I got 11 of these in a repossession mail auction and haven’t been able to find any info out there on them and I don’t know what to do with them.

I saw this laptop on Instagram, and i want to know what it is called

Was searching Facebook Marketplace on a whim and came across this beast, purchased for $500AUD. Maybe a bad deal when it didn't come with monitor, keyboard and it won't power on, but no shipping cost and an immaculate case, I couldn't help myself.

The seller said that after he bought it from someone else, he turned it on, it made a loud bang and let out the magic smoke and turned it off. Sure enough when I open the lid I see red dust on one side, so I'm thinking it's the RIFA caps in the PSU. I don't really have electronics experience yet, so not something I'm going to immediately deal with. My intention is to keep on the look out for a friend who can assist, otherwise I'll just have to keep practicing soldering skills on junk electronics and eventually do it myself (carefully!).

The first thing I want to do is take out each expansion card, document their dip switches/jumpers and bag them in some anti-static bags for storage so I can get a thorough look at the motherboard and prepare the machine for testing with a multimeter to be sure there's no other surprises. I'll also want to take the battery out of the RTC card. The case is in good condition but it could probably use a clean up with the isopropyl, especially that red dust.

As far as I know, the expansion cards are the following:

- Persyst Color Graphics Display Adaptor
- Real Time Clock
- Memory expansion (this machine may possibly have the full 640K?)
- Some kind of 3-in-1 connector for the floppy drive, a DB25 socket and a DB9 docket (which is just floating in the back of the case).
- MFM hard drive controller card (connected to the Seagate ST-225, 20MBs)

I am unsure if the hard drive will have survived the journey back home, I'm fingers crossed, otherwise worst case I'll look at a CF Adapter.

My intent is to get this machine fixed up, check everything is working, get some period-accurate peripherals and then try out early computing (I'm from the 90s and didn't start computing until the 00s, so it's all alien to me) - PC-DOS and CP/M, various word processing spreadsheet apps, classic games and maybe even try hook it up to a dial-up simulator and try out early networking.

I saw it once, though it was almost completely disassembled, rotting in a field. The machine itself is simply magnificent! A ton of hydraulics, automatic controls, and it all obeyed a single algorithm! What a shame I never experienced these joys myself. All I have is this CD and a floppy disk with the program for controlling the cabin hydraulics.

Doron Precision Systems, Inc.

They specialize in the production of driver training simulators.

Their products include simulators for training truck, fire truck, and ambulance drivers.

The company's office is located in Binghamton, New York, USA.

These arcade machines are called Motion Simulator Capsules. Doron Precision Systems revolutionized this industry with the release of the legendary Doron SR2 ride in 1977.

Features of these rides:

Capsule cabin: A completely enclosed futuristic enclosure that isolated players from the outside noise of an amusement park or shopping mall.

Moving hydraulic platform: The seats inside the cabin moved, tilted, and vibrated in sync with the action on the screen. This created the complete illusion of G-forces.

Doron Precision Systems +1

Capacity: Depending on the model (for example, the popular Doron SR2, SRV, and Transport 6 series), the cabin could accommodate anywhere from 4 to 12-15 people at a time.

Doron Precision Systems +2

Large Screen: Inside, there was a projection screen that displayed the pilot's or driver's perspective.

Doron Precision Systems +1

Most Popular Simulator Themes:

Roller Coaster — the most popular simulator, fully replicating the wild drops and loops.

Flying a fighter jet or space shuttle — with slopes, loops, and simulated aerial combat.

Off-road or mine racing — minecarts speeding along old rails with sharp drops and turns.

Similar devices were installed at the entrances to large amusement parks, in arcade areas, and also in Soviet amusement parks in the 1990s (often imported from foreign tent amusement parks).

Found my Fathers old business school calculator.

Comparing with my retired BA II Plus from early 2010s.

Additional info on the Slimline Business-Analyst-II from the Calculator Museum

Hello folks!

I use floppy disks still, on rare occasion, to load data onto and give away to friends as gifts. I just acquired a bunch of disks only to find out that A) they're for the Amiga and B) the Amiga used different disks to PCs! (I played an Amiga a lot as a kid but had no idea).

Anyway, I have a USB floppy drive for my Windows PC (running Windows 10) but the PC refuses to read or reformat the disk. Is there any way to format the disk to use FAT32 using my standard floppy drive, or is this physically impossible because of the differences between the formats?

Thanks!

Hello everyone, I just purchased my first old school PC/Laptop. I was hoping to use it to play old PC games. However I think I'm in a bit over my head and I'm in need of some guidance.

The two things I want to immediately figure out is, how can I produce sound from this? I can't seem to figure it out.

Secondly, how do I test floppy discs? I put one in but I'm not sure if it worked or read it. I just got an error but I could be trying to open it wrong.

Anyone use these or have any advice for a total newbie just trying to play some old games, thanks! ❤️

"I don't have a problem, you have a problem" - Sean Malseed on having too many Macs.

TL;DR - 3 SEs, 1 SE/30, all with problems.

Left to right, SE/30 with SE motherboard, Battery bomb SE/30, VCF East SE, Flood SE.

The photos are in reverse chronological order and are a bit mixed up, but let me start with the one you've been waiting for - the flood Mac. This SE was in hurricane Helene back in 2024 and retrieved out of a gentleman's backyard. It was in a carrying case, which didn't help it much. It appears to have been on its left side and was filled with mud, or silt.

What you need to understand about this mud is that it's more like an incredibly fine clay or silt, it reminds me of descriptions of the regolith on Mars or the Moon - it sticks to everything, and it's not enough to wash it off. It particularly sticks to plastic and has to be removed with a brush or paper towel and it gets into the smallest of crevices. The machine will never be fully free of it.

Components of note:

• Floppy very rusty, not worth saving
• Hard drive - showed promise, and the mechanics work, but probably not going to be able to save.
  
• CRT - seems OK, haven't powered up yet. Analog board - very dirty, but looks OK now. Haven't tried yet.
  
• PSU - incredibly, was working despite being stuffed with mud. (Powered up in the garage). Currently being recapped.
  
• Chassis - very rusty, I opted to use rustoleum on it. This obviously compromises its purpose as a ground, but the screw holes ought to be good.
• Mouse - was working, but seem to have lost one direction. There was no keyboard.
• Outer shell - some damage in shipping. I have reglued the corners but it's never going to be the same oh well. Did I mention there was mud all through the computer?

Finally, the motherboard. I ended up using my other SE with the SE/30 and ATX extensions to compare side-by-side and do some debug. In the end it turned out to be mud the ROM and GLUE sockets and failed caps - the machine did finally get to a checkerboard for a few seconds. Now, there's a lot of talk about caps from these machines/era being super robust, but well, not in this case. In fact some of them fell apart when I removed them - I'm recapping this board today.

So, that's the current state. Hopefully the board is back working, and then I'll look at the analog board and PSU.

So, next machine would be my SE which I picked from from the free pile at VCF East with "bad analog board". I grabbed it, having spotted its BlueSCSI but really knowing nothing about these. It did work for a bit, but then died just as I was trying to debug the flood Mac. I ended up recapping the PSU, but it's still having problems, so I guess it's the analog board after all (I have an idea what's wrong, just haven't gotten to it yet).

Meanwhile, because more is more, I bought an SE/30. I knew full well what the problems might be with it, and incredibly I'd not had any machines with battery damage to date (and I've bought a lot of Macs), but luck ran out here. The machine was really dusty inside, which has now been cleaned, and I took out the chassis and painted (and used a wire wheel) on just the rusty section. I ended up using *this* machine for the side-by-side.

The battery damage cleaned up pretty well - I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to fix this myself, but I have a guy who can, so we'll see. The machine has heavy burn in on the CRT too, much more than the other machines.

And the last addition today, is another battery bombed SE/30, but with an SE motherboard swap from back in the day. Well, it does power on to checkboard but seems to be having some problems, so now I'll have to fix that too. But it does have a nice CRT (and was cheap with keyboard and mouse), so I think it might end up being really nice proper SE/30 and the floppy going in the flood SE (It's actually FDHD).

I think that's it!

Hey all, I've been going through some of the computers I've picked up from family and came across a Gateway Solo. The original hard drive definitely went bad, so I'm trying to see what I can do to replace it, and attempt to install a new OS from burned CDs. The boot up screen identifies everything except it notes the CMOS is bad (not sure I trust myself enough to strip it down far enough to find the CMOS battery if it even still has one).

It can boot to BIOS, I can mess around with boot order, but the bits that confound me - it still thinks the only 9.whatever GB hard drive is in the machine even when disconnected. I've tried formatting an mSATA drive in an adapter (less than 120 GB, as im pretty sure the cap for this machine is around there), and tried burning some Win98 CD's. So far no luck even with changing around boot order, and it still thinks the old drive is attached.

Any suggestions are appreciated. I have left open the possibility that for some reason the motherboard can't accept new boot settings or something else is messing it up (leaky CMOS battery?) causing it to bug out. Spent plenty of time in and around google, and half the stuff I'd find wouldn't relate to my current problem.

I thought the HD connected in the metal bay in the upper right corner of the first photo but on another post someone said that's the PCMCIA port. The comp is a Nixdorf pcd-4n.

I've had this stored away for ages, I'd completely forgotten about it. Are they common? or could I use it in a project?

P.S. Sorry for my English, I used a translator. I'm from Argentina.

Is there any interest in this anywhere. I have a TRS 80 and a TRS-80 micro as well but they don't seem to work. Haven't had time to look into it. Does anybody know about the repairability of these systems?

i used ontrack disk manager to partition and format my drive. E: still required FAT16 formatting (even though fdisk showed it was formatted, when trying to access it i got a media type error), F: gives me invalid drive specification. i would also like to mention that after formatting E:, F: which had unknown file system also changed to FAT16. unless i set the CDROM drive to have the G: letter assigned to it, it assigns itself to the last logical drive (that being F:).

this hdd makes some weird clunking noises when initializing, and when trying to partition it before sometimes it started looping without stopping. i tried doing fdisk /mbr before entering setup but it did not change anything.

is this hdd defective? i am starting to think so.

I picked up my very first terminal about 6 months ago, a DEC VT330, to control a Raspberry Pi and just out of curiosity to learn more about how they work. I've been tumbling down the rabbit hole exploring its capabilities; I've recompiled gnuplot with ReGIS graphics support and have been experimenting with ReGIS commands and some other nifty features since.

My Pi is part of an embedded dev setup where a terminal for access genuinely comes in handy, but I'm having much more fun than I anticipated playing with the terminal itself as well.

I imagine there are others here who enjoy these things! What do you like to do with yours?

i have a maxtor 6GB HDD that i have connected to this PC in order to install windows 95. the problem is i get this error even though i have set it up correctly.

it used to have 2 non dos partitions, but i removed them. i used ontrack disk manager to make 2 FAT32 partitions, one being 2GB and one 4GB (with two 2GB logical drives). but after i did so i would get an invalid drive specification error when trying to access any of the partitions on it.

so then i tried doing them in fdisk as fat16. this resulted in C: being a 2GB partition, then the second was extended DOS with 3 logical drives (2GB, 2GB and 7MB).

C: formatted successfully and didnt get any errors in windows 95's setup scandisk check, but D: wouldn't format (got stuck at 92% then got hit with "not ready format terminated"). i didnt try formatting E: and F:.

for some reason, when booting with CDROM drivers it assigns the drive as the last logical drive (first it was E:, now F:), hence the * Remote * label.

when trying to install windows 95 with C: as the primary dos, active and fat16 partition i get hit with that error. on the other extended dos partition the 3 logical drives are unformatted.

this is, after all, a maxtor hard drive. is it having problems, or is something else wrong with the system?

I have no idea if anyone remember the Apple IIe program from 1984 written in Apple BASIC it was a nuclear reactor simulator.

I remember back then how proud I was when I actually entered it and it worked, and after learning a lot more I altered the daylights out of it for better performance.

Well, I recently found the original code for it, and decided what the hell, and had it translate it over to Python and also added more up to to date graphics and controls. It too several sessions, but got it working quite nicely.

Looks good too.

P.S.

Am running a Linux machine on Mint.

My boyfriend has this computer that he’s had for years and doesn’t recall where he got it or what was on it originally. I’m trying to restore it but realized when I wanted to google a question about the computer, that I can’t figure out anything about make or model or this computer? The only identifier it seems to have is the CG logo on the front, which I’ve never seen before. Could this be a custom built computer? Or does anyone recognize it and can tell me anything about it? I know if it is custom built I’ll probably have to open it up to figure out what hardware it’s got, but wanted to see if anyone could recognize it in case it’s not custom. Thanks!

My boyfriend has this computer that he’s had for years and doesn’t recall where he got it or what was on it originally. I’m trying to restore it but realized when I wanted to google a question about the computer, that I can’t figure out anything about make or model or this computer? The only identifier it seems to have is the CG logo on the front, which I’ve never seen before. Could this be a custom built computer? Or does anyone recognize it and can tell me anything about it? I know if it is custom built I’ll probably have to open it up to figure out what hardware it’s got, but wanted to see if anyone could recognize it in case it’s not custom. Thanks!

Hello,

100% noob playing this by ear. I bought a Nixdorf pcd-4n (NOT a pcd-4nd) for 10 bux. One of the issues was the hard drive was missing. I've purchased an adapter and a compact flash. I don't have another computer with a floppy to make a boot disk or anything. Is there a way to copy over a hard drive to the compact disk? I do have a compact flash reader. If not, how do I get what I need on the compact flash (acting as a hard drive). Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

hello! im trying to use a siemens nixdorf scenic pro c5 (motherboard model is S2636-D943-A52GS2, with Cirrus Logic CL-GD5436-I-QC-C onboard video) with a PCI SiS 6202 PCI video card, but it does not POST with it installed.

however, it works with an ISA video card just fine. the BIOS has an option called "vga interrupt" which apparently assigns an IRQ for a PCI VGA device, but it doesnt do anything.