David Goodwin

I develop software and mess about with vintage computers. Sometimes I have a go at a bit of astrophotography. @ @[email protected]

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

Kermit 95s first time ever doing 24-bit colour! I'm not sure what this is actually *useful* for, but I guess there must be something out there that needs to display more than 256 colours in a terminal at once.

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

It has been *a lot* of work, but 256-colour support in Kermit 95 is finally showing some visible sign of progress! Still a fair bit of work to go to finshin the implementaiton off, like commands and OSC sequence for customisng the colour palette, etc.

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

@WithinRafael Picked up one of those ECS Liva QC710 mini PCs which *appears* to be brand new/unused, but also doesn't seem to do anything when turned on besides lighting up its power LED. Do you know of any way to reset these things, or if there is some trick to making them work?

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

After replacing a few leaky capacitors in its power supplies, my HP 9000/370 lives! And unlike the /360 I fixed up a week or two back, none of the weird glass tantalum capacitors popped! Now I've just got to sort out some emulated HP-IB drives for it so I can get running an OS.

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

So after all that, the ugly 286 now at least has matching floppy drives, and both of them even work too! 1.2MB on the top, 360K on the bottom. Still a few things left to do on it (like figuring out turbo, and making the power LED work), but this is enough for one night I think

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

With all the attention I've given the Mitac Turbo XT lately, I guess its time the Ugly 286 was finally given some. While it may be a little rusty, yellowed, and have "Tasman" engraved in the plastic, its not a bad machine overall. 12MHz, IIT 2C87 FPU, ST238R HDD, 2MB RAM, VGA.

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

After cleaning the worm gear a bunch and helping the heads travel the full length of the disk, the Panasonic drive is now working fine too. The ROM diagnostics in this machine were helpful in verifying that it was finally all working properly.

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

@SteveMaves Yeah, there used to be a little blue one right where the black mess is now. Surprising it didn't fail instantly like they usually do!

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

One last upgrade for the Mitac: a second serial port. In part because I can't think what else I would put a one-port serial card in and I have two of them lying around. This leaves it with one 8-bit ISA slot free, maybe for a sound card someday - one of those adlib clones perhaps

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

The Mitac Paragon 88, a rather nice compact 10MHz Turbo XT. Integrated Paradise CGA video, RTC, Floppy controller, one serial port, one parallel port and 768K RAM (the top 512K-640K is bank-switchable to support a 128K RAM disk). Display is an ADI DM-14+ green monochrome.

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

Checking the news at 2400bps! Its not fast, and RNZ is not as compatible with text-mode browsers as it perhaps could be. But it made horrible screeching noises as it connected and that's the important thing! https://t.co/Wg9E9N2OZz

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

The VisionAV deals with the weird video output of the RS/6000 (refresh rates like 72.809Hz, 59.94Hz, 60.317Hz) rather well. A higher quality VGA cable might help with the occasional video noise too.

[David Goodwin @davidrgnz]

A new video capture card (Datapath VisionAV) arrived today, so here is a video of my RS/6000 43P Model 132 (type 7248) slowly booting into windows. https://t.co/WbvL3TuaC2