First post, by Elia1995
- Rank
- Oldbie
Ok, I've been browsing these forums for years, before being really "active" myself only this Summer and I haven't seen a single discussion about OS/2.
I mean, it isn't a "huge" system and probably there isn't even a big games/software library for it, but it's still a retro system, no ?
I tried OS/2 on a real machine for the first time only yesterday and here's my whole first experience with this obscure system.
I installed it in my famous Celeron build, after getting all those issues with FreeDOS, I decided to format the hard disk and while I was looking for my MS-DOS 6.22 floppies, I had the brilliant idea to give my original OS/2 Warp 3 a try.
I made two floppies with the batch file the CD has in its root directory from Windows 7 (using an USB floppy drive on a craptastic Samsung laptop) and after adjusting a setting in the BIOS in the Celeron computer (otherwise the floppy didn't boot), it's an option under Advanced settings I think and it said "Boot OS/2 > 64 MB" or something similar, I began the installation.
The installation took approximately a good half hour, I think... I had the time to complete a bunch of puzzles in Pokémon Picross meanwhile I was waiting. 🤣
When it was done installing and it rebooted, it booted directly in the system (the boot up logo of OS/2 took around 1 whole minute each time !!!) the sound worked right away (guess the Creative Sound Blaster AWE32 CT3670 PnP is REALLY PnP 😁 ) but the AWE32... no way I could get it to work !!! I even tried to install the drivers from the CD I made of the drivers, but here came the biggest issue and main reason I decided to remove that system... I couldn't get the IDE CD-ROM drive to work !!!!! I mean... WTF !!! The system came in a CD, the installation, after the bootable floppy proceeded from the CD and now I can't even browse the CD-ROM drive ??? Driver issue for sure, but I couldn't find any driver online... oh well, guess I'll try that system again another time...
but while I was at it, I enjoyed the system itself, it was actually cool. There is a "prototype"-like taskbar with an option to browse the floppy (and probably CD drive aswell) drive and a shortcut to the trash bin (which the system calls "shredder") and a shutdown option which really just closes all the processes and then tells you can ctrl-alt-del to reboot or unplug the PC.
There is a Basic editor in the DOS programs folder and various shortcuts to use DOS: full screen mode, windowed mode and Win-mode which I THINK works with Windows 3.11 somehow.
Then I changed the desktop wallpaper and other settings, the settings menu is pretty cool, it looks like a book with the labels on the side, if I was a kid I'd probably enjoyed that system for its aesthetics.
Has anyone tried OS/2 ? My version is OS/2 Warp 3 and I hope I can get it to 100% work with the CD-ROM and AWE32 one day... it can run DOS games and programs just fine... it's DOS after all... PC-DOS, probably.
Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11
Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard