Impressive stuff!

I'm amazed that:

1. Intel still has drivers for that RAM card on their site

2. That Award CMOS setup screen is definitely using a VGA textmode on your EGA card and monitor (I could recognize that 9x16-character ROM font with my eyes shut) 😎
Then again, many non-IBM EGA cards were starting to include very partial support for limited VGA features, following the PS/2's launch... and I'm pretty sure that the 256 KB Paradise models belonged in that class.

3. How much nostalgia I get from seeing those games like Keen and Duke with a nice BIG overscan/border, and those crude thick 200-pixel scanlines that only the CGA and EGA could pull off... none of that blocky VGA scanline doubling 😁

Never had a 286 system, but we had EGA on our XT-clone for a couple of years so that period of PC history strikes a chord with me. I only wish I had the knowledge... or lived some place where it's easier to obtain old hardware like this.

2. That Award CMOS setup screen is definitely using a VGA textmode on your EGA card and monitor (I could recognize that 9x16-character ROM font with my eyes shut) Cool
Then again, many non-IBM EGA cards were starting to include very partial support for limited VGA features, following the PS/2's launch... and I'm pretty sure that the 256 KB Paradise models belonged in that class.

Are you sure its 9x16 and not 8x14?
The BIOS setup only goes up to EGA (there is no VGA option).

3. How much nostalgia I get from seeing those games like Keen and Duke with a nice BIG overscan/border, and those crude thick 200-pixel scanlines that only the CGA and EGA could pull off... none of that blocky VGA scanline doubling

Totally agree... the games just seem that much better. I used to think EGA LOOM was pretty ugly but on an actual EGA monitor you can see they put a lot of effort into the artwork, working within the limitations of EGA.

I only wish I had the knowledge... or lived some place where it's easier to obtain old hardware like this.

Stuff isn't easy to find here either... this took about 8 months to get done, on and off as time allowed... it was pure luck that I scored the case and EGA monitor/adapter. I try not to think about how much money I spent on this... probably close to a couple of hundred dollars when all is said and done. A few items I had to get shipped from USA so shipping accounted for a lot of that. It's worth it though 😀

I have to join the chorus of other forum posters in congratulating you on a great job on a post. Originally I was concerned that the content was directed at a rather basic level considering the likely readers who frequent this site. Many of the most knowledgeable people in the world concerning vintage computing and system building post to these forums, and the depth of this article shows that you can join that infamous company. However, the amount of praise informs me that even redundant information in a good post should not be held against it.

Some comments :

A 9x16 font requires a monitor and a graphics adapter than can display 400 lines. I cannot talk about his monitor, but his graphics card certainly does not support 400 lines. To support 400 lines, it would need a clock crystal with the appropriate horizontal scan frequency. The 16.257MHz clock crystal on his EGA card is used for an MDA display.

A legacy SCSI interface tends to have more liberal hard drive size limits than IDE, since the CHS limits tend to be higher than IDE. This depends on your boot rom.

Your taste in games is mostly impeccable. Except for Civilization, all of them look best on an EGA monitor.

Build-your-own computer kits were no longer major sellers by the early 80s. IBM PC system building was in its infancy during this period, especially for the consumer.

Vritually any game that takes advantage of more than 640K, whether as EMS or XMS memory, is not likely to run very fast except on the fastest 286es.

I learned something new, that SimCity apparently supports a math co-processor. I thought that did not happen for games until Falcon 3.0.

Serial ports and MDA/CGA/EGA/HGC/TGA all use a 9-pin DE-9 port, but serial ports use a male port and video ports, along with external floppy, scsi, parallel and gameports use a female port.

You have what would later be called OEM motherboards, built and packaged to be sold individually. With each generation of CPU, more and more generic motherboards entered the marketplace until the Pentiums. While many 8088 OEM motherboards were near clones of the IBM PC and XT motherboards and used discrete components, the 286 machines and above generally used VLSI chipsets to replicate the functionality of leading manufacturer machines.

Motherboards until the 486s generally did not tend to have anything integrated on the motherboard, and with the 6-8 slots usually available, the user could configure his system exactly as he wanted it. Some slots would have to be given up to multifunction cards for serial and parallel ports. 286 board did not always come with real time clocks and generally were not particularly upgradeable. 386 systems were where you really saw motherboards supporting a range of CPU speeds.

An MFM hard drive has a sticker on it designating the bad sectors. You have to enter this information when performing a low level format. That drive is at least 2,560 bytes smaller than the advertised formatted capacity due to the bad sectors. When IDE drives became standard, low level formatting was not necessary and this information no longer needed to be posted on the drive casing. It does not mean that manufacturing defects were eliminated, they are now just hidden from the user. Kind of the dead/stuck pixel issues of today.

IBM's ATs could handle an interleave of 2 with the stock hard drive controller, so that your 10MHz machine can do away with interleaving altogether is not surprising. A program like Spinrite will tell you what the optimal interleave is for your hard drive, controller and system. \

Is the floppy drive a 360K or 1.2M model?

The Adlib's OPL2 chip is not designed to do digital sampling, but with some trickery it is quite possible. The 1987 version of the Adlib uses the large jack, the 1990 board revision uses the mini-jack.

The Sound Blaster was released at the end of 1989. Your sealed box contains a Sound Blaster 1.5 without the C/MS chips, as its front label says "speech" instead of "stereo".

@Great Hierophant: You certainly seem to know your stuff! 😉
I know a fairly good deal about computers, but theres plenty of "white spots" left, and pre-486's/pre-VGA is one of them. My knowledge on ISA sound cards is also very limited. But if I have a question about them, I know I can ask here since theres quite a few people who know so much about them!
One of the reasons I like Vogons is because theres always someone who knows about something. We don't have someone who knows it all, but the combined knowledge of the posters here on Vogons is what gives it it's strength 😁

Great Hierophant: thanks for the comments. I did post this on a couple of other forums and I wanted to write it in a way that it was accesible to people who were not familiar with hardware of this vintage. Perhaps on this site there will be several members who find a lot of it redundant; but it may also serve as a catalyst for discussion that they can participate in.

This was a learning experience for me as most of my knowledge is from the 386/486 era, and I wanted to share that experience.

The 5.25" drove is 1.2MB; mainly because I think pretty much all my 5.25" games are on 1.2MB disks.

DonutKing wrote:

2. That Award CMOS setup screen is definitely using a VGA textmode on your EGA card and monitor (I could recognize that 9x16-character ROM font with my eyes shut) Cool
Then again, many non-IBM EGA cards were starting to include very partial support for limited VGA features, following the PS/2's launch... and I'm pretty sure that the 256 KB Paradise models belonged in that class.

Are you sure its 9x16 and not 8x14?
The BIOS setup only goes up to EGA (there is no VGA option).

I'm pretty sure - but only in that specific screen (bios.jpg), all the other text mode shots do in fact look like 8x14.

Uppercase M, T, X, Y etc. are the telltale characters - note especially the "MM/DD/YY"... the two M's are the wider versions but are actually separated from each other (same with the Y's), only happens if you have a 9th pixel column. Same for the height (the middle strokes of H, B, E, etc are slightly higher than the middle of the character).

See, I'm weirdly pendantic about visual details which is why I spot this stuff. 😁 Still, GreatHiero knows his hardware far better than I do... I did find some info about certain Paradise EGA cards doing even 480 lines, but no exact models or specs.

I'm pretty sure a lot of BIOSes never had a separate option for VGA - at some point they just reworded the "EGA" option to "EGA/VGA"... you can still see this in some modern BIOS setups actaully.

You are obviously knowledgeable enough not to have tried to write to the disks for Loom, Simcity or DOS in the high density drive, as they are all 360K disks.

Since the BIOS has always used text modes, except for AMI's derided "WinBIOS", they are going to use the card's default mode. If you have an MDA card, its 9x14, a CGA card, TGA, PCjr, or EGA connected to a 200-line monitor, its 8x8, and if an EGA card is connected to a 350-line monitor, which the OP is using, then its 8x14. MCGA does 8x16 and VGA and everything else since then 9x16.

Although I am not convinced, it may be indeed that the card may default to 9 pixel columns when connected to a color 350-line monitor to give the text the less cramped look of MDA. Whether that would require an extra clock crystal on the card and a special monitor I cannot say.

286 Machines are not often featured on these boards. Not to detract from this fine system presented here, but soon I will show you a 286 gaming that will knock your socks off!

Great Hierophant wrote:

You are obviously knowledgeable enough not to have tried to write to the disks for Loom, Simcity or DOS in the high density drive, as they are all 360K disks.

I understand that some of DonutKing's 5.25" game disks are 360K, but he is using a 1.2MB 5.25" FDD to install and run them. If these disks need to be written to for any reason, can you "flick some switch(es)" on the 1.2MB FDD in order to change the FDD's operation from 1.2MB mode to 360K mode?

As far as I know I don't believe that's possible. The problem is that the higher density drive writes data to a physically narrower track on the disk- so the heads in the higher density drive are designed to be narrower than in the low density drive.

This changing of track widths in the middle of a disk is what causes the problem.

As long as you write disks in EITHER a low or high density drive, they should be readable in both. If you write to a disk using BOTH a high and low density drive, you may corrupt the disk.
Since the heads are a physically different size its not something that can be switched on or off- as far as I know.

All my original game floppies are too valuable to be writing to anyway. I should really get some small labels and cover the write protect notch.

Thanks for the explanation. Unfortunately, I don't fully understand this situation. Say you have a 360K game disk. That disk, for whatever reason, requires writing to occur, either during installation or running the game, or just whenever. Because you can't get this write operation to work successfully using a 1.2MB FDD, can you not successfully install and/or run the 360K disk based game?

At some point, do the 360K disk based games Loom, Simcity and also the DOS version 3.3 disks require a write operation to occur? If they do require a write operation to occur, how do you overcome this? Thanks.

Well these games are all installed to the hard drive 😀
So I only use the disks once for installation, and I don't need to write to them. DOS also doesn't require a write to the disk during installation.

If I were to write to them using my 1.2MB drive, they will become unreadable in a 360kb drive.

This article might explain it better than me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#5.C2 … nch_floppy_disk

Also I should clarify what I said above. Obviously a 1.2MB disk is not readable in a 360KB drive. If you write a 360KB disk in a 1.2MB drive it will become unreadable in the 360KB drive. However you can use the 1.2MB drive to read it, and it will still be readable in the 360KB drive.

This microsoft article talks about formatting a 1.2MB disk to 360KB so the low density drive may be able to read it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/79538

Thanks. Just to confirm please: writing to a 360K disk using a 1.2MB FDD will not cause any problems to occur to the 360K disk if you continue to use this disk (for reading and/or writing) using a 1.2MB FDD only.

Well for the short term at least, I believe that's correct. I'm not sure about long term effects....

I'm not willing to test it on any of my original disks and I only have blank 1.2MB floppies, no 360KB blanks.
I do have an 8088 machine with a 360kb drive in it but its not going at the moment (blown PSU)

You should definitely confirm what I'm saying here with someone else before writing to any important disks!!! I accept no responsibility for any corrupt or damaged disks 😀

The mailman dropped off a couple of goodies the other day....

First up is a Creative Music System (aka Game Blaster), with box, manuals and disks:

As mentioned previously, the CMS/Game Blaster was Creative's predecessor to the Sound Blaster. CMS and Game Blaster were identical hardware-wise, the only differences being the packaging. CMS was marketed more for musicians while Game Blaster was obviously targeted at gamers. The CMS had 12 voices of square-wave polyphony. Kinda like 12 PC speakers going at once, in stereo. The card itself has two RCA jacks for connection to a stereo, plus the regular 3.5mm stereo jacks. You'll notice that it also has the flat mounted volume wheel rather than the long knob that protrudes out the back of the Adlib.
On the back of the box is a label that says 'ONLY $195'.

I copied the disks contents into ZIP files, here they are if anyone wants to check them out:
http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1 … menustate=45,38

The card only uses an I/O address, default 220 (this would later be the default for the Sound Blaster, with the addition of IRQ and DMA channels).
The only driver you need for the card is CMSDRV.COM, just run it and it will detect the card.

The manual says to insert the Song Disk 1 and run DEMO.BAT - which plays a corny CGA demo with equally corny music:

There is also a Karaoke program

and an organ program. This is actually really hard to play compared to a real piano/keyboard, you have to hold Shift to play the black keys.

For games though, I actually like the sound of the CMS over the Adlib. The CMS has a real 'retro' (or '8-bit' for lack of a better term) feel to it. Of course, games needed to be specifically written for the CMS- of which there were comparatively few, while the vast majority of games from the early-mid 90's supported Adlib/Sound Blaster.

This site has a few CMS music recordings:
http://sound.dosforum.de/

In particular, check out the Monkey Island song, and compare the Adlib and CMS versions. I much prefer the CMS version.
If you had a Sound Blaster Pro or 16, the music you would have listened to would be Adlib (often also referred to as Yamaha OPL or FM synthesis). (Later versions such as the AWE32/64 used General MIDI wavetable synthesis for music, and for games that only supported Adlib, remapped the Adlib sounds to the wavetable. The result was usually pretty bad, much worse than a real Adlib or sound blaster with the OPL chips.

The first Sound Blaster was released in 1989, and supported mono digital audio playback, in addition to Adlib and CMS- AND it included a joystick port, which you'd usually have to install as a seperate card. So basically it was 3 sound devices in the one card.

Of course, if I want to keep this build in a 1988 timeframe, that excludes a Sound Blaster.

Unless you get a pre-release prototype model dated at 19 august 1988:

Notice how all the chips are socketed rather than soldered, and there are wires soldered into various places on the board. Many of the solder joins on the back look to be done by hand.
'Killer Card' is presumably a pre-release name for Sound Blaster.

The card still works 😀 didn't install any drivers, just set the BLASTER environment variable and off it went, the couple of games I tried all picked it up without trouble.
It operates and sounds just as you'd expect a release version of the Sound Blaster to do. Once its inside the case you wouldn't know there's anything special about it- apart from being the sound device that kick-started the 'multimedia' revolution by bringing digital sound to the PC.

This 286 is totally awesome man, can it even get more pimped up at this point? I guess you would need a card with full cga compatibility and a sound blaster 1.0 .

Im pretty jealous of the LAPC-I btw.

Funny thing is i went to my dad's place again this weekend and found a 286 motherboard in his closet, he didnt even remember it was there ( Dad really has a lot of stuff 🤣 ) . So im gonna have my own 286 build too eventually 😀.

@ donutking.

I think you need to fix your pictures.. on my pc they dont work anymore..

Thanks, glad you like it 😀
I've actually already got a SB 1.0 - well, more like 0.9... I bought the prototype SB and Game Blaster from Anonymous Freak: Double score: CMS and prototype SB1.0

(Before anyone jumps down my throat about the 'no trading' rule, he put it up for sale at vintage-computer.com)
I just haven't got it installed at the moment, but I did try it and it definitely works.

What sort of 286 motherboard did you find?

Robin4 wrote:

@ donutking.

I think you need to fix your pictures.. on my pc they dont work anymore..

They're hosted on dropbox.com, can you get there in your browser?

I can see the pictures fine here 😀

DonutKing wrote:

What sort of 286 motherboard did you find?

I dont want to hijack your thread with a flood of details/pictures about my board 😉
Lets just say it has a AMD 286 12/s , no cache and no ram installed. No simm slots, only 4 emty SIPP spaces and a large square of empty sockets. No clear model number but most chips are labeled VLSI, Dad may still have some parts for it that are hidden and i still need to find a nice AT case for it so a few challenges ahead! Ill make my own thread for it in due time, like i did for my 486 😀

Robin4 wrote:

@ donutking.

I think you need to fix your pictures.. on my pc they dont work anymore..

donutking wrote:

They're hosted on dropbox.com, can you get there in your browser?

No they are all dead.. Maybe find a other host for it thats relible..

works perfectly for me on multiple devices/networks... and I posted this on a couple of other forums and nobody else seems to have trouble...
Seems like a problem on your end to be honest, what does is say when you try to ping www.dropbox.com? If it says it can't be found I suggest trying a different DNS server.

You can always use this website to determine if there's a problem locally or with the remote site.
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/