Interestingly, i'm looking at procuring a reasonably vintage laptop for
a computer festival i'm planning to attend soon. It seems that many
laptops of the PIII era use SuperIO chips, but i'm rather confused as to
how "low level" they get.
Some of you may remember my RCA MS2000. I've had great luck writing
bootable images from a PIII machine with a "standard" 1.44mb floppy
drive, despite the format being 70-track, SSDD. The machine's floppy
controller uses a bona-fide NEC uPD765 though, so no surprises it worked
fine... ( Here's a video of me playing around with it for the curious...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdKkaf-77dE )
I'm really asking if anyone has any recommendations for a laptop that is
reasonably powerful, fairly modern (has USB), but also has a
direct-connection floppy drive that can do device level shenanigans (via
Omniflop) to allow me to write floppies in obscure formats. Bonus points
if it can use it with a serial terminal emulator, and run the Emma02 RCA
1802 emulator on it as well. I, like Tony, don't drive, so i need
something compact and portable for public transport travel.
I've been eyeing up a Dell Latitude C series (C600?) But the whole
SuperIO-over-parallel thing makes me think there might be proprietary
drivers involved, preventing device level access of the floppy drives...
Hopefully some of you might be a bit more wise.
Cheers, Josh
- [cctalk] Super I/O chips and Getting floppy images ... Joshua Rice via cctalk
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