If NO IMAGES will be shown, use www.z80.eu/blog instead of blog.z80.eu

Please note also - THIS BLOG ENDS HERE WITH THE LAST ENTRY FROM NOVEMBER 9th 2021.

I have prepared a new blog with wordpress at https://vintagecomputing.info !!!

Thank you.

This is HD-COPY, the status information can be found in the lower right corner:

It's NOT working with the Pentium 200 PC, like VGACOPY.

COPYIIPC (all versions) and also COPYWRIT (all versions) are crashing, they will not even show up a program dialog at all:


DISKDUPE and DOSDUPE are working fine:

Usage of DISKDUPE is a bit difficult, you MUST use a MOUSE driver. Also, it's usually found only as a time limited trial version...



>First part of this article series<
>Third part of this article series<


(related link points to download link for DOSDUPE)

There are so many disk copy programs (aka disk copier), but they are not all working with a Pentium 200 PC. Do you remember the hitlist of the best of them ?
COPYWRIT
COPYIIPC
LOCKSMITH
HD-COPY
VGACOPY
BLITZCOPY aka QCOPY
DISK COPY FAST aka DISK COPY PLUS
DISKDUPE
DOSDUPE
COPYSTUDIO
FROGCOPY
X-COPY
a.s.o. (I can't list all, but I guess I listed the most important ones)

Some of them are showing their beauty in graphics mode, but text mode is very functional and is enough to show all necessary information, of course.

I am starting with VGACOPY and HD-COPY because BOTH of them are NOT working correctly with computers using Pentium or newer CPUs. They're working only with a 386 or a 486 PC.
But some programs are so old, that they do not even work with a 386 PC. COPYWRIT and COPYIIPC are working only with XTs (but I didn't manage to test it on a 286 PC).

I tested VGACOPY 3.3 and also the newest VGACOPY 6.25. Both are NOT able to write to a 360KB floppy disk (in a 360KB floppy drive), producing only yellow errorneous sector blocks on the screen:




Cont'd on >Part 2 of the article series<

(related link points to the VGACOPY web site)

It was a kind of a horror trip, because first I was not able to screw/fasten the drives in it because of missing screw holes,then I got problems with the RS232 interface because of a problem with the 486 mainboard, then I replaced the power supply, and after this didn't fix the RS232 problem, I exchanged the whole mainboard with a Intel FX Socket 7 board.
But now I got all problems fixed so far, all components working:

Pentium 166 (no MMX)
ASUS P55TP4 Intel 430FX Mainboard
64MB RAM (more than enough for Windows 98)
ATI Xpert98XL (PCI-card)
Soundblaster AWE/32PnP (ISA-card)
CD-Burner with licensed Nero 6.0
ZIP100 Atapi Drive
8GB UDMA7 CompactFlash HDD
3.5" Floppy Drive
5.25" Floppy Drive

Even Daytona USA Deluxe (with applied Direct3D patch) is working fine (it's really playable with ca. 20-25fps). And the installed DirectX7 is enough also for Diablo I ;-)

I configured it to use optionally a Command Line only after boot, too. So I am also able to use 22Disk, Alien, Uniform and other CP/M Floppy Disk Reader/Writer/Copier Software.

The board itself even supports a Pentium 200, see related link.

I just liked to try again how it works and I tried to replaced the BASIC ROM with my Turbo PASCAL ROM, using the Turbo PASCAL version which does not generate a BAK file (this is important because the RAM Disk has only a size between 9KB and 20KB, and if 20KB, this costs may be too much CP/M TPA space).

So I tried to generate an EPSON PX-8 ROM again, and took the utility program PROMFORM.COM - using it in my MyZ80 emulator. I had to choose 256Kx1 ROM size, and created the ROM file.
But - I forgot it generates an Intel HEX file first, so I had to convert it to a binary also.
This was stopped by the HEXBIN utility, because PROMFORM generated a correct formatted HEX file, but with a heading single empty line (not understood by HEXBIN).
After I removed the first line, it was possible to convert it to a binary 32KByte ROM file, so I was also possible to replace the BASIC ROM file successfully.

I did it first in Toshiya's HC-80 emulator (still very very useful), so I just renamed BASIC.ROM to BASIC.BAK and the TPASNOBK.ROM to BASIC.ROM.
The TPASNOBK.ROM can be downloaded from >my Epson PX-8 page<.

This is the sample session I've done:

First step is set your drive you want to save the source (with "L" for "Logged Drive").
If you don't do this, you can't save the source...

Now enter something useful (this is just a demo source without any further purpose) ...

See how much (memory) space was consumed ... Turbo PASCAL is very efficient ...

It's running ;-)

Starting with installing SuSE Linux 4.2 on a real 486 PC, I thought it would be a good idea to try it in a virtual machine, too.
But guess what happens. Different errors leads in the same result - it didn't work, although console is working always, X-Server did only work with VGA 640x480 in 16 colors (not more).
First I tried to install it in VMWare Player 7, but then I tried it in Workstation 6, too.
Both installation tries resulted in a working character console, but SVGA or even accelerated X-Server aren't possible.
Also, "Soundblaster IDE" interface auto probe at boot time was a pain. This can be skipped by additional boot parameter "sbpcd=0", so started with the installation floppy disk, you had to type in "scsi1 sbpcd=0" always.

But the problem with the graphics adapter continued, also with VirtualBox and Virtual PC 2007. You will get always a scrambled screen after starting X:


You will get additionally trouble with Virtual PC, even if in Virtual PC's BIOS "ACPI" was switched off. Unexpected write errors on your virtual hard drive (in VPC) occur:

Later on, even if you managed to install something, you will be not able to boot or to use programs in general:


A good idea was to try it with QEMU. But unfortunately QEMU does only support a Cirrus Logic GD5446 graphics card, and SuSE Linux 4.2 does NOT. But MS Virtual PC 2007 supports a S3 graphics chip. So even if you can't install it in MS Virtual PC 2007, you can prepare it in QEMU.
Later on, you can convert the virtual hard drive image to a VPC hard drive, just with this command:

qemu-img.exe convert suselinux.raw -O vpc suselinux.vhd

When preparing with QEMU, choose the accelerated X-Server for S3 using xf86config, but don't try to start it in QEMU. Also, because you have to change the floppy disk images, don't forget to switch into the QEMU console to enter the "change floppy0 filename" command with Ctrl-Alt-2 and then back with Ctrl-Alt-1.

The result is a working SuSE Linux in MS Virtual PC 2007, but you can't save any file nor working with it in an usual way, because it will immediately be corrupted again.

You can click on every image to enlarge it.

related link points to version history overview of S.u.S.E Linux (not OpenSuSE nor SuSE Leap)