Retro Computing

Cleaning Retro Kit

Posted on by ajross

Well, I got a mouse today. A lovely little original serial port #Microsoft mouse. It was pretty grubby, so I decided to give it a good old clean up.

Here is a video of the process and materials of what I use to clean up my retro stuff. I hope you find it entertaining and educational. I certainly found doing it a little more entertaining than it should be (thanks, Cussons!).

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How to set up a retro DOS PC to use the web, IRC chat, email, twitter, connect to BBS’s and more!

Posted on by ajross

In this video I show you how to set up networking using a packet driver and mTCP. After that it’s over to showcasing some of the ways to get apps such as telnetd on a Linux box to give you email, twitter, reddit, rss, video and more. Then there’s the native mTCP apps such as IRC; an FTP server, an FTP client, a telnet client (for you to connect to your Linux box with) and more. Finally, there’s a harkening back to the days pre-internet with BBS’s. I’ll show you how to connect to BBS’s via telnet.

How to play music modules on an old PC (MOD/S3M/XM)

Posted on by ajross

Up until now, listening to digitised music on a retro PC has been pretty much impossible. In this quick video, I’ll show you how you can play MOD / S3M / XM modules on a PC with as little as a 4.77MHz CPU. This is using brand new software (March 2020), which is still in beta so YMMV!

Links to the material shown in this video: Forum page with link to beta 16 of ModMaster XT: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?… Download MODs etc from here: https://modarchive.org Galaxy Music Player (GLX) (1994) download: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=7… Original version of ModMaster 2.3 (1997): http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=8…

MS DOS Shell & Task Swapping Review

Posted on by ajross

Many people didn’t even know that a utility called MS-DOS Shell shipped with the extras disk of MS-DOS versions 5 & 6. It was a handy file manager which looked and operated similarly to File Manager in Windows. One of it’s most interesting features was its ability to ‘swap tasks’. I’ll show you how to enable task swapping, and how it works, as well as give you a brief overview of the use of Dosshell overall.

How to get more than 640K RAM in a PC or XT

Posted on by ajross

For years, I thought that it was impossible to access any more than 640K ‘Conventional’ RAM on my PC or XT. I was wrong. This time on Al’s Geek Lab, we see why and how the PC only addressed 640K, as well as how to take it up to 1MB without any major work.

MicroRAM card from Monotech Vintage PCs: https://monotech.fwscart.com DOSMAX / SHELLMAX Utility: https://www.pcorner.com/list/UTILITY/… USE!UMBS: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread…

XT-IDE CF ROM BIOS Flashing

Posted on by ajross

The XT-IDE-CF card is great. It lets you add an IDE hard drive, or a Compact Flash card to your PC or XT. Of course, new updates come out for the BIOS on these cards regularly. They improve performance and fix bugs. But flashing the updates can be tricky! Here’s how to make sure you don’t do like what I did (totally screwed it up!). Step by step instructions follow!