There were two control versions used on the VMC800. One was a CIB (control in a box) and the other was just a normal motherboard bolted to the electrical cabinet wall. I will assume you have the second one I mentioned. Most Zip drives are IDE devices. The bridgeport had two style mother boards used with the non CIB machines. One had a pile of ISA (black) expansion slots, the other had both ISA and PCI (tan) expansion slots. The first variety had a I/O board plugged into an ISA slot. You need to get a IDE cable that can attach to 2 IDE devices and configure the Zip to a slave using junpers on the Zip drive itself. The Hard drive may need to be configured as a master with a slave. If you have the mother board with the PCI slots, then usually this type have 2 on board IDE connectors. Now you can attach the Zip to the second IDE connector with a ribbon cable or still attach it to the first with the double type and still configuring it to a slave drive.
If you have the CIB variety control, it has a half size industrial mother board. Odds are it has a Disk on a Chip. This is uaually a 8 meg device. It may not have enough room for some 3D programs. I would get a laptop hard drive and attach it to the IDE port and disable the Disk on a chip. also you can use the double device cable but there is not enough room in the CIB for a Zip drive. You may need a custom cable built that is lomger and can get to a Zip drive mounted somewhere.
The Super drive will fit in the place of floppy but is an IDE device. Very hard to find DOS drivers for it though.
Consider a parallel port ZIP drive. The parallel port is on the side of the machine and you can place it on top of the electrical cabinet. Very easy and neat. With a CIB machine, I would still use a hard drive or a Disk on a Module and a parallel port Zip drive. Again neat and easy.
George W.  |