Re: PC Transporter

[salfter@chakotay.ncc74656.org (Scott Alfter)]

In article <ruorghjp3i540@news.supernews.com>,
Michael Y. Su <msu76@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
>I had made the disk bootable through DOS under Win98.  There must have been
>some new babble in msdos.sys, io.sys, and drvspace.bin that PCT and
>Transdrive(s) just didn't like.

Even on a boot floppy, Win95 requires at least a 386DX.  The Win98 box says
it needs at least a 486DX2-66; whether it checks for that or just a 386, I
don't know.  (The slowest x86 box I use regularly is a Cx5x86-120.  I have
an IBM PC/XT, but have never gone to the bother of trying to make a bootable
Win95 or Win98 floppy since my only other machine that has a 5.25"
double-density floppy drive runs Linux all the time.)  A PC Transporter, of
course, doesn't even come close.

The newest OS you'll likely be able to run on a PC Transporter is Caldera
OpenDOS 7.0x (which is relabeled Novell DOS 7, which was the successor to DR
DOS 6).  It should be a free download from Caldera's website (yes, it's the
same company that does a Linux distribution).  Nearly any version of MS-DOS
ought to work, too.

>Now, if there was only some miraculous way I could speed up the transfer.exe
>utility.  It's god-awfully-slow.  Everything in PCT is ssllooww.  And the
>720k floppy swapping is getting on nerves too.  :*!

8088s in general are slow.  The few times I've fired up my XT, I've been
surprised by just how slow it is, especially at redrawing the screen (it's
equipped with the original IBM CGA card, a full-length card that's subject
to "snow" interference under certain circumstances).  An Apple II, even at
the normal 1-MHz speed of the 8-bit machines, would keep up (or even outrun)
it in most apps.

Still, old computers are fun...if they weren't, none of us would be here.
:-) I've had Apple IIs for 14 years and have followed this newsgroup
on-and-off for 10 years, and I still get some use out of 'em (though
admittedly not as much as in the past).

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(IIGS(  Scott Alfter (salfter at (yo no quiero spam) delphi dot com)
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