So, my "brand-new" Pentium 150-S has arrived! 😀

First, some other photos (I'm really sorry for the poor quality but, being at my parents, I had very little time before leaving).

...and now please I beg for your help! 😊

1. I'd like to identify precisely the hardware... could you help me?

- Motherboard: ???
- CPU: Pentium S 150 (...and what does it mean "S"?)
- RAM: 64 Mb (type?)
- Sound card: ESS 1868f
- Video card: Matrox Mystique MGA MYST 4I 4mb PCI? (not sure)
- HDD 4Gb
- 2 Floppy readers
- 1 CD-Rom LG Electronics CRD-8322B 32X

2. I tried to install FreeDOS 1.1 last night (booted from CD-ROM) but after deleting all partitions and re-created from scratch one with FDISK utility, installation inexplicably stops with a "Driver not loaded" error! 🙁
After a few attempts, as a temporary solution I retrieved the three backup floppies of MS-DOS 6.22 (kept in a drawer for about 22 years!) and installed without probs the good old OS!

But I'd really like to upgrade to FreeDOS, so any advice would be greatly appreciated (nothing found about this error on the net).

3. Tested few games and they all work as I remembered, excluding Golden Axe (some stuttering at scrolling) and Crystal Caves which only shows a series of colorful vertical lines (controls and audio by speaker is OK, I could even quit the game blind). Since it's a title to which I am very fond, maybe there's a way to fix it? 😀

4. What should I do to configure the sound card? (I think I need a step-by- step guide... I do not remember how to do it).

Thank you very much for your support, any other advice/comment/historical background is greatly appreciated!

Hey! Nice looking AT case there =)
You could try this:

• Get the FreeDOS 1.0 bootable floppy and boot from it
• Partition the HD with FDISK, set the first primary partition as active and reboot
• Run "FDISK /MBR" for good measure
• Then format the partition with "FORMAT C: /S" (assuming the boot CD sees the first primary partition of your HDD as C:)
• Install FreeDOS 1.1 on a Virtual Machine
• Get all the files from the virtual HDD after the installation and burn them to a CD
• From the bootable floppy, copy all those files to your HDD, replacing the few system files that should already be there

Scandy wrote:

I'd like to identify precisely the hardware... could you help me? […]
Show full quote

I'd like to identify precisely the hardware... could you help me?

- Motherboard: ???
- CPU: Pentium S 150 (...and what does it mean "S"?)
- RAM: 64 Mb (type?)
- Sound card: ESS 1868f
- Video card: Matrox Mystique MGA MYST 4I 4mb PCI? (not sure)
- HDD 4Gb
- 2 Floppy readers
- 1 CD-Rom LG Electronics CRD-8322B 32X

Motherboard:
According to here http://www.kumanov.com/Hardware/award-numbers.html your "2A59GS2IC-00" motherboard is a Soyo SY 5VA
Quick google and found the manual here: http://www.motherboards.org/files/manuals/107/5VA22.pdf

RAM:
Will need some more info. Googleing the Actual RAM chip will give you a bit of an idea

Sound Card
You have timed this quite well as this card has only been "discovered" not so long ago
ESS AudioDrive (ES1868) - a surprisingly good ISA sound card

Video Card:
Quite a nice card
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_Mystique

HDD:
Will need the model number from the top but an old 4GB IDE drive is going to be slow. What I like to do is use the HDD for Dos so you still hear it booting up (I was surprised how unnatural a dos PC sounds without a HDD) and use fast reliable CF cards for my games partition.

FDD:
Floppy drives are nothing special as long as they can read disks. If it was me I would keep 1 and replace a:\ with a gotek FDD emulator.

CD-ROM
32x is not period correct if that bothers you. Personally as long as I have a working drive in my computers doesn't really bother me what it is.

All in all think you have done quite well!

Thank you very much for your answer!

alexanrs wrote:

You could try this...

Hi alexanrs, so do you think it's a partitioning problem? Since I was able to install MS-DOS 6.22, I suppose it's a CD-related problem. I think FreeDOS 1.1 is using the system CD driver for boot, but for some reason doesn't like it during install. Maybe there is a way to load directly a FreeDOS CD driver for installation?

chinny22 wrote:

Motherboard:
According to here http://www.kumanov.com/Hardware/award-numbers.html your "2A59GS2IC-00" motherboard is a Soyo SY 5VA
Quick google and found the manual here: http://www.motherboards.org/files/manuals/107/5VA22.pdf

Hi chinny22, thank you very much! Even the manual! 😁
But it says that there is a PS/2 connector on board (for both keyboard and mouse) while I have only AT and Serial ports... maybe it is an older model of the same range?
(this evening I will post a picture of the rear)

chinny22 wrote:

Video Card:
Quite a nice card
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_Mystique

Great! But maybe I'll have some problems with EGA mode?
(spotted this exact strange behaviour on Crystal Caves: https://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showthread.php?t=2083)

Thank you so much for your support and interest. 😀

It would be good to know exactly where the boot process fails. I would begin looking at UMBPCI or the optical disk driver / caching driver as the problem. From what I recall, those are the two drivers which are most hardware dependent.

gdjacobs wrote:

It would be good to know exactly where the boot process fails. I would begin looking at UMBPCI or the optical disk driver / caching driver as the problem. From what I recall, those are the two drivers which are most hardware dependent.

The boot process from FreeDOS 1.1 CD goes well: I can enter in the menu options, use FDISK (from the boot menu) etc. But when I press "1" to install FD on HDD, after few screens (scrolling is too quick to read) I hear a beep and on monitor "Driver not loaded" appears, and then a symbol like a crux, and I can only hard-reset.
The same partition I created with FDISK from FreeDOS 1.1 boot menu was OK for MS-DOS installed from floppy, so I suspect is a CD-ROM-related problem...

Makes sense. It could be successfully loading the El Torito image while being unable to read data off the disk via the disk driver.

Scandy wrote:

Hi alexanrs, so do you think it's a partitioning problem? Since I was able to install MS-DOS 6.22, I suppose it's a CD-related problem. I think FreeDOS 1.1 is using the system CD driver for boot, but for some reason doesn't like it during install. Maybe there is a way to load directly a FreeDOS CD driver for installation?

I never said that. That procedure I suggested is meant to bypass booting from the CD to install FreeDOS. You could also try another optical drive just in case.

Scandy wrote:

Recently I decided to "pass" the DOSBox experience building a retro-PC to:

- play smoothly [strike]Wolfenstein 3D[/strike], DOOM, Heretic, Hexen, [strike]Dark Forces[/strike] and Quake 1 in software mode

Technically, if you wanted to play those games smoothly, the best way is to use sourceports instead of DOSBox 😉

I guess Wolf3D might have a good sourceport, but I've never looked. I know Dark Forces had a port in the works, but it looks to be abandoned.

Quake, you might want to find SciTech Display Doctor, or WinQuake, and also configure it for more memory. You might have trouble playing some of the newest maps though, and a lot of newer mods require a modern GL engine.

Scandy wrote:

The boot process from FreeDOS 1.1 CD goes well: I can enter in the menu options, use FDISK (from the boot menu) etc. But when I press "1" to install FD on HDD, after few screens (scrolling is too quick to read) I hear a beep and on monitor "Driver not loaded" appears, and then a symbol like a crux, and I can only hard-reset.

Personally, I would just install Win9x and live with DOS 7.1, but I've never had a reason to use FreeDOS.

The ESS card, I read somewhere you can just use setblaster in autoexec.bat, but I've never tried it. Would be useful for saving extra RAM, though.

I don't know where my old link for AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS settings went, but these two are good:

http://madsenworld.dk/con_auto/index-uk.htm
http://www.deinmeister.de/dosconf_e.htm

And yeah, turbo button is for slowing down the CPU, you'll have to experiment with it to see exactly what it does.
Also, CTRL+ALT+NUMPLUS/MINUS should toggle turbo mode, and SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+NUMPLUS/MINUS might toggle cache memory? It does on my computer.

i'm pretty certain the ESS card has to be initialized using a software utility.

Last night I was able to take a picture of FreeDOS installation error (enterning and exiting from FDISK):

...it seems that El-Torito doesn't like my CD-ROM drive at all. 😵

I found a working Toshiba external USB FDD in my desk drawer, I'll use it to download on a floppy (with my modern PC) a DOS driver for CRD-8322B and enable it in AUTOEXEC.BAT.
I hope FreeDOS will use "my" driver instead! At least I'll should be able to access the FreeDOS CD-ROM in MS-DOS, and run the utility to create a bootable floppy.

Any link for a good generic DOS CD-ROM driver?
Can't find an official one for CRD-8322B on the net.

As always, thank you for all your support.

P.S. later I will focus on the sound card.

chinny22 wrote:

Motherboard:
According to here http://www.kumanov.com/Hardware/award-numbers.html your "2A59GS2IC-00" motherboard is a Soyo SY 5VA
Quick google and found the manual here: http://www.motherboards.org/files/manuals/107/5VA22.pdf

Cool, that was the first mainboard I bought new, used it with an AMD K5. Worked fine, the only issue was it didn't take a 6x86MX I tried to upgrade to. (The CPU could run at 133MHz, but not at the 200MHz it was supposed to. I assume this was an issue with the voltage regulators since it ran at 133MHz so the BIOS was fine, and the board supports split-voltage. (Of course it's possible that this depends on the revision. The linked manual mentions the Cyrix M2 only in the "Dual Voltage CPU Setting" section.)
Later I gave the board to my father, at some point one of the chipset chips burned (torch mark on the sticker) when he tried to attach a printer. The board is now behind glass in a frame on the wall.

Since it uses a 430VX chipset, don't upgrade it beyond the 64MB of RAM already installed. The chipset can only cache 64MB so the machine will run slower with more RAM.

But did you have a PS/2 connector?

Scandy wrote:

Hi chinny22, thank you very much! Even the manual! :D But it says that there is a PS/2 connector on board (for both keyboard and […]
Show full quote

Hi chinny22, thank you very much! Even the manual! 😁
But it says that there is a PS/2 connector on board (for both keyboard and mouse) while I have only AT and Serial ports... maybe it is an older model of the same range?
(this evening I will post a picture of the rear)

chinny22 wrote:

Video Card:
Quite a nice card
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_Mystique

Great! But maybe I'll have some problems with EGA mode?
(spotted this exact strange behaviour on Crystal Caves: https://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showthread.php?t=2083)

Thank you so much for your support and interest. 😀

Taking a pic from the back of your AT case won't answer that question. I've seen many AT boards which actually had a PS/2 connector onboard (usually right below the larger AT-style keyboard connector) while their cases actually didn't have any corresponding opening for it, so the metal backside of the case will obscure the connector (that is, if the connector itself is soldered directly to the board...I didn't read the manual that was linked a couple replies ago).
Some motherboards will have a connector (just a couple rows of pins) which needed a cable plugged onto it and the other side of the cable being on one of those backside-mounting-brackets (the L-shaped ones which attach to the back of any PC case) but iiuc there were multiple ways to wire them.

Nice, it was indeed a Matrox! Knowing how to guess what's inside a closed PC case is very handy 😁

And I tend to agree with just trying a regular Windows install first. If possible (and if you have the parts at hand) I'd first replace the CDROM drive with a known working one. IDE optical drives are still very very easy to find, there's tons out there!

And one word of advise...make sure you get some bandages and anti-bacterial stuff before working inside an AT case, chances are good you will look like you just had a fight with a cat afterwards 🤣!

Scandy wrote:

3. Tested few games and they all work as I remembered, excluding Golden Axe (some stuttering at scrolling) and Crystal Caves which only shows a series of colorful vertical lines (controls and audio by speaker is OK, I could even quit the game blind). Since it's a title to which I am very fond, maybe there's a way to fix it? 😀

Regarding the scrolling stuttering in Golden Axe, that is most likely caused by an incompatibility with the Matrox card.

Goodmorning everyone!
Finally I was able to install LG CD-ROM Drivers on MS-DOS 6.22, but for some reason I still get the installation error on FreeDOS 1.1.
Well, since I can still access D:\> without problems, I'll keep MS-DOS 6.22 (I really like the idea, 'cause it is the exact OS I used in the early '90s).

Testing some good old sharewares of the era (that I still keep jealously) I got the following error with Monster Bash:

DOS is yet in high memory, maybe shuld I run EMM386 before launching Monster Bash?
Here there are my CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, any advice is sincerely welcome:

About the scrolling stuttering: found also in Double Dragon 3 (during the intro). There is a way to fix it or should I change video card?
Or maybe it is possible to install a second video card, switching each time the VGA cable?

Thanks

MGA Cards have excellent Image-Quality but poor compatibility. Stuttering, some Resolutions/Colordepth do not work properly.
I recommend changing to a more compatible card.

Scandy wrote:

So, my "brand-new" Pentium 150-S has arrived! :happy: […]
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So, my "brand-new" Pentium 150-S has arrived! 😀

Congrats. Wow, that's a white case. Really beautifull to look at.

Scandy wrote:

Well, I'll receive my new Pentium 150 at the end of this week! 😊
Since I've configured a DOS system a lot of time ago (and I was a kid), I remember practically NOTHING about CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, so I need your help, as a newbie. 😅

You'll need to get quite good quite quickly 😀

Ultimately you will have a boot menu allowing you to choose different configurations depending on whether you want to run Windows, use EMS, XMS or maximise conventional memory. I believe Phil has some samples on his website.

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/

@Scandy: If you're using DOS 6.22, try running MEMMAKER. It will load EMM386 which is important to get UMBs, otherwise all the drivers are loaded into conventional memory which is probably the issue you're having. Besides, EMM386 is needed to get EMS memory, and Monster Bash won't play sound effects unless you have EMS!

You can't run two ISA VGA cards in the same system as they both use the same I/O ports and memory addresses.