Uncreative Labs

Joined: 01 Oct 2006 Posts: 36 Location: USA

I was just wondering, is there any software small enough to fit on a 360K floppy disk that will allow me to connect my XT to my Windows machine? It has an old HP Ethertwist network card, at least I think that's what it is (has two ports, one marked LAN and one PHONE). The machine has no hard drive so it would be really convenient if I could just set up a shared directory on my Windows machine and run my old games and programs from it instead of constantly swapping floppy disks.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Given what Mike Brutman knows about PCjr's and XT's, I'd say he'd be your best source of knowledge. He released mTCP recently, and it looks promising. You might drop him a line (e-mail addy in the Memberlist) or see if he drops in...

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

there are a couple of things that will bite you
the os for the xt, assuming you have dos 6.22
will only see 2,048 megs max.
dos will not see a ntfs partition.
it's likely a xp machine will SEE and copy files from a xt or other older machine,
but as I said, there are technical problems going the other way.

My son brings home any hard drives he finds at the scrap yard.
some are from XP machines and are NTFS.

I have a drive for this machine that has XP installed, when I have to do something I plug that drive in.
and this time, I could no access one of the NTFS
drives as a second drive.
I finally had to do it on anothee machine with
w 2000 as the boot drive. and it was slow to start and had several false and slow starts.

when you try to look at a XP machine with a dos or even a windows 98 machine, nothing will be seen.

Joined: 02 Oct 2008 Posts: 6 Location: Tucson, AZ

Skyfrog -

Yes, it's possible. I have been working on this for the past few months on my IBM PCjrs and my IBM 5160s. It's not easy to set up, sorry to say, but it IS possible.

I am currently using a parallel port Ethernet adapter (the same one Mike Brutman recommends) on my PCjr (with only 1 360KB floppy drive) to connect to my Windows Server 2003 machine using NetBEUI. As wdegroot stated, there are some caveats to doing this. Here are some of mine :

- DOS version is limited. I'm using PC-DOS 3.30 due to floppy disk space.
- I'd recommend using MS LAN Manager v2.2c. It has enough support for some older network adapters, and it can be tweaked to run on only 1 diskette. MS LAN Client v3.x won't work for this (the NET.EXE file is over 410KB by itself)...works great if you have a hard drive, though.
- Conventional RAM gets sucked up pretty quickly. Keep this in mind if you want to run some pretty big games.
- There are tweaks you will have to do on WinXP/WinServer to get this to work correctly. That way, you will have hard drive write access. This drove me nuts for a while on why some of my old games wouldn't load correctly. And I don't know if this opens up any security holes in Windows.

My biggest problem is this...getting some free time to write up the article on how to do it. Once I do get some free time, I'll finish up everything and send you a copy.

Jon

Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 66

Please, write it up! I've been waiting for a few months now. Smile

Joined: 01 Oct 2006 Posts: 36 Location: USA

Thanks all, and thanks very much NTEPB. Looking forward to reading about it.

Joined: 02 Oct 2008 Posts: 6 Location: Tucson, AZ

Okay.

Now that I've had some time to actually work on this thing, I have the basic steps of how to network a computer with only a 360KB floppy drive to a Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 computer using NetBEUI. It's definitely not the final draft version, it's in MS Word 2003 format, and it's just shy of 30 pages (has lots of pictures).

Skyfrog - if you don't mind, could you PM me with your e-mail address?
mbbrutman - Mike, I already have yours. It should be in your e-mail box sometime today.

I need your help making sure that these instructions are correct. If you could test this out for me and let me know of any corrections or additions I need to make to the final draft version, that would be great.

Another reason that it's taken me so long to get these instructions out is because I was talking to a friend of mine about this project, and he gave me a very interesting dare: to get an old floppy-only-based DOS system to network up to Windows Vista. I tried to do this, and I think it will work. Because of "slight" changes in the architecture of Vista, that'll take a while to rewrite the article and tailor it to Vista's needs. If there's demand for it, I'll research it further.

If anyone else wants to beta test these instructions out for me, please let me know. Thanks!

Jon

Joined: 01 Oct 2006 Posts: 36 Location: USA

I sent you my email; my computer is put away at the moment but I'll try it out as soon as I get a chance. Smile

I'm not really sure if the network card in my XT even works. I've never seen one like it either. It's called an HP Ethertwist and has two ports on it marked PHONE and LAN. I was guessing maybe that was so you could use regular RJ45 phone cable instead of an ethernet cable, but I'm really not sure. Anyway if it won't work I may be able to dig up another card somewhere.

Joined: 02 Oct 2008 Posts: 6 Location: Tucson, AZ

I noticed that when I was writing out the networking article, there were a few options in LAN Manager that had HP and Ethertwist in the same sentence. You never know...it might actually work with the built-in drivers.

Actually, I was digging around through my old cards earlier and found some PCI network cards that had RJ-45 (ethernet) and RJ-11 (phone line) connections. It might work on the same principle as your HP Ethertwist for home networking. Now where did I put that driver CD to test it out? Rolling Eyes

When you start up your PC-XT again, if for some reason the card doesn't work in your 8088, try it in an older Win95/Win98 computer with ISA slots to see if it even functions (they might even have a built-in driver). If that still doesn't work, you can't go wrong with parallel-port ethernet adapters. In fact, I'm getting ready to test out another brand of parallel port networking adapter to see if it works with my 8088 systems. Cross fingers! Smile

Jon

P.S. If anyone else has the urge to test out my networking article, feel free to send me a PM. Thanks!