Hi All, Today was a pretty fun day…
After a few hours in CAD, some time 3D-printing, soldering, making a label and what not... Today, I manufactured a brand new battery for my 486 notebook. Works like a champ. Hopefully, it remedies a couple minor issues. I think the completely dead battery OEM battery was causing those. Oh, also threw together a internal audio amplifier in the docking station. This allows me to use the Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold sound card without external speakers and just to run a audio patch cable from the card back to the docking station's speaker input jacks. The card has no on-board amplifier and cannot drive speakers directly. TDK DVD Writer works (at least as a CD-ROM) and can even play music CDs. Although, I must say that none of the FreeDOS CD/DVD drivers work with this drive. I was able to find drivers for the 10/100MB NIC. So, all the hardware is working. !!! ETHERDFS works great for moving stuff to and from the Notebook. Thanks Mateusz. !!! :-) (FYI, works in PC-DOS too. Haven’t tried it in MS-DOS or DR-DOS… Yet.) Getting the DVD drive working was the hardest part. Too make a long story shorter… The main problem was getting the VLB Super I/O board to talk to it. Decades ago, I just used the CD controller on a Sound Blaster Card instead of the I/O board. I no longer have that card and needed to use the I/O board. Well, it is configured through jumpers (about 16 of them). I no longer have the manual and hours searching the internet found nothing. So, through trial and error got it good enough. They really don’t make ’um like they used too. This docking station is something else. I forgot how it turned this notebook into a more than capable desktop. It’s got 2 ISA and 2 VLB expansion slots. I’ve got that DVD drive in there. But, it also has room, mounts and power for 2 more full sized hard drives. But, I gave up on getting either the 40GB or 60GB IDE drives I have to work in it. For those who are interested, as it sits right now, this is how the notebook+docking station is configured… (I’m so glad I had imaged all my old software and driver diskettes) ACom Vesa-4000 Notebook (no longer in business) 486DX2-66Mhz w/12mb RAM, 524mb Seagate Hard Drive 9.5” Active Matrix LCD Display 2-button Trackball (non-functional, COM2, maybe dead) Logitech ClearCase Mouse (COM1) Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold w/12mb RAM WinBond DC-280E VLB Super I/O Board 3COM 509B 10/100 NIC Internal 3W+3W stereo amplifier & 2” speakers. TDK DVD-RW Drive. 3.5” Floppy Drive 2 x Type 2 PCMCIA Slots (aka: 1 x Type 3 PCMCIA) 2 x VGA (one at a time, up to 1024x768) 3 x COM (1,3,4) (another on notebook, but inaccessible when docked) 2 x LPT (another on notebook, but inaccessible when docked) 2 x GAME 1 x SCSI 1 x PS/2 (another on notebook, but inaccessible when docked) PCMCIA Type 2: DSI Scout 28,800bps Fax/Modem (Working) EXP 14,400bps Fax/Modem (unknown state) Maxtor MobileMax 4MB Flash Memory Card (not working, possible config issue or dead) OS: MS-DOS 6.22 (Works) PC-DOS 7.1 (Works better) FreeDOS 1.3-RC3 (Works best, except with Windows 3.11) _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
