(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 single option for CompactFlash, either.
But I do want to give an overview as far as how I'm gonna be doing it for
this lovely Woodgrain 486 build
that 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 but
recently the hard drive has gotten really, really loud,
and it's just too much to enjoy.
And that is actually one reason that I like
putting old hard disks in old computers like this.
It's part of that retro nostalgic experience for me.
It feels more authentic
to have a spinning platter in there making noise.
And, you know, the load times and stuff, it makes sense.
But there comes a point, too, where I'm using this one to
capture a lot of stuff,
like my Wing Commander review was
recorded entirely on here.
And I really wished that I had something more convenient
than 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 of the devices that I'm considering.
So when it comes to this CompactFlash stuff, you have several options.
This one seems to be one of the most 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 card
will just sort of go in
right 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 access to 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 directly
into the motherboard or
your floppy disk controller card, whatever.
And it does the same thing,
it's just not, you know, not on this little board here
and you don't plug in a cable to it.
This goes in directly.
It is worth noting, though, that these are only gonna work with certain computers
with a certain BIOS that is supportive of these.
And unfortunately, there's no directory saying
which one's gonna work for you and which one won't.
These are the ones that seem to be recommended to me for the most part
by people that say they work well on 386 and 486.
There's also this one here for laptops.
I just picked this up on a whim 'cause I was curious.
Just goes right in here on a 2½-inch IDE tray.
And of course, there's also just the matter of the cards themselves.
Not all CompactFlash cards are 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 here
are not gonna be quite as reliable
just over, you know, long term usage.
So I ended up going with one of these
4 gig cards, although I'm only gonna be able to use
2 gigs per partition on this DOS setup,
due to the way
that the drive sizes are handled.
in DOS.
There's something else just to keep in mind in general,
and that is the reason that these devices work
so easily and why they're so popular
with machine setups like this is because
CompactFlash actually uses the parallel ATA standard.
So these are just basically miniature ATA devices.
These adapters are just converting the interface of CompactFlash
over to IDE.
And that's why there's so little going on here.
Pretty much, it's just adding this stuff for power
and 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 work on these old computers.
They have more modern uses.
There's also these industrial solid-state
flash 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 do
a 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 easily
plug this into a modern computer
So for my purposes, I wanted something
that I could easily transfer and swap back and forth.
I ended up grabbing this thing,
which is really just the same as this other one over here.
Except it has a bracket on the back,
so it adds a little port on the back of my computer,
and this way I can sort of swap the cards
and get access to them easily with the case closed.
And then take it over to my modern machine, 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 this
to 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 it
and not actually put all the mounting stuff in there.
Got the four-pin...
This is normally a floppy drive
cable there, for like 3½-inch
drives, 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 be
using.
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 this over to the modern computer and
transfer my files.
And then put it right back in there, so...
Yeah, let's turn on the computer and see how this works,
just sorta hanging out the side here.
Alright, so everything is plugged in and ready to go.
I'm gonna go ahead and power it on here
and 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 because
it can't even read
probably the disk format that's on there at the moment, so
I'm gonna use a DOS boot disk here that I have
loaded with some tools.
Yeah, so we put in "C:" Obviously it's not going to "see" anything
because the drive is not formatted or it's not
ready for DOS.
And in fact, we don't even know
what's been done this. I just got that card off of eBay.
So I'm gonna run this program here that I've read does good things.
It's called "Clear HDD."
And so with this, it's supposed to just sort of wipe the whole thing clean,
and sort of prep it so that we will be able to do things like
place 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 pretty much 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 define
the primary DOS partition, which is this one.
And it'll restart and do its thing.
Hopefully, we should at least
have what it sees as a C: drive after this.
Okay, so we can see that there is a C: there, which is good,
but there's nothing on it yet, so what we're going to do is
format C: with sarcasm.
(chuckles) Actually, "/s," that means to
add 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 instantaneous
benefits of CompactFlash.
This is formatting so quickly compared to a standard hard disk drive.
And, yes, it's going to be 2 gigs because that is the maximum partition size.
If I were thinking, I would have added another partition just for the lulz.
But I didn't, so whatever.
Cool. That /s added the COMMAND.COM there
which means we should just be able to boot
straight to
the CompactFlash card now
without the disk drive at all.
Yup.
(chuckles)
So, yeah, it's having us put in the time and day
like some really old school DOS, but...
Well at this point, really the thing to do is install MS-DOS,
which is gonna be the
full 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 itself
and just skip the disk drives entirely, but...
There's some weirdness there
with the disk identifications.
So, Disk 1, 2 and 3 are ID'd by the setup program.
And I've run into some funkiness trying to copy them over
into a directory as opposed to installing 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 and replace the current version of DOS
because we don't need that!
So, yeah, that copying that system file really was redundant.
So, whatever.
And this is just gonna copy pretty much 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 restart
and 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 this
as 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 the
thing 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 Commander Keen: Goodbye, Galaxy,
Jazz Jackrabbit, the CD version, and
Tyrian 2000.
And, yeah. (laughs softly)
Very quick, which is awesome.
And I'm gonna stick these in a nice, 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 computer
because 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 folder
and 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.
- [Computer] Good luck.
- [LGR] 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've heard can happen with these.
So, you know, your mileage may vary depending 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 thing
that isn't quite reliable
in the most...
reliable of ways.
And we'll see about Keen 4.
Yeah, thankfully, I don't think the read-write's gonna be a huge problem
unless I'm copying, like,
really big files at once, and I don't anticipate doing that.
It might be a problem if it craps out in the middle of loading something.
But chances are the things I'm gonna be loading on here
aren't like...
really intensive games.
It's just files that are a few megs at most.
And those read and write pretty much instantaneously 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 all the things now that make me happy,
like setup AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS
and get the conventional memory optimized. Mmm!
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to
get 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 solution
for getting files over without doing
networking or burning CDs or anything like that.
Which, I'll still probably do that from time to time anyway
as the need arises or I just want to.
But that's really sort of the whole point of this build for me
is 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 gonna add to it, but I'm gonna keep doing it.
Because it's fun.
I'm really curious, though, about some of those other
storage solutions that I mentioned at the start.
You know, some of the little solid-state thingies
and 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 for
older 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 that you'll like some of my others.
This is just one in a series of these 486 upgrade videos.
I have all sorts of other topics being uploaded every Monday and Friday,
so check them out if you'd like.
And thank you very much for watching!
(jazz music)