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how do YOU define a "tweener?"

Casey

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Posted here for lack of a better place. Apologies if it's the wrong area.

...I've been wondering for a while how one defines a "tweener." A machine that can run both MS-DOS era software as well as Windows 10? A machine with more than one kind of floppy drive? A dual boot system?

How do you define tweener?
 
The whole point of a "tweener" is to move data *between* truly vintage (such as PC/XT/AT or older) systems and lobotomized modern systems.

You would have a rather hard time these days finding a system that can run Windows 10 well and having even the minimum to act as a "tweener". It would need at minimum a real FDC and support for 1.2mb/720k/360k drives.

And then any NT based OS (NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/10) has rather poor floppy support.

In my opinion, an ideal tweener would:

-Have any Pentium, K6, or Athlon era CPU
-Have a generic AT or ATX case
-Have BIOS support for *two* real, internal floppy drives.
-Have Ethernet Networking (easy to add)
-Have Windows 95 OSR2 or 98SE as the primary OS for easy DOS access (ME/2000/XP are more difficult)
-Have USB ports for flash drives.
-Have at least one ISA slot and plenty of additional slots (AGP/PCI)
-Ideally the FDC should support FM encoding, but that is rather uncommon and hard to tell just by looking.
-The motherboard should use a coin cell CMOS battery instead of a Dallas or Odin integrated clock/battery chip.

There was a previous thread about tweeners here: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?50935-PC-quot-Tweeners-quot
And a test of some of the last motherboards with FDCs here: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?39615-Recent-motherboard-FDC-and-quot-legacy-quot-tests

If you require a "modern" computer that interfaces directly with floppy disks, then you should look in to adding a Kryoflux or SuperCard pro.
 
A machine capable of running Windows XP on a single physical CPU core however does not use PCI Express.
Minimum floppy requirements are generic support for 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives.
 
The whole point of a "tweener" is to move data *between* truly vintage (such as PC/XT/AT or older) systems and lobotomized modern systems.

Agreed.

Another example would be the Apple Mac Performer 630 I have to transfer data from my main PC to a Mac plus.
 
I think to define a tweener you need to consider what exactly you are intending to transfer onto a modern computer. For most people it's probably floppy disks, so in that case you don't need much. If it's only 3.5" disks you can still pick up cheap USB floppy drives which makes building a tweener simple, or even unnecessary. But if you want to extend your capabilities further, into RLL/MFM hard drives, parallel port drives, tape drives connected to the floppy interface, old SCSI devices, hard cards, and so on, then that will dictate what type of tweener you want - probably as a result of what kind of drivers are available for the hardware, and what OS you have to run to use those drivers.

I think we're getting to the point where it's going to be difficult to have a single tweener that can handle everything, with some technologies requiring multiple steps to get to a modern machine. Although interestingly it's becoming possible to add newer hardware to older computers, so things can now go in the other direction - instead of finding a newer computer that can still interface to older hardware, you can find an older computer that readily supports the older hardware, and add a newer interface to it.

The main one for me is the IDE to SD-card interfaces you can get from China for a few dollars that allow SD cards to appear as hard drives on any machine that supports an IDE interface. I have a 286 booting off an SD card, with IDE support in ROM thanks to the XT-IDE project. With this machine I can use the SD card to directly transfer gigabytes of files between the 286 and a modern PC. Since the 286 natively supports RLL/MFM hard drives, that's my go-to machine if I need to read any data off those drives, or indeed anything that requires an ISA slot or a real parallel port and doesn't need 386+ protected mode.

I have other systems too, but they are all based around what I want to read. Early on I tried to have a single system that could do it all, but I found hardware for it was not common and often commanded high prices. I didn't like the idea of building an expensive tweener only to have it break and need another rare part to get up and running again, so I went with the multiple cheap systems option. This has the advantage of there being some overlap, so if one system is not cooperating you can easily try another system and usually at least one will get the job done.

So to answer the OP's question, I think a tweener is whatever you need it to be to read a format that can't be read on current-generation hardware.
 
Tweener: An excuse to keep a Pentium II/III around.

A good tweener should have the ability to read older floppies and connect directly to an older system through programs like Laplink while also having the performance to handle modern Ethernet, USB drives, and even writing optical drives. Mine never gets as much usage as a tweener as I planned but it still serves as a disk imager and late 90s game system.
 
These days I installed OS Win98 SE and win XP on my Dell XPS R400 - Pii-400/368mbram/80gb ide/16mb riva, Installed my favorite games of the ear on Win98 partition there - Red BaronII, Dark Forces II/JEdi Knight, Nox, Revenant, Midtown Madness, X-Wing Alliance - as I began to feel true nostalgia for late 1999s, early 2000s...

But also I use to work with floppy drives - both 3.5'' 1.44 and 5-25'' 1.2mb and 360k. Even to exchange data with my Kaypro 10.

And in Win XP there's a terminal program to exchange data with Kayro 10 by com null modem cable and also I load data by usb to win xp and then transfer with Norton 4.0 from win 98 by LPT null modem cable to my 8088 - P1 machines. So there's a lot of work for my pII ) And - mp3, photoshop, as well )
 
I'm guessing the XP program you're referring to is Hyperterminal, yes?

To which Nortons 4.0 do you refer? Commander? Utilities?

It occurred to me a while ago that telnet might prove useful in getting some of the vintage machines to talk to each other, given the paucity of networking software back then.
 
A tweener is any machine capable to move data from modern machines to media that can be used in classic machines.

I think my "tweener" is about as perfect as a tweener can get.

AMD K6-2 500. 256mb Ram, USB capable
1.44mb floppy
1.2mb floppy
USB Zip 100 drive
100mbps NIC
CD/RW Drive
Nvidia Geforce MX200

I have 3 hard drives installed. I use PLOP boot manager to select between True DOS 6.22, Windows 98, or Windows XP. It allows me to do everything from one box. If I need files from the internet, I'll boot up XP, and go online. It's a tad slow on a lot of sites, but gets the job done. I can then copy the files direct to floppy/zip, or if I need to do imaging, I'll copy them directly to the DOS hard drive and reboot to write the files.

It's also a fun little retro-gaming box for late DOS and 98-era titles.
 
To me, a Tweener is anything 80486 and up. I consider the 486 era in general the perfect midline between a vintage and a modern PC - here is why....

- A 486 is just about as at home running PC/XT/AT era apps with Turbo off or Moslo or other tools of that type, as it is running Windows 2000 Professional with various hacks to allow it to do modern things

- A 486 can take/bake Optical Media, modern Hard Disks (SATA to IDE adapters, DDOs), ZIP Drives, Floppies, Bernoulli drives, IDE Floppies, Superdisks....all depends on the 486. Even USB is possible via USB Floppy emulators or a 486 with a PCI Expansion bus on the motherboard. With hard disk caddies with large hard disks, the skies and the core of classic PC computing are availible for your choosing.

- 486's run between 16MHz (rare) to 160MHz (Overclocked AMD 5x86 133), they overlap the performance of the 386 DX-40 and the early Pentiums, giving them a very wide swath of compatibility

- With a powerful graphics card, or some software hacks, or if someone took up programming enough, some modern internet and web-based features would be possible on such hardware

- It's new enough to work with Windows 2000 Professional, which can and will play nicely over TCP/IP with Windows 10 both ways - though it also can be connected to over Windows 10 TCP/IP using Windows 9x, Windows for Workgroups, and even Microsoft LAN Manager for DOS, as well as other networking technologies availible through BSD, Unix, Linux, and so fourth.

- They are old enough to be manually configured for weird old software, but some are new enough

- More recent examples (SBCs aimed at Industrial Applications) offer the correct performance/power for retro-computing with some of the conveniences of some modern systems

My tweener setup is this

250 Watt XT PSU
SongCheer XT Clone Chassis
AMD 486 DX4-100 with WriteBack Cache
512K L2 Cache
64-128MB of RAM, Parity or Non
1.44 and 1.2MB FLoppies

The following four hard disk caddies....
- 15GB w/ DOS 6.22/WFWG 3.11
- 20GB w/ Windows 95 OSR2
- 40GB w/ Windows 98 SE
- 80GB, which I'm planning to test out a multiple O/S load on of some kind including some kind of Lihux Distribution

2MB S3 805 2MB Graphics VLB
SoundBlaster AWE 64 Platinum
VLB Super I/O Card w/ Dual IDE and
LinkSys PnP 10mbps ISA Ethernet

It actually lives on 24/7 365 right next to the modern system I'm typing this on running Windows 10, they "hold conversations" over the network on the regular.
 
If it can run a 5.25" floppy and easily transfer off newer media (network etc), then it's good.

Mine:

Pentium 166 MMX
Dual Booting DOS 6 and Win98 (sepearte IDE hard drives, with GAG bootloader)
Syquest 200C SCSI (reads 44, 88 and 200 carts)
Iomega ZIP100 SCSI
CD-RW
3.5"+ 5.25" HD drives
S3 + VooDoo 2
10/100 network card (Windows 10 PC can drop files on it no problemo)
1 USB port on the back :eek:

Mounted in a very large Gateway 2000 case that I pulled a nasty P3 board out of.
 
I'm guessing the XP program you're referring to is Hyperterminal, yes?

To which Nortons 4.0 do you refer? Commander? Utilities?

It occurred to me a while ago that telnet might prove useful in getting some of the vintage machines to talk to each other, given the paucity of networking software back then.

Yep ! It's the hyperterminal - as described here - http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2010-03-24-kaypro-software-acquisition.htm

And about Norton - for some reason, I realise now, that Norton Commander wasn't VERY popular in the West, but here all people who used to have a IBM PC compatible computer with DOS of any kind - all had a Norton Commander installed... Norton Commander was the symbol of IBM - compatible computer in the USSR and it's territory until Windows era came. )

And I can't imagine a MS-Dos machine without a Norton Commander 4.0 - I have it an all my vintage IBM compatibles from 8088 to PIII machines.)
 
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I don't have need for a tweener, my "modern" workstation (a 3.16 GHz Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM running a fully-modern Linux desktop) has a CD burner, SCSI card (with external port), IDE Zip and LS120 drive. It can seamlessly transfer files to my oldest machines: a 386DX/25 with a Zip drive, an MSX with a DD floppy, and even the C64 & Vic 20 if I plug a 1541 into its parallel port. :D

Aside from the 386 (and one 486-based Thinkpad), my other DOS machines can all read USB sticks.
 
My favorite computer is a k6-2+ 600Mhz which I have in regular use. It has PCI, ISA, AGP, IDE, and of course floppy. It has a PCI SATA card installed. It has a parallel port, 2 serial ports, USB ports. I've used AT, PS/2 and USb keyboards on it. USB mice and serial mice. You can copy IDE drives to SATA. I've run ISA and PCI sound cards on it. The floppy controller supports two drives, and both 5.25 and 3.5. It also runs a fairly modern Linux (Ubuntu 10). Runs DOS games fine, and ones that benefit from fast cpu like software rendering Descent, Quake, etc run very well, as well has real ISA sound. I've even run a ISA VGA card to see if it works. Oh yeah, it also supports both SIMMs and DIMMs. The only thing its really BAD at is Internet browsing. Running a modern browser in Linux works, but its abysmal performance, and you can forget about video. I can play mpeg2, but anything online now is h264, so forget it.
 
When I think tweener I think Pentium to Pentium II/III. Definitely needs to be able to run two floppy drives of all formats, which many P1-P3 boards can do. I think a PII era machine is a good choice. Specifically the ones that have energy saver settings in the BIOS that can throttle the CPU speed down based on percentage. This helps for slowing the speed of the CPU more effectively then a utility like MOSLO.

But yeah, ISA, PCI, FDC, IDE, Parallel, Serial, PS2, USB, etc. Excellent are ones with no onboard audio/video/network, rather just the basics leaving you the flexibility to choose what cards you want for those functions.
 
To me a tweener is a machine that exists between two technological gaps, able to access both. It's a very WIDE term. An example would be a machine that can access a USB flash drive AND 360k floppy drives. Or a machine that can access my LAN but also has an actual parallel port on it.

Though locally the term "middling" seems more popular than "tweener".

At least that's how I've always used the term. If I'm sitting there using it to do stuff, it's not "filling a gap" between things now, is it?
 
A very interesting thread. My "tweener" as you call it (as a non-native English speaker, I assume it comes from "between", right?) is my Panasonic CF-41 laptop that is Windows / DOS machine and has 3,5 inch floppy drive and CD-Rom. Unfortunately, no USB / SD card / other media.
 
as a non-native English speaker, I assume it comes from "between", right?
A bit more complicated than that from an etymology standpoint as we get into Olde Englisc "tween" and "twixt" which have mostly been dropped from the modern lexicon, but yes.

I always assumed the term "tweener" was used for the same reason it is in animation. A "tweener" is a low level animator who does "tweening" -- the process of creating sub-frames between keyframes created by more talented (or at least better paid) artists.

Normally in professional animation -- at least in the pre-computer days -- you would have "master artists" who would generally do images that were more like storyboards showing beginning and end poses. Your second tier "animators" would then do a low framerate animation (typically on onion paper) to flesh things out. Quite often these mid-tier animators had a better grasp of anatomy and movement which is why whilst the character design and 'feel' was left to the masters, the animators are who gave it life.

Even so, the animators would often only make one or two frame a second animations unless the scene were particularly complex. At the bottom rung are the line animators who would often be the first to transfer the onion skin drawings to cellulose as inked line art, and then the 'tweeners' would come in to draw in-between the frames the remaining lines. Quite often this bordered on slave labor considering the pay, lack of recognition, long hours, mass labor needed, and disposability of the workers -- hence why many animation projects outsource to countries where low wages and child labor laws are a bit lax. Even more true when one considers some of the nastier chemicals used in traditional animation, many of which aren't even legal in the "first world"

The first pass tweener would draw in between the keyframes, handing off their new frame and the one after it to another tweener, then drawing between the previous frame and the one they just made, repeating until the desired frame rate was met. A lot of anime traditionally 'gave up, close enough' at 16 or even 8 frames a second focusing more on the quality of each frame. Ralph Bakshi on the other hand obsessed about framerate to the point the quality of the art looked like cheap-ass nick-toons AND character deformation from a lack of sufficient keyframes set in.

It's also why vector animation formats -- like flash (which despite it's decline in the webspace, IS alive and strong in animation circles even if they render to movie format) -- have tweening built into them. You create the objects/outlines as vectors in keyframes, and let the computer do the tweening for you.

One of the few times I would applaud technology eliminating an entire class of job.
 
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