threw out the following result...

But, alas, both TSRs just reported an incorrect CPU when trying to run. Of course, what are the chances they'd even work.

UPDATE:: Adachi-san of Adachi Giken has come to the rescue! You can skip this part.

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IF ANYONE HAS ONE OF THESE UPGRADE KITS, CAN THEY PLEASE MAKE AN IMAGE OF THE DISKS FOR THE INTERNET?... there's many sites with people asking for the software and I'd love to try it out! The box looks like this... and the disks seem to come in both 5.25 and 3.5" variants.

The disks are labelled "共通サポートソフト".

Excuse the image quality... they were flogged from a yahoo auction. But here's a better close-up...

I'll have to keep watching the auctions as those Power Up Kit /PK-X486Sシリーズ disks above went for $10.

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The disks!

So, the kit comes with two disks: an IPL and an Installation disk.

Downloads
	IPL Disk Image		Installation Disk Image

The IPL (or Initial Program Loader) is used to boot the machine into a state where the seconday CPU is active. This is good to use prior to installation of something that needs a 386+ (i.e. DOS 6.20), so boot this disk to the following prompt:

And then swap disks. Once done, hit enter and you'll get to continue as if you booted the second disk you inserted, but on a 486! Of course, after installation, rebooting the machine will set the 286 active again and that's where the Installation disk comes in. Let the machine restart after installing DOS 6.20 and watch it crash and burn. Once it does that, insert the Installation disk and restart the machine...

That screen above scrolls onto the screen in 90s goodness... and then you get the main menu. The options are to Backup something, read the README, install the software or configure cache. Choose the third option, and then your SCSI disk.

From here, choose the partition/installation and go for it!

You'll then be told that everything is complete and that it's time to restart your machine.

With this done, your machine is now a 486! Congrats. Message me if you need the disk images.

Z Scale Layout – Akia 485-Series Traction Tyres

Just for a lesson in complete-failure, I attempted the fitting of traction tyres to an Akia 485-series EMU powered-car. The train couldn't get up gradients and so I thought I'd see how it went with traction tyres from Rokuhan.

Rokuhan provides both 4mm and 5mm tyres, and I purchased a bunch of both sizes as I know I'll need them in the future. The power car in question is a standard 485-series passenger car and the shell comes off once minimal force is applied to separate both walls from the chassis. From here, you then need to remove the top circuit board by inserting a flat-head screwdriver in the 4 holes in the chassis, two on each side.

Once that's off, remove the two weights.

It gets a little tricky from here. The bogies are attached via drive-shafts with lateral pins. The chassis is a single unit, so you actually have to spread the frame to get the bogies out. Make sure to allow space for the drive-shafts when doing this, otherwise you might snap them.

With the bogies out, you can grab a flat-head screwdriver and press down on the clips next to the power pick-ups. Pushing down on these will push the under-frame of the bogie onto the table. Once it's separated enough, you can flip the bogie over and lever the frame off.

With this finally off, you have full access to the wheelsets and you can install traction tyres.

Unfortunately, these wheelsets don't have the grooves for tyres and the trains run erratically once installed.
So don't do it! The end.