CompuServe Messages

I just got my DPS PAR (from Greg Pyros and company) last friday. The install went retty well, with only two significant problems: I got the 1 GB Micropolis drive and had some difficulty in mounting it. The drive is a 3.5" form factor and I didn't have a 5.25" mounting frame. My computer (a Gateway 486DX2-66 tower machine) has two 3.5" drive slots that are often used for things like floppy drives. The drive slots have (had<g>) little metal tabs to rest the drives on. The Micropolis drive is too tall for the slots and it ran into the tabs. After fighting with the machine for a while trying to remove the annoying little metal bracket things and fit the drive into the space, I broke the things off. The drive mounted but, since the bracket was designed for floppies, the holes were too far forward. I got two mounting screws into the drive – one on each side – and managed to tie the last pair of holes into the bracket with a washer. It mounted OK in the end. I put the board into the top slot in my machine (which just happens to be a VESA local bus slot) and loaded the software. The software couldn't find the board no matter what address I set. I finally moved the board into another slot and it worked fine. I checked the connector on the board and in the system and they were both OK. I guess that I just didn't get the board to seat the first time. The board locked up when I tried it, but I had the message about having to format the drive. Once I did, everything worked fine. Unfortunately, what I was missing was a way to hook it to my monitor. I needed either a 75 Ohm BNC – BNC cable or a BNC to RCA adapter for the cable that I did have. A quick trip to Radio Shack solved that, and the board works fine. I've animated to it, copied files to and from it's drive and it all seems fine. I haven't seen JPEG artifacts so far – just NTSC chroma crawl on the composite output. Chris