XTIDE is a BIOS extension that helps to detect hard drives and probably a lot of other devices like Compact Flash and SD-cards. After I restored a 386 board at the end of 2024, I once more was confronted with a limitation of those old systems: HDD capacity.
Many 386 and even 486 systems are limited to hard drives no larger than 500MBs. That is plenty of space for such old systems since…
During one of my adventures at the scrapyard, I picked up a 486 motherboard – the BEK-tronic BEK-V429S. As it turns out, this board had fake cache chips installed! If you want to see the full story, here is the video in which I discover that fake chips.
But how is it possible that seemingly nobody caught on and identified the fake cache earlier? The company or individual who owned…
Owning a Sound Blaster back in the mid 90’s was probably a big deal – I wouldn’t know with my ESS AudioDrive. And although my ESS sound card wasn’t a real Sound Blaster from Creative, it was a compatible card which got the job done. Recently, a viewer sent me a Sound Blaster 32 PnP for repair. My first attempt to fix the card failed. There was just no way to get past a…
EPROMs and EEPROMs can be programmed using a programmer like the XGecu T56 / T48 / TL866II. Unfortunately, the programmer cannot resolve the Device ID to an actual model number. The below list should aid as a lookup for anyone who needs to understand what device and model is behind a given Device ID.
Device IDNameMFG NameType0115AM27C64AMD27C640189AM27128AAMD27128(12.7V…
Some time ago, a viewer of my channel sent me a broken SoundBlaster 32 PnP with the model number CT3670. This sound card seems to be special since it has an audio chip that was apparently also used on the AWE64. Furthermore, it has two memory sockets that allows us to install 32MB in form of 30-pin SIMM modules. This memory can be utilized to install sound fonts which will elevate your midi…
Since version 3.2, Microsoft included the file RAMDRIVE.SYS in MS-DOS (released in 1986)
Did you ever wonder why Microsoft invested effort and resources into providing a tool for creating RAM drives during a time when memory was a pricey commodity? Back in the mid-80s, your typical personal computer boasted a mere 1 or 2 MBs of system memory. Perhaps Microsoft felt compelled to compete with…