In today's #retrocomputing adventure, I learned:

- Only the first PCI slot in my #COMPAQ #Presario 5184 exposes its option ROM, sometimes. At least for the NIC.

- Compiling #XTIDE will work in Linux if you get rid of the .exe extensions and replace del with rm, but you also have to remember to replace all the backslashes with slashes or the checksum perl script won't run and you'll get a 101-I/O ROM Error!

I just stumbled upon this upgrade I would have leapt at a few years back when I was building up my "new" Tandy 1000HX:

Tandy 1000 EX/HX 3-in-1 V2 Adapter --- 640K RAM + 2x Serial + Parallel + XTIDE Upgrade by Rob Krenicki

https://www.ebay.com/itm/197473626636

It looks like the creator of this device, who posted the project to GitHub, has made his last production run, sadly. Several are available still on eBay.

It doesn't look like the RAM expansion has the DMA chip, but that really doesn't much matter. What a great unit. I upgraded my own 1000HX to this spec -- but did it the Hard way (note the capital H).

https://github.com/rkrenicki/Tandy-EX-HX-3in1

#Tandy #Tandy1000 #Tandy1000HX #Tandy1000EX #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #retrogaming #XTIDE #modernretro #eBay #x86 #TRS80 #RadioShack

My Pentium machine's BIOS had a pretty underwhelming hard drive detection routine. I swap drives and CF cards pretty often, and setting things up manually every time was annoying.

I thought XTIDE Universal BIOS might help. I spent most of the day getting it set up, but even at best, drive speeds with XUB were about a quarter the speed as without. Damn. I guess it was a stretch expecting that to work, but still a bummer!

(TBC)

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #bios #xtide