old computer question

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traveler.in.time
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Joined: Tue Oct 24, 2006 7:28 pm

old computer question

#1 Post by traveler.in.time » Wed Sep 23, 2009 8:55 pm

I just purchased a 486 laptop as a gaming computer, but have run in to a couple of issues that I would appreciate some help with.
First off, there is no sound card, I had not even considered that as a drawback to getting a laptop from this era. Would there be such a thing as an external sound card that I could plug into the scsi or serial port?
Second, I currently do not have a cdrom for this machine, and no 3.5 drive on my current home computer; would it be possible to find an adapter to convert a USB port to a serial port so that I could hook up a jump drive to my 486?

even if neither of these options are possible, hearing that old machine boot up, and playing KQ4 with the PC speaker spark some of my earliest memories on my very first computer, a Magnavox 386 with 16 Mhz...

MusicallyInspired
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Re: old computer question

#2 Post by MusicallyInspired » Thu Sep 24, 2009 4:12 am

Actually, you might be able to install a sound card into it. If it's the same design as my 386 laptop you can unscrew the back panel and put in any ISA cards you want. I put an ISA sound card in my laptop and it works absolutely swimmingly. That's really your only option. I don't think they had any external sound cards back then....if they did I never heard of them.

As for communication, your best bet might be probably "null modem cable" networking via parallel port (LPT1 Printer port). What you need is a bi-directional parallel cable or that can connect to each computer's LPT1 printer port. From there there are multiple options for networking the two together depending on what operating system your laptop is running. If it's DOS then you must use INTERLNK.EXE and INTERSVR.EXE which should be included with DOS. One computer runs INTERSVR.EXE and acts as the host and the other runs INTERLNK.EXE and acts as the guest logging into the host. It's a DOS application so it would have to be run in real DOS mode. I'm not sure how you would get that to work in a Windows XP/Vista environment. You might be able to just run it in a command prompt window but when you run INTERSVR.EXE it doesn't allow multitasking so I don't know if you can do it with newer operating systems or not. If worse comes to worse you might have to run INTERSVR.EXE or INTERLNK.EXE after booting from a Windows 98 boot disk or something. You might be able to run INTERLNK.EXE just fine though. It's INTERSVR I'm worried about.

If you're running Windows 95 on your laptop it's no problem at all to set up a connection with the Direct Cable Connection program. Windows XP is compatible with this but you have to set it up for it. It's a bit of a complicated process but I have my old 486 computer running Win95 connected to my XP computer and I'm able to swap files back and forth easily. To set up WinXP to accept a connection from a Win95 system you have to create an extra user profile with the same login name as the network computer name of the Win95 computer. Then somehow you have to set up your network neighborhood on your XP machine somehow to accept incoming connections via the parallel port. I'm trying to remember how I did it but it's been a while. A quick Google should turn up some results, though. That's how I figured it out. Then again, your laptop likely doesn't have Win95 on it :).

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