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DataStor Commuter Parallel Port IDE HDD

This came in a bulk eBay purchase months back but I only just re-discovered in a box today. I love surprises! I've recently been going through all the boxes'o'shite and so I'm sure there'll be more surprised to document.

It came in a pleather pouch with a manual, floppies and all required cables. Below you can see the DC power adapters actually piggy-back onto either an AT Keyboard socket or a PS/2 port. Very handy! I am still trying to work out if plugging my mouse into the piggy-back pushed pins inside my mouse's plug, or if it was just ready to break. Either way, had to fix that also.

The unit actually allows the printer port to pass through, but I didn't test this. I might grab a parallel port Zip Drive and see if you can daisy chain them. Otherwise I assume you can put a printer on the end.

As for operations, the floppies included had expired, so I downloaded the driver package for Windows/NT/OS2/DOS and created a bootable floppy disk image with the required DOS tools. The main driver is CDISK.SYS and this just needs a standard DEVICE line in CONFIG.SYS with no arguments. It's all on the floppy image above.

With the floppy in the drive, the disk came straight up and prompted me to partition/format it. It saw a 3.2gb HDD inside and told me to make two separate partitions of 2048mb and 1248mb, as the OS doesn't support disks bigger than 2gb! Ah, history.

Handy Portable Ethernet Pocket Adapter

Aaand another impulse purchase from eBay: a Handy Portable Ethernet Pocket Adapter. What a name? Turns out this is a clone of the Accton EN2209. Finding software wasn't the easiest, but somehow a university in Taiwan had the required file.

Installation on a 486

My IBM PS/1 486 received this unit (after a WFW311 upgrade) and worked perfectly with it. Installation was very straight forward! Just download TCP/IP for WFW and install it as an additional protocol. DHCP worked fine.

Installation on a PIII-500mhz

Things got awry from here. Firstly, running WFW311 on a PIII-500 with 512mb RAM is probably not a recommended thing to do... but... it installed so quickly... it was lovely. The adapter drivers installed and came up on a reboot. As soon as TCP/IP was installed, the whole machine froze!

That second transmission light just stayed locked on and the whole machine actually became non-responsive. Seems to be some kind of race condition with the device... so... what to do? After thinking it was Parallel port settings, I changed them all to no avail. I then guessed it was clock speed, so I down-graded the 500mhz to the slowest setting possible: 333mhz.

At 333mhz, the unit worked perfectly! WFW311 on this hardware is lovely! :) I then upgraded to 375mhz (75mhz bus), but it was NOT stable. WFW311 would lock every-other-time when booting? Seems 333mhz is the magic number.

What about Linux?

I started digging around for a Linux driver and found a few hits on the parport mailing list. These then lead me to harshman's archived page containing a driver! Seems it needs Kernel 2.0.30, so I went back to le'googs and started hunting.

Since I love Red Hat Linux so much, I jumped over to their page and checked the version history. Nice, we have a matched kernel with Red Hat Linux Version 4.2! Back to the Red Hat Linux Archive and there's a 4.2 folder... but wait, there's no ISO in the expected folder? Fortunately, the main guts of the OS are still available and we can then make our own installation media. Download that folder and copy it ALL onto a blank CD. Then jump into the images folder and write boot.img to a floppy. Special thanks to grem75 in this reddit thread for pointing out the required steps.

But that actually didn't work... No matter what I copied over, the installer baulked with an unrecognised Red Hat CD. So, I then downloaded the ISOs from archive.org. I'm surprised that didn't come up as a first search result, but then it occurred to me that archive.org never does? Has it blocked google?

Meanwhile, no amount of burning that image under Windows would work! I even tried to boot up an old ThinkPad with Linux Mint and wodim to try and get it to burn successfully. It didn't... it seems there's an issue with those images on archive.org? Finally, I used the FTP method and an NE2000 compatible card I had lying around to install RedHat.

Once RedHat 4.2 was up, I followed the instructions on harshman's page and, after a first failed insmod, the unit came up on the second attempt, received an IP and I was able to ftp into redhat! Amazing! This was also on the 500mhz at 100% speed, so no race conditions here!

Finally, if you check harshman's page, you'll note that he notes that there's already an updated version whilst he was making his... I wonder if a newer version of RedHat will support this unit?

Covox Voice Master Key

This item came up on eBay a long time back and went straight into the 'projects' box. Thanks to a newfound push to clean up the spare room, that box has been turned upside-down and dealt with. So, without any further ado, I present to you a 1988-vintage COVOX Voice Master Key.

The box was well-worn, but all text can be read. Of interest is, in the second-last paragraph, the redacting of the quote "Plays back through optional COVOX Speech Thing". Was the redaction done by a child with a marker? Or from the factory? Finding information on this card online is pretty difficult. First hit was this Korean blog post on naver.com and you'll notice that the redacted sentence is totally removed from their version of the product. Their version seems to be a lot newer, but only of box design, not product name or quality.

Nerdly Pleasures also has a post on COVOX devices, but was very light-on for info on this card. I hope I can help them with their photo of the card as well. Also, the I/O for the DAC can be gleaned from the jumper setting above.

So what does it do?

First and foremost, this is one of the first pieces of hardware to let you control an IBM PC via voice. If I had the software, I'd test this functionality out... unfortunately I don't and no amount of searching has dredged up the installation disks. There's a disk image listing here, but no actual disk image? I messaged the author of that post and he just silently stepped out of the conversation... he must have the actual image to take those screenshots from DOSBOX? I then started by own thread, but no one cares.

A little more digging brought up this request post on Amibay for the same software. I posted a bump reply and got in trouble for hijacking someone else's thread... didn't realise that was a rule. I then PM'd the author, but no response as of yet.

So, without any software, I can't do the voice recognition/control stuffs... but can it play audio?

Audio output hardware

This unit does have an output port and the included head-set is just that; a speaker and a microphone! There are two microphone ports on the card, but we don't actually care about them as we don't have any software that'll make use of them. The headphone port interests me though as, with the redacted text on the box, there must be some way to use the 'included' COVOX Speech Thing functionality. The directory listing of the installation disk above even has a THING.EXE which must enable this card as a sound output device.

The output circuit includes an LM386N amplifier that's fed from the resistor bridge. That bridge is fed directly from the ISA bus data lines, so it must do something if data is fed in. The I/O Address jumper selections allow settings from 0x22f through to 0x28f. I initially thought that was 0x0220, thinking the F was just some naming style, and, after taking out my SB16, tried to get my machine to output sound via FT2 on 0x220... this was entirely fruitless and entirely wrong! I mean, come on, the jumpers don't lie... the I/O ranges really are all based with an 'f' on the end!

So, what to do? First up, anything that wants to use a COVOX Speech Thing as a sound output device will expect it to be on LPT1 or LPT2. These ports are configured via your BIOS and, well, it just wont work adjusting BIOS settings as anything configured there will just send data out the existing configured printer port. I went googling around and found that people had built their own DACs back in the day and someone even has a project for a DAC that sits in an ISA slot known as ISA-DAC-r0. Further on from that, I then found instructions on how to use it on the DOS Re-loaded forum.

There's a really interesting screenshot half-way down that forum topic where the user has used the DOS debug command to hack a memory address. This address contains the I/O register of your machine's LPT ports. Hilariously, you can actually tweak these addresses live when your machine is running!? The basic idea is to type debug, hit enter, then type the following:

-e 40:08 78 03 2f 02

then press enter and then type q and enter to quit. Above, you've entered the bytes 78 03 2f 02 into memory address 40:08. It turns out that that memory address is the system configuration area for the IO base address for your LPT ports and you can chain as many as you want together to pretend you have LPT ports. In the case above, the first port is 0x378, written as high-byte low-byte and then 0x22f, again as high-byte low-byte. Entering the command above will configure your DOS session to have LPT1:0x378 and LPT2:0x22F. Does it work? I configured Fast Tracker II to have a SoundPlayer on LPT2...

And...

Actually... here's a proper demo of its capabilities:

Woah! The audio quality was as-good-as any original SB2.0 that I remember... but it's probably worse... and MONO. Seems can you have two DACS and have FT2 run LPT1+LPT2 for stereo sound. More games were downloaded and tested and all worked fine! Amazing.

Now to just find the actual software!

NEC PC-9801VX – Video Output

After getting the PC-9801VX up and running via the monochrome output, it was time to get the RGB signals properly-connected to a real monitor. Thanks to previously playing with Amigas, I actually have an LCD on-hand that can do 15khz via a standard VGA cable. What to do? Hack together a cable that would interface with the DB-15 port on the PC-9801.

As mentioned, this unit uses a DB-15 Analog port which looks exactly like a Macintosh Video port. Of course, it's not, so you can't just use a Mac adapter, but you can refit one, thanks to this blog. You can also just roll-your-own-cable, using the pinout here. Jaycar has the necessary DB-15 male port with housing and the cable above was built.

Plugging it in saw the picture work beautifully... but the fonts were still out. A-Train was also still scaling off the bottom edge?

Front-Panel Dip-Switches

Turns out there's display configuration options on the front-panel to configure resolutions and font-sizes. As seen above, the DOS installation screen looked OK for the most part, but the selectable menu options showed stretched/cut-off fonts!? A quick read of the the dipswitch descriptions pointed to items that may help.

SW1-1 sets the output resolution from 640x200 to 640x400 and this helped a bit, but the fonts were still wrong. I then also toggled SW2-3 and SW2-4 to enable both 80-character screen width and 25-character screen height. After this? Perrrrrfect!

Very similar to the version from the MSX.

You don't have a 15khz monitor?

No fret! This is the internet and someone has already done this before. To make this work, you'll need a GBS8200 video adapter. Once you have this in-hand, you'll need to either wire things in directly, or build a circuit such as antarcticlion's GBHV_RGBS_CONV adapter. I've had a few PCBs printed for me...

... and I intend to build them up and test them. If anyone wants one, then contact me here. I'll post again once I've built one and got it going.