LGR 486 Update! Installing CompactFlash Storage

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Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing,and today, we've gotta have the talk.The CompactFlash talk, that is.

This is not gonna be a comprehensive, \\

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en(typing, jazz piano music)Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing,and today, we've gotta have the talk.The CompactFlash talk, that is.This is not gonna be a comprehensive,\"this is the one way to do it\" type of video.And I'm not gonna show every singleoption for CompactFlash, either.But I do want to give an overview asfar as how I'm gonna be doing it forthis lovely Woodgrain 486 buildthat I put together last year here on LGR.It's a great little workhouse machine... workhorse.(laughs) Workhouse?Whatever, man. It's a cool computer.And I like it a lot butrecently the hard drive has gotten really, really loud,and it's just too much to enjoy.And that is actually one reason that I likeputting old hard disks in old computers like this.It's part of that retro nostalgic experience for me.It feels more authenticto have a spinning platter in there making noise.And, you know, the load timesand stuff, it makes sense.But there comes a point, too,where I'm using this one tocapture a lot of stuff,like my Wing Commander review wasrecorded entirely on here.And I really wished that I hadsomething more convenientthan having to rely on old floppy disks and stuff.So, that's what we're gonna do today.Let's take a look at some ofthe devices that I'm considering.So when it comes to this CompactFlashstuff, you have several options.This one seems to be one of themost popular ones by Syba here.We got an IDE cable that goes right here,power goes right here if you need it,and then, of course, your CompactFlash cardwill just sort of go inright there like that,and it's a pretty simple solution.It is internal, though.In fact, most of these are gonna be internal.So you're gonna have accessto the inside of the case,if you wanna swap out the cards.But that's a thing.There's also this one that plugs in directlyinto the motherboard oryour floppy disk controller card, whatever.And it does the same thing,it's just not, you know,not on this little board hereand you don't plug in a cable to it.This goes in directly.It is worth noting, though, that these areonly gonna work with certain computerswith a certain BIOS that is supportive of these.And unfortunately, there's no directory sayingwhich one's gonna work for you and which one won't.These are the ones that seem to berecommended to me for the most partby people that say theywork well on 386 and 486.There's also this one here for laptops.I just picked this up on awhim 'cause I was curious.Just goes right in here on a 2½-inch IDE tray.And of course, there's also justthe matter of the cards themselves.Not all CompactFlash cardsare gonna be created equally,as you might imagine.They've been around for a long time.I've heard that these older ones,like the 64 meg one hereare not gonna be quite as reliablejust over, you know, long term usage.So I ended up going with one of these4 gig cards, although I'monly gonna be able to use2 gigs per partition on this DOS setup,due to the waythat the drive sizes are handled.in DOS.There's something else justto keep in mind in general,and that is the reason that these devices workso easily and why they're so popularwith machine setups like this is becauseCompactFlash actually usesthe parallel ATA standard.So these are just basically miniature ATA devices.These adapters are just convertingthe interface of CompactFlashover to IDE.And that's why there's so little going on here.Pretty much, it's just adding this stuff for powerand a couple of indicators and whatnot.The newer CompactFlash cards,like CompactFast, like CFast,won't work at all.Those use serial ATAs as standard.Or at least they won't workon these old computers.They have more modern uses.There's also these industrial solid-stateflash memory solutions, they're disk-on-modules,as they're called.And this one's 128 megs.They come in different sizes, as you can see.But yeah, these are good if you want to doa straight-up hard drive replacement.These go directly into the IDE interface,a lot like this other one does.But of course, this isn't swappable,and I can't just easilyplug this into a modern computerSo for my purposes, I wanted somethingthat I could easily transfer and swap back and forth.I ended up grabbing this thing,which is really just the sameas this other one over here.Except it has a bracket on the back,so it adds a little port onthe back of my computer,and this way I can sort of swap the cardsand get access to them easily with the case closed.And then take it over to my modernmachine, put files on it, you know.It's more convenient, is what I'm trying to say.At least for my purposes. So, yeah,let's go ahead and install this thing.(soft jazz music)Alright, so the old hard drive is right in here, so...Oh, jeez.Okay, yeah. So, don't need that anymore.However, we will need thisto plug into the card interface itself.And, yeah..There's the IDE which we'll use...uh...to connect to it, maybe?I'm not sure if that's long enough.It might be long enough.I'm planning to put the...I'm planning to put this right in here.So...That's like just too short.Hmm...Well, I might just get a longer cable later.In fact, I'm just gonna leave it out here to test itand not actually put all the mounting stuff in there.Got the four-pin...This is normally a floppy drivecable there, for like 3½-inchdrives, but it works well for this.'Cause it takes 5 volts,which is what that provides.And this is the card that I'm gonna beusing.And it just...goes in there like that.Simple enough. And then, of course,when I don't need it in here anymore,this is gonna be sticking out the back,so it's gonna be easily accessible.And then I can just take thisover to the modern computer andtransfer my files.And then put it right back in there, so...Yeah, let's turn on the computerand see how this works,just sorta hanging out the side here.Alright, so everything isplugged in and ready to go.I'm gonna go ahead and power it on hereand see if things are gonna show up.(slight buzzing)We have a video signal. That's a good sign.(drive whirring)(PC beeps)Okay, so it said \"Transcend\" there, and of course,this is not gonna do anything becauseit can't even readprobably the disk format that'son there at the moment, soI'm gonna use a DOS boot disk here that I haveloaded with some tools.Yeah, so we put in \"C:\"Obviously it's not going to \"see\" anythingbecause the drive is not formatted or it's notready for DOS.And in fact, we don't even knowwhat's been done this.I just got that card off of eBay.So I'm gonna run this program herethat I've read does good things.It's called \"Clear HDD.\"And so with this, it's supposed tojust sort of wipe the whole thing clean,and sort of prep it so that wewill be able to do things likeplace an MS-DOS partition,add a master boot record,format it, that kind of thing.And here we are so... yeah.At this point, I would prettymuch just have to run fdisk,and see what we can see.Okay, well it at least sees there's a fixed drive.No partitions are defined,so we are going to definethe primary DOS partition, which is this one.And it'll restart and do its thing.Hopefully, we should at leasthave what it sees as a C: drive after this.Okay, so we can see that thereis a C: there, which is good,but there's nothing on it yet,so what we're going to do isformat C: with sarcasm.(chuckles) Actually, \"/s,\" that means toadd the system files which...I don't necessarily need to do that, I just want to.Because I... feel like it.And there we have the instantaneousbenefits of CompactFlash.This is formatting so quicklycompared to a standard hard disk drive.And, yes, it's going to be 2 gigsbecause that is the maximum partition size.If I were thinking, I would have addedanother partition just for the lulz.But I didn't, so whatever.Cool. That /s added the COMMAND.COM therewhich means we should just be able to bootstraight tothe CompactFlash card nowwithout the disk drive at all.Yup.(chuckles)So, yeah, it's having us put in the time and daylike some really old school DOS, but...Well at this point, really thething to do is install MS-DOS,which is gonna be thefull operating system that I want to run on here.And, yes, I am going to do this from disk.There's other ways that you could do it.I could in theory take this CompactFlash card and...you know, copy the files over to the cart itselfand just skip the disk drives entirely, but...There's some weirdness therewith the disk identifications.So, Disk 1, 2 and 3 are ID'dby the setup program.And I've run into some funkinesstrying to copy them overinto a directory as opposed toinstalling from a floppy disk.It's just easier to do this. There's no...I don't know.I like it this way anyway.I like to hear disk sounds, man.So, yeah, we're gonna continue andreplace the current version of DOSbecause we don't need that!So, yeah, that copying thatsystem file really was redundant.So, whatever.And this is just gonna copy prettymuch the same normal speed as...anything else. It's three disks.So we're gonna skip ahead to the end.(whistling ala Duke Nukem)(PC beeps)Yay!We are finished, so...Time to restartand hope that it loads.HIMEM takes longer to do than anything else.Uh, awesome!Okay! Well here's the really fun part.I get to test out the functionality with thisas a card going into the modern computer,and then transferring some stuff back over,like, no problem, so let's do that.So, alright. I'm going to stick thething into my thing here.It's really descriptive.And hopefully it should pop up... it does!(laughs)So, yeah, we've got,you know, here's the DOS things.And so I can just copy files over quite regularly.I'm gonna copy over CommanderKeen: Goodbye, Galaxy,Jazz Jackrabbit, the CD version, andTyrian 2000.And, yeah. (laughs softly)Very quick, which is awesome.And I'm gonna stick these in anice, handy little \"Games\" folder.Yay!So, let's just take those on over.Okay, we're back, and yes,I did have to restart the computerbecause it doesn't like it if you don't.Like, you swap out the card and stuff.But yeah, there we go.So I've got a games folderand Jazz CD, Keen 4 and Tyrian.Hmm, the volume is really low, but...(low MIDI music)It does seem to work, so that's cool.(music gets louder)That's better!Oh, I didn't turn on the mouse. Ha ha!Well, we'll just play with the keyboard.- Good luck.- Sweet.(shooting, explosions)Alright, cool, so this works.Ah, 'kay...That's one of the errors.Like, it wasn't quite reading there for a moment.It seemed to fix itself.(funky MIDI music)And that's a thing that I'veheard can happen with these.So, you know, your mileage may varydepending on the card you use,the adapter you use, whether or not,like, I don't even know what, man.But, like, it's a thingthat isn't quite reliablein the most...reliable of ways.And we'll see about Keen 4.Yeah, thankfully, I don't think theread-write's gonna be a huge problemunless I'm copying, like,really big files at once,and I don't anticipate doing that.It might be a problem if it craps outin the middle of loading something.But chances are the thingsI'm gonna be loading on herearen't like...really intensive games.It's just files that are a few megs at most.And those read and write pretty muchinstantaneously on this thing, so...I'm not too worried about those read-write issues.It does suck, though.Alright, well I'm gonna go and do allthe things now that make me happy,like setup AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYSand get the conventionalmemory optimized. Mmm!Oh, yeah, I almost forgot toget this thing properly mounted in there.Got a longer IDE cable going on there and...Okay...Alright.Simple enough!I like it.Yeah, I would say that turned out pretty well.Seems to be a nice, convenient little solutionfor getting files over without doingnetworking or burning CDs or anything like that.Which, I'll still probably do thatfrom time to time anywayas the need arises or I just want to.But that's really sort of thewhole point of this build for meis just to have fun with it, tinker with it.I use this thing a lot. (chuckles)It's just a cool machine and I like adding things to it.I got a Roland MPU-401 in there now, and then...And I don't know what else I'm gonnaadd to it, but I'm gonna keep doing it.Because it's fun.I'm really curious, though,about some of those otherstorage solutions that I mentioned at the start.You know, some of the little solid-state thingiesand other types of CompactFlash card,or even like SD cards.I know there's some things like that.And in fact, I have another sort of related thing,the XT-IDE that I hope to cover in the future,but that's forolder machines than this, for the most part.But anyway, hope you enjoyed this video.And if you enjoyed this episode of LGR,there's a good chance thatyou'll like some of my others.This is just one in a seriesof these 486 upgrade videos.I have all sorts of other topics beinguploaded every Monday and Friday,so check them out if you'd like.And thank you very much for watching!(jazz music)\n"