Sharp PC-3000

[Kyodai]

Sounds exactly like what i would have recommended. I already got a pack of fresh batteries this morning and hopefully i can play a bit with the sharp this weekend.

[wintermute]

BR-2325s arrived and at least I don't get that annoying "card battery low" message anymore.

( Expecting to get the above mentioned Omnibook 800ct tomorrow. Will open another thread about it shortly and will keep posting here only what's relevant to the Sharp. )

[Kyodai]

So the new battery didn't fix any of your other problems?

[wintermute]

I did not try. I couldn't reinstall Win 98 on T42 and I did not dig deeper there because of the Omnibook arrival. If Omnibok doesn't help, I will revisit (invest into a 512MB stick for T42 to reduce the RAM (requires opening the case) and reinstall Win 98 from scratch -- both of those would take more money and time so I hope the Omnibook solution works and I keep T42 as my XP only machine).

[Kyodai]

Well yeah i hope everything will just work fine with the OB800.

[wintermute]

Sadly it did not work. At least not immediatelly.

OB sees and can read and write the SRAM card and can see Sharp's files and their content (i tried with a small txt file). It also sees the label. Sharp sees the files written on OB but cannot read them -- it says bad sector. If I ignore the error I get garbage. I tried formatting on both machines and running chkdsk on OB. Nothing helped. But it is better than T42 which could not even see anything.

OB arrived late yesterday and I was out. This was all late night when I just tried quickly with the Win 98 drivers and ttfs. Will play with it more today. I plan to completetly rebuild the OB800 to put the ssd drive in anyway and in the process will downgrade to Win 95 (this machine was designed for Win 95 and I have all original restore disks -- maybe even this doesn't work because the previous owner hacked Win 98 on it). Will keep the original hdd with Win 98 and can swap back anytime if needed.

I am also suspecting maybe the card is not fully compatible or something. It's a Poqet PC card, Kyodai do you happen to have that card and does it work for you and under which drivers/config?

[azureal]

Hi Guys,

I was pleased and surprised to see such a flurry of activity relating to the PC-3000!

Like wintermute, I am working on getting my PC-3000 set up for use. For what purpose, to enjoy some vintage computing of course!

I found two reasonably priced SRAM cards on eBay, one 1MB for $10 + 5 shipping and another 2MB for $40 and free shipping.

I also found the 2325 batteries dead in both and I was able to replace them at a local Batteries+ store.

After installing with the new batteries, both cards were able to be formatted and were recognized.

I am now up to the task of getting programs onto the cards so I can fdisk and format my 32MB CF card which is in a PCMCIA adapter.

I hope to be successful, if I am this little thing will have better hardware than my first Tandy 1000!


I want to try a few games as well as a few other things. I doubt I'll replace any current laptop with it, but it sure is cool.

I want to find a copy of Borland Turbo C/C++ from the early 1990s to compile executable code for the unit.

[wintermute]

I am pulling my hear out. OB with Win95 expresses the same behavior as with Win98. Even worse, after I installed the dos drivers, my OB crashed hard and was not able to recover (win95 boot forever with garbage colors). I am now reinstalling win 95 on it again.

I am curious if you will be successful, azureal, I think I might be doing something fundamentally wrong or that my sram card is faulty. If you succeed, can you put the steps here and also the info about your cards please?

My steps: install fresh os (win95/98), insert the card (os detects it and installs automatically sram drivers but the cards are not usable, just visible as empty removable drives), reboot, install manually ttfs, reboot. At this point it should all work but then the fun begins. I explanied weird behavior above. I tried with 2 computers (Thinkpad T42 and Omnibook 800ct) and two operating systems (win 98 and win 95). I also add dos drivers after this but doesn't help (and it killed OB).

[Kyodai]

OK, TTFS should NOT be used on Win95 - it is intended for Win98 ONLY.

I can't think of much stuff you can do wrong - normally either you have the drivers installed and can acceess the card, or the card won't appear at all.

I do have one or two of these POQET branded SRAM cards, at least I am sure i have a 512KB one. I don't recall them being special, but i have so many SRAM cards, i probably never even used it.

I didn't have much time this weekend, so the batteries are still sealed. If i have a calm moment this week i might play a bit with my PC-3000 and the POQET card.

BTW - if Win 95/98 don't boot then start them in safe mode. There are some key combos you can press during startup that allow you to influence the boot sequence of Win95/98.

F5 - Safe mode
Shift + F5 - Safe mode, command line
CTRL + F5 - Safe mode, booting to DOS in REAL mode, not laoding ANY drivers at all (obviously safest)
Shift + F8 - manual boot mode - you will have to confirm every single driver from config.sys/autoexec.bat if you wanna load it
F8 - nice text menu allowing to pick one of the options above.

It's easy for windows to boot so fast that it will "miss" the key you press, so the easiest way is to hammer F8 as fast as you can after the BIOS screen.

[wintermute]

Yeah, I know about the F8 and nothing worked. Even step by step loading of drivers froze OB (and it changed the black to purple color on the screen) once it went with "dos=high,umb" line. Then i commented all lines in config.sys and the same thing once the windows screen appears. I seriously thought my RAM card went bad or something. This happened though after i installed BOTH ttfs (which I was not supposed to do on Win 95) and the dos driver. So, my bad there.

2nd time I installed Win 95 on OB I did not install any ttfs. I just plugged in the sram and it got detected as SRAM. Then I edited the config.sys as described above and rebooted. This seems to be the most stable config. The card works great in OB alone (format, write, read, volume) but it's not readable by Sharp once Win 95 touches it (unrecognizable or sometimes recognizable but bad sector and sometimes recognizable but "nothing" on it). And the same card works great in Sharp alone (format, read, write, volume) but OB Win 95 sees garbage on it as soon as Sharp writes something to it.

This installation procedure is explained on many places on the internet and the only conclusion is that Poqet card is somehow has some incompatibility. I would really like to know your experience with it. I am now thinking about buying a 2nd card but they are expensive and would really like to know if the Poqet one works for you.