David Goodwin

Kermit 95 running the 24-bit colour test script for the first time

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.

256-colour Kermit 95

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.

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 it up and running an OS.

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 how to switch turbo on/off, and making the power LED work), but this is enough for one night I think

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 all working properly.

Then the 1.2MB Pansonic JU-475-3A14 I wanted to replace the old yellow drive with was misbehaving. I was sure I'd used this drive recently with a greaseweazle but now it couldn't seek properly past the middle of the disk. It would just start jumping grooves on the worm gear.

So I set out to replace it with a slightly older Chinon F-502L II. But this drive would only step the heads once during the seek test and again while booting. Couldn't read disks at all. Problem turned out to be the PCB edge connector needing a cleaning. Now it works nicely.

What started with a "lets make the floppy drives the same colour" turned out to be a bit more of an ordeal. The black 360K Chinon FZ-502 drive already in there turned out to be no good. The ribbon cable going to one of the heads seems to be slightly damaged.

Inside of the computer

So this is what the inside looks like now. The left-most slot, and the two right-most slots are only 8-bit ISA so only the SoundBlaster 2.0 or modem would fit there, but the SoundBlaster is too long for any of those slots. The SIP memory and HDD means only short cards in the three 8-bit ISA slots.

3Com EtherLink III

A 33.6k modem

Due to the NIC failure, I had to go digging for an alternate and ended up with an 3Com EtherLink III. A little newer than I'd like, but I don't have all my ISA NICs here with me. I had to switch to a different unfortunately somewhat newer (33.6k) modem too due to space constraints.

One American Research PCN-006 network card that will never network again

Well, I regretted that NIC for an entirely different reason than anticipated. After the machine had been running fine for 10 minutes or so, I briefly stepped out of the room only to come back to smoke pouring out the computer. Thankfully the computer is fine, but the card is not!

Upgrade parts all bagged up except for the FDD - I was using it recently on a Greaseweazle

Parts unbagged. The sound card will need some CMS chips eventually.

I went digging and these are the parts I found. I'll probably regret the NIC choice; its supposed to be NE2000-compatbile though sounds like not perfectly. I've no idea if the RAM works, but if it does it may as well go in. And a black 1.2MB FDD to match the existing 360K drive.

They ugly 286: yellowed, a little rusty, and has "Tasman" engraved in the plastic on the top along with the ASCII code for the Pi character written in pencil on the front!

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 286, 10MHz IIT 2C87 FPU, ST-238R RLL HDD, 2MB RAM, VGA.

Single port serial card ready to be installed

Rear view of the Mitac Paragon 88 with the card installed in the second slot from the right. The left-most slot doesn't accept cards.

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.

YouTube video by David Goodwin Checking the news at 2400bps

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! www.youtube.com/shorts/DCfbW...

Mystery 8-bit ISA dialup modem

Modem installed in the computer between the NIC and MFM disk controller

As its 2025, I guess its about time this thing finally got online. I had a dig through the big box of modems, and this one seems suitable enough! Fits right in between the NIC (a far more sensible connectivity option), and the Transteque MFM disk controller for the ST-225 20MB hard disk.

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. HDD is a Seagate ST-225.

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.

YouTube video by David Goodwin Windows NT 4.0 booting on an IBM PowerPC machine

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. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwDu...

The AlphaServer and RS/6000 eventually finished their task! The AlphaServer produced the Kermit 95 3.0 beta 7 DEC Alpha binaries for NT 3.50, NT 3.51/4.0/2000, and 64bit Windows 2000ish, while the RS/6000 did the PowerPC build for NT 4.0.

Release Kermit 95 3.0.0 beta 7 · davidrg/ckwin This is the seventh beta of Kermit 95, based on C-Kermit 10.0 beta.11. There are now fourteen(!) download options to support different versions of Windows on different CPU architectures, in additio...

Binaries for nearly all 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows in addition to 32bit OS/2 along with source (BSD license) and the full list of changes for this release can be found on Github:
github.com/davidrg/ckwi...

Kermit 95 Window menu available when the menu bar is turned off

SSH port and X11 forwarding, a lightly updated user manual, various bug fixes and enhancements such as new commands to turn the menubar, toolbar and statusbar on/off. When the menubar is off, some important commands appear in the window menu (like PuTTY).

Kermit 95 v3.0 beta 7 has been released! Now for IBM OS/2 2.0+ in addition to Windows NT 3.50+ (x86, alpha, mips, powerpc, alpha64, itanium, x86-64, arm32, arm64) and Windows 9x. Aside from a new/old name and OS/2 support, this release brings REXX scripting to x86 Windows XP or newer, ...

RS/6000 43P type 7248 running Windows and Visual C++ 4.0

And the RS/6000 is joining in today too

Digital AlphaServer 800

Today the Windows AlphaServer 800 is doing a bit of compiling...

I wonder what Apple did to end up with such bad quality plastic in the 90s. Tried to cut costs a little bit too much?

Looking at the DCA1 manual, I *think* that board just uses regular ram (guess the need for EDRAM is new to DCA2?). Instead it sounds like the DCA1 is doing something weird with memory writes to try and make them fast enough to make cache on the motherboard unnecessary - in theory.

Octek Hippo DCA2

Two 4MB Ramtron 72pin ED-RAM SIMMs

Octek MR-BIOS shows the ED-RAM as DynamiCache

Will be interesting to hear if there is anything to DCA1! I've got a DCA2 awaiting some kind of benchmarking; it requires special 15ns EDRAM SIMMs in the first two slots, with the others for regular uncached FPM stuff. The Ramtron EDRAM chips are apparently a 35ns DRAM combined with 15ns SRAM cache.

YouTube video by David Goodwin Windows XP build 2210 64-bit booting on a Digital AlphaServer 800 5/500

I also made a screen recording of my IP-KVM showing this booting on the AlphaServer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm3c...

Playing Age of Empires under x86 emulation on an AlphaServer 800 via an IP-KVM isn't the *best* experience, but it could be much worse. It has trouble scrolling the screen (1024x768 probably doesn't help), but otherwise it runs pretty smoothly. Perhaps letting FX!32 optimise more may help.