Emax

well it's finally been accomplished! my emax is now floppy and hdd free.

funny story -- if you've been following my journey, i've been trying
to figure out how to make/run an SE upgrade disk on my emax, since i
don't have a PC that can make emax formatted disks. well, it turns out
my emax was already upgraded to SE, but the hdd only had OS 1.1 loaded.  

after failing (a lot) with making an SE disk, i figured, what the
hell, i'll see what happens if i copy the Plus OS to my SD card and
try booting from it. so, using EMXP and the pcmcia card slot on an old
Dell laptop i had, i replaced the OS 1.1 that was copied to the SD
card with the Plus OS.  Lo and behold, it boots!  that meant my emax
was SE upgraded all along!!  (it also meant i wasted a good two weeks
with my silly little experiments).

after a bit more tinkering, i found out that the pcd-15b has active
termination built in, so i didn't need the two-device scsi cable with
an added terminator at the end.  scsi id 0 is Slot A, and scsi id 1 is
Slot B (as expected).

i used the "jumper on pin 26" trick to fool the emax into thinking
there was a floppy connected.

so, since i don't have a floppy now, i rely on that old Dell laptop's
pcmcia slot and EMXP to add banks on my SD or CF cards.  works like a
charm.

formatting new cards is easy -- i just use the "copy hd" function to
copy from one scsi id to another.  the whole thing overall is very
quick, and SILENT. :)

pictures of the card reader installed are linked below:

http://launch.ph.groups.yahoo.com/group/emax/photos/view/c009?b=6

http://launch.ph.groups.yahoo.com/group/emax/photos/view/c009?b=7

now all i need is something to fill in the empty space above the card
reader...hmm...