Have been finally giving FreeDOS a serious try on the 486. Seems to have some SERIOUS speed improvement over MS-DOS 6.22, Dillo ran like crap on that setup, it runs amazing on my DX4 under FreeDOS. Also the first time I used Links (Lynx?) and had some REALLY good success surfing in Lynx, seems HTTPS is fully implemented as I even managed to access a bunch of HTTPS sites with it.

Was a bit of a tricky installation though. Somehow the bootloader for the install with the Legacy CD or Floppy boot both caused the 486 to fail, and even once or twice corrupted the firmware on my SB AWE64 (or caused it to stop addressing at least). Found the trick was when booting off CD/Floppy I hit F5 to bypass some kind of Kernel drive detection, and then install - but I had to do so from a freshly formatted partition and using the CD ortherwise for some reason, Autoexec.bat and Config.sys don't get copied. Also had to learn to install the other packages post-mortem and figure out that I had to use the packet driver from my original Floppies to setup networking.

Currently I'm copying my legacy DOS stuff to the HDD, then it's back in the caddy. I have one more RH17 caddy, maybe it's time to buy a IDE/CF adapter or some DOMs to experiment with, esp since I want to play around with some other O/S including OpenBSD and Linux on this machine.

Mister Xiado wrote:

Thanks again. Tried a few tools, they all choked on PSP's executable. Upon further investigation, even if I was able to gut it, it would be like disassembling a jet engine. I wouldn't know what to do to fix the problem. The time required to achieve proficiency exceeds the value of the results.

Hi Mister Xiado, I am sitting on the answer you want, but as a newly registered user I cannot send any PMs. 😵

My retro activity today was getting Wolfenstein 3D to work with ECWolf. I struggled at first because I didn't realise there was more than one revision of 1.4, and only the final patched version works. All is now working, but I am still pretty bad at the game.

astonsmith wrote:

Hi Mister Xiado, I am sitting on the answer you want, but as a newly registered user I cannot send any PMs. 😵

My retro activity today was getting Wolfenstein 3D to work with ECWolf. I struggled at first because I didn't realise there was more than one revision of 1.4, and only the final patched version works. All is now working, but I am still pretty bad at the game.

Eh, you can send me an email. It's just my username (sans the space) at Gmail. yeah, I'd be a lot better at Wolfenstein myself, if I could more easily set A and D to left and right strafing, and disable vertical mouse movement, but then even if I'm doing well, I tend to get disinterested in playing before even the fourth level these days.

More icons... Set 11.

liqmat wrote:

Would anyone like me to upload the images of these Wang APC disks? I acquired these through a Craigslist listing from a very nice gentleman. There are 25 Wang 5¼" 360K diskettes for the Wang APC. All of them are in mint condition. He also included two cleaning disks. One for an 8" floppy disk drive and one for a 5¼" floppy disk drive. It looks like they are all the system and diag software plus two versions of Wang's word processor software.

Wang Disks.jpg

I am done imaging disks and scanning media. Wang APC software & system disks are now available over @ minuszerodegrees:

http://minuszerodegrees.net/manuals.htm#Wang

Hmmm, sorting out an old Pentium 200 mhz CPU.

What is strange is that on this particular OEM machine, I put in that ISA creative sound blaster 16 - CT2860, that I ragged on about before for sounding absolutely terrible. In this machine, it sounds more or less fine. I guess a lot of this card's problems are due to noise on the ISA bus, and this computer must have a nice clean 5V fed into the ISA slots.

Still not a great example of the SB16, but at least not completely useless.

Was messing around installing/testing Half Life and Deus Ex and noticed there was a booklet for upcoming Eidos releases in the Deus Ex box. I used to love flicking through these, most of the games were familiar but there were two that I didn't recognise and stood out. The first was Abomination: The Nemesis Project and the second was Revenant.

Searching online both appear to be somewhat of a, shall we say, mixed bag? Abomination looks really interesting though, I'm going to have to give it a bash.

I was trying to get rolling on making some productivity software for Windows 3, mainly stuff for electronic engineering (resistance, capacitance, and inductance calculators and the like) buuut my 486's HDD is getting worse, leading to the random inability to read or write new files, so that's halted. All of my other small drives are similarly screwed. If the motivation to create comes back, I may set up a virtual system and work within it. If that proves to be too much of a bother, perhaps I'll do it all in Win98.

@Mister Xiado

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https … %2F271003280321

These things are practically magic.

That magic turns into a curse if you use Windows with one, as the swap file constantly being written to will kill the write cycles on the card as sure as microwaving it, albeit not as quickly.

thats why you keep a backup. ^.^

Mister Xiado wrote:

That magic turns into a curse if you use Windows with one, as the swap file constantly being written to will kill the write cycles on the card as sure as microwaving it, albeit not as quickly.

It takes many years.. I'm going on 5 years now with a SanDisk Extreme w/ Win98SE -- no problems yet. If you're that worried, use an industrial grade CF card that's made for high wear rates. I have some industrial grade CF cards at work in machines that are a decade old with no problems.

I personally use a 320gb sata drive on an ide converter. 8gb partition and a massive one after. It holds CD images and imaged backups of the 8gb partition. The whole thing is backed up to my Nas that I can drop into a vm if I want to test something real quick.

The principle is the same.

Tested a dead GA-486AM/S with a dignostics card.
The board halts at video init - 0d0d - video error/can't initialize screen.

Changing the video card does nothing, so I have to assume it's done for.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Also, that is one cool system you got there. Is it running Windows XP, 7, or Linux?

2000, XP, and 7

Huh. I did a quadruple-boot system in 2010. I did 2000, XP, Vista (yikes), and 7 on a 1TB HDD.

xjas wrote:

A 5V DX2/66 overdrive CPU which I didn't even know I had & have no idea where I got. I popped it into my formerly-CPU-less Opti Local Bus board, which it should be perfect for. Will be nice to have that one up & running; I don't have a mid-grade 486 in my setup yet.

CameraZOOM-20181128145247071.jpg

That isn't an Opti Local Bus board, that is a HiNT Caesar "Mini"-EISA board (note the sticker on the BIOS chip). It was notorious for not supporting all the bus mastering features of the EISA bus.

canthearu wrote:

Hmmm, sorting out an old Pentium 200 mhz CPU.

What is strange is that on this particular OEM machine, I put in that ISA creative sound blaster 16 - CT2860, that I ragged on about before for sounding absolutely terrible. In this machine, it sounds more or less fine. I guess a lot of this card's problems are due to noise on the ISA bus, and this computer must have a nice clean 5V fed into the ISA slots.

Still not a great example of the SB16, but at least not completely useless.

Told you it was a decent card; my CT2890 is one of the most silent OPL3 SB16s in my collection.

I'm putting together a dream synthesis rig with as much Yamaha XG delight I can gather.
I am aiming for stuffing the Vectra with an SW60XG ISA card besides an SW1000XG PCI with PLG100-DX plugin board. Next to them sits the DS2416 DSP mixer card which also features a AX44 breakout box in the second drivebay for the additional inputs and outputs. The onboard soundcard's additional midi interface could be used in conjunction with the one from the SW1000XG, which would let me have two lanes of MIDI access, to be able to drive both synthesizer cards at once. The breakout box would make hooking up the computer to the existing audio gear a breeze.

This past week has been a week of archiving a large amount of vintage software for preservation purposes. Updated my year long Cardinal SNAPplus archival project with more found drivers, manuals and software. Imaged twenty hard to find Wang APC software & systems disks. Categorized, combined and labelled two large ALR server file and document archives. Finally, I am in the middle of building an archive for the long forgotten Tempra line of software from a long ago defunct company called Mathematica, Inc. Found two more sealed products from them and have been scanning and imaging for the last few days. One of the Tempra products I did not know existed until I saw it on Ebay. They were mainly producers of DOS multimedia content creation software before they went belly up. Found a Windows version of their software and this must have been released just moments before they went under because I never knew about it until now and I used their products extensively back in the early 90s.

One of the many challenges of archiving old 5¼" floppy disks is possible disk warping like the disk you see below. Luckily the magnetic disk itself was not warped and only the casing was. What I had to do to get the data off was slowly and carefully move the disk in the disk drive as WinImage read the disk. When WinImage encountered an error I would have to press down on a different part of the disk casing to flatten it as best as possible and hit "retry" in WinImage. Eventually, with a lot of patience, I got a complete image off the disk. What some of us do for historical preservation. So worth it though.

It's kind of hard to see in this light, but you can see the disk casing is warped. Mr. floppy drive was not happy about this.