After boiling the ocean with Claude paired up with DOSBox-X I finally have a followup to the “10310 BTInitIsam” error I wrote about in https://binaryfury.wann.net/2026/01/patching-wildcat-bbs-for-y2k-in-2026/. This was about the PatchWC program that applies Y2K patches to the Wildcat! BBS v4 software not being able to run in DOSBox-X. This may be helpful for other DOSBox-X […]
Category Archive for 'retro'
New additions to the dial-up modem teardowns gallery. As usual yes I know a flickr album isn’t the best way to organize these, at least they’re alphabetical by name. Even with Claude I still haven’t got around to making something better. No, you can’t steal my photos and create your own modem website. US Robotics […]
Some new additions to the modem teardown album: US Robotics Courier 9600 HST (manual, photos), “widebody” FCC ID CJE794FAST. This is similar to the 14400 HST I already have in the album, except this one takes 16 VAC power with a male DIN-5 plug. A PDF of the manual already is online at vtda.org, […]
Retro case MHz LED readout setup
Posted in retro on Jun 5th, 2025
Back in the day when we had x86 IBM PC systems with “turbo mode”, which was really a reverse euphemism for being able to slow down the CPU clock for older applications, snazzier cases had a LED readout on the front to show the current MHz instead of/in addition to just a plain turbo LED. […]
Vintage Diamond video RAM upgrade-a-thon
Posted in retro on Jun 3rd, 2025
At the recent Electronics Flea Market somebody had a stack of Diamond ISA and VESA Local Bus video cards for sale. Which is funny because I had just been looking to maybe take the splurge and try to find a VLB card with an Tseng ET4000/W32 to put into my 486. I currently have a […]
I finally reached the point in my vintage gear lifestyle where I needed to replace old Dallas realtime clock chips that have dead batteries. I opted to try to find replacement chips, taking a gamble with “new old stock” units, instead of trying to grind down the side of the chip casing to attach leads […]
The Internet Archive is invaluable when working with old hardware or software when you need to go look at old version of a website to find manuals, drivers, or general info. Unfortunately a great number of files lived on FTP servers because the web wasn’t really up to hosting them in the 1990s, and many […]
TL;DR: I complain about my failings and show off pictures and log files. Later some gradual understanding of ISDN and why this probably won’t work with my particular version of the Courier I-modem with a U interface. Turns out U is electronically incompatible with S/T. In my telcom fiddlings to get a 56k dial-up modem […]
TL;DR: replaced LH1056 solid state relay / optocoupler at U3 One of the USR Courier HST modems I purchased recently had a peculiar problem that if I plugged the phone line into the “wall” jack of the modem it returned NO DIALTONE when I tried to dial something, yet I was able to dial something […]
US Robotics Courier I-Modem power adapter substitute
Posted in retro on Apr 29th, 2025
TL;DR: Original US Robotics I-modem power adapter is extremely rare. I cut mine open to document it. Original adapter provides 20 V AC (1500 mA capacity) across pins 3-4 of mini-DIN connector, no other voltages. Substituting a $15 24 V DC power adapter seems to work just fine. The US Robotics Courier I-Modem seems to […]
