A good friend of mine gave me a 486 laptop to play around with. I’ve been hunting these bad boys down to make myself a half decent DOS game machine.
I ended up with a CF-41 from Panasonic A.K.A. The ‘Toughbook’.
Nice little machine, from what I can tell in Windows 95 (Came pre-installed) it has:
- A 486 Processor ( probably an Intel 486DX50 )
- 12MB of ram (Upgrading later on! )
- 10″ 640×480 color screen
- Builtin CD Rom Drive
- 260MB Hard Disk (Going to attempt to CF )
- Chips & Technologies 65548 GPU (Seems to do 640x480x16 no problem, so I’m happy!)
- ESS Audio Drive 1688 (Sound Blaster Compatible!)
Of course, this laptop has issues. It’s battery is dying, CMOS battery needs replacement, Floppy drive needs replacement, Power Supply — you get what I’m saying. It needs a lot of love.
So, first things first! I want to get data in/ out of this thing. But sadly, since the floppy drive isn’t working, I might have to resort to the COM port (Seeing the CD Drivers aren’t installed).
For now, my to-do list:
- Get data in/out
- Fix CMOS battery
- Fix Big Battery
- Replace Floppy Drive / Attempt to fix it
- Upgrade Ram
- CF Hard drive replacement?
Wish me luck!
Where is part 2 please?
Sadly I don’t own it anymore.. sorry
i recently get one but it no signal to display, nighter vga output, you have any idea
Did you make sure it POSTs? Did you hear a beep of any kind?
I just started working on restoring a CF-41 MKII. I have finally got it booting, passing POST, floppy works now, but I just cannot seem to get a cd-rom drive to work. I have a couple of MK III part machines but the drive module is too different and will not physically fit into the MK II. I have 2 CD-ROM modules – both are toast. The main board recognizes they exist, the dos drivers will install, but the drive will absolutely not spin up and fails when trying to red a CD.
I am going to try to scrounge up another MK I or MK ii to see if the cd-rom module works.
If anyone has any REAL ideas on these CD-ROM module I am open to trying. I have completely cleaned the boards, the lens and the contacts an no difference.