Pentium II 233 MHz
64 MB of RAM
Two 1 GB hard drives
Sound Blaster 16
Diamond Stealth 64
8x CD-ROM, 3.5" floppy
MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11
All housed in an awesome silver-aluminum case.
This thing's more than proven itself in my book, having shown it can run The 11th Hour at a consistently fast speed in 16-bit color, Pinball Illusions in SVGA 640x480, and Mechwarrior 2 in high-res with full detail.
Refurbishment to-do list:
The CD-ROM drive functions quite well, but the tray's faceplate is missing. I'll want to glue a new one on, as the old one apparently snapped off.
Conventional memory issues ALL OVER THE PLACE.
All things considered, though, I am impressed with it so far, and for $30 I think I got a swell deal out of it, even if it is a fixer-upper. (Say, do USB keyboards and mice work in DOS 6.22, or do I need to run a TSR program/alternative version of DOS to do that?)
Last edited by wildweasel on 2009-04-25, 17:36. Edited 1 time in total.
Hmm - despite having turned on USB Legacy Device mode in my system's BIOS, the mouse remains undetected - I'm assuming I'll need some special kind of mouse driver for it, but a quick Google search tells me that I'm going to be putting up with some conventional memory issues if I use those (apparently moreso than a standard Microsoft mouse driver). One thing I haven't checked, though, is if Cutemouse supports USB - I doubt it, but worth a try I suppose...
If you're using some usb->PS2 adapter your mouse has to support that else it won't do anything.
It's the adapter that came with the trackball in question - shouldn't pose too big a problem. The only issue is modifying it to fit into this rather idiotic PS/2 port, or else finding some way to purge it of its plastic stopper.
Not long ago there was an article in the german computer magazine C't about how to remove stuck plastic bits from PS/2 ports. 😉
Their solution: Take a piece of sturdy wire, heat it with a soldering iron and shove it into the piece of plastic stuck in the port (melting the plastic). Wait for the wire to cool off, then take it out. With a bit of luck the "wedge" comes out with the wire.
Wow, that actually sounds like it might work, but I don't trust these shaky hands of mine with anything hotter than a bowl of soup, so I'll probably be asking my friend to help with that later on. =P
Seems like the sound issues I mentioned above are more than I thought - while sound works fine in most cases (I can run Impulse Tracker in SB16-MMX mode pretty well), I still haven't figured out what's with Pinball Illusions, and sometimes sound will just cut out completely. I've actually got the sound card piping through my main machine's microphone port (don't have a spare set of speakers for it), and it sounds pretty good (when it works).
Conventional memory is also an issue, but I've yet to go through the autoexec/config and weed out the useless crap. Do I absolutely need CTCM running to use my SB16?
Well, I've now had success in getting Redbook audio working, just had to dig through Dad's stash of old parts for the right kind of cable...and dig through Google results to find a manual to figure out where the CD Audio input is on the sound card. That's another To-Do List item down!
Having pretty nasty issues with freeing up conventional memory on this thing. Most games seem to run okay, but stuff like Pinball Fantasies, Dreamweb and others need way more than I've got. Does anybody have any tips on freeing up some extra mem for them?
For Pinball Fantasies Deluxe, I'm running with the "For Custom Memory Managers" config, which disables EMM386 (otherwise it crashes). Under that config, I get about 540 KB, and only slightly more with Mouse support disabled, but still not quite enough to play the game. The game needs both CD-ROM and sound support.
For Dreamweb, it's even worse because I need to use the full boot (CD-ROM, SB, EMM386, mouse support) which only affords me about 533 KB. Disabling CD-ROM support does net me an additional 60-some KB but I obviously can't run the game without the disc.
Get Cutemouse, SHSUCDX (MSCDEX replacement) and the ATAPI CDROM driver I have attached below. Added together equals a huge savings in conventional memory.
Personally, I haven't used UMBPCI.SYS.
You should be able to run most games without SETVER.
With EMM386.EXE, you can almost always use I=B000-B7FF for another block of upper memory. Never had much luck with HIGHSCAN.
In my experience, for the best compatibility, you really want to stick with the MS utilities and mouse driver. But for many games, the above replacements work and are much smaller in RAM footprint.
That worked a charm, swaaye! Thanks for the advice - pulling 630 KB conventional now, which is amazing and nothing will ever complain about memory again. Well, except for one little thing...
from the looks of it, your autoexec will also process the %CONFIG% sections below the selected one. for example, CDSBEMM was chosen at config.sys, when it gets to autoexec.bat, all the other sections will be processed sequentially because there is no jump command to isolate only CDSBEMM.
I just figured out the "goto common" bit an hour ago (while trying to figure out why I kept getting "MSCDEX already loaded" messages), but thanks for the note on goto %CONFIG%, I wouldn't have figured that out myself.
