OS/2 Warp 4 should work on that PC just fine. 😀

As for DOS compatability, from experience, it's honestly a bit "meh" ... not very good for DOS games really.

I ran Warp Connect 3.0 on a DX2-80 VL-bus system and it ran fine.

Thank you guys, I ordered a copy of boxed OS/2 Warp with BonusPak. Unfortunately, the user's manual seems to be missing, but the price was good. I'll find out in 2 months when the package arrives.

OS/2 is one of my interests, though I never had the chance to use it. For now, I'll try it with the virtual machines, and then maybe will move on to install it in my PII later. The native applications from Creative Labs for the SB cards and other fancy 1st party applications from other hardware vendors might be lacking though. But still, basic drivers are available, and it's worth to build a system specifically for the OS/2 Warp 4.0, after getting (and based on) all the available drivers for it.

Quite frankly you will probably find it interesting for fifteen minutes and then never use it again. I suppose you could use it for Windows 3.x games, but are there really any of those that you particularly want to run?

RacoonRider wrote:

The speeds at which I am going to run the system/CPU are as follows:

I doubt you'll use even a quarter of those speeds for more than fifteen minutes either. I'm just trying to think realistically here.

Jorpho wrote:

Quite frankly you will probably find it interesting for fifteen minutes and then never use it again. I suppose you could use it for Windows 3.x games, but are there really any of those that you particularly want to run?

RacoonRider wrote:

The speeds at which I am going to run the system/CPU are as follows:

I doubt you'll use even a quarter of those speeds for more than fifteen minutes either. I'm just trying to think realistically here.

That's probably true. OS/2 apps aren't easy to find and many of them are business oriented and cost a lot when you find one. If all you'll be running are Windows 3.1 stuff, then just install Windows 3.1 instead.

RacoonRider wrote:

I'm in the process of building a very high-end 486 PCI: 5x86, 512Kb cache, 64 MB RAM, Matrox Mystique or S3 videocard. I can rea […]
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I'm in the process of building a very high-end 486 PCI: 5x86, 512Kb cache, 64 MB RAM, Matrox Mystique or S3 videocard. I can read wiki and google myself, so I'm looking for opinions on running OS/2.

How would OS/2 3.0 work here?
How is it compared to Windows for workgroups 3.1?
How good is it for games, how compatible is it with hardware of the time period?
Will OS/2 have trouble running at low clock? Does it have anything like "MS-DOS mode" in Windows 98?
Will it be able to share files with Windows 98, XP, 7 over network?

The speeds at which I am going to run the system/CPU are as follows:

3x12.5=37.5MHz
4x12.5=50MHz
3x16.5=50MHz
4x16.5=66MHz
3x25=75MHz
4x25=100MHz
3x33=100MHz
4x33=133MHz
3x40=120MHz
4x40=160MHz
3x50=150MHz

Thank you in advance.

Back in the day I ran Tie Fighter, Doom and Mortal Kombat in Warp 3. For apps I was using the productivity suite in the Bonus Pack. I also ran 3d Studio, Fractal Painter, Povray, and other graphics apps.

Dos stability is excellent, win 3.1 is good as well. Native apps will be very difficult to find. I never had any problem with mainstream hardware but I had a no-name CD-ROM that was a pain to get working. I don't remember how I resolved that.

File transfer you could probably use ftp. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get anything else going.

Jorpho wrote:

Quite frankly you will probably find it interesting for fifteen minutes and then never use it again. I suppose you could use it for Windows 3.x games, but are there really any of those that you particularly want to run?

Let's face it, it's cool and I want it and it does not matter if I ever run it for longer than 15 minutes 😁 One of my weaknesses is alternative operating systems, I had a lot of fun with Ubuntu (yet I'm waiting for Steam OS to mature before I say "Good Bye" to Microsoft Windows) and I plan to play with it a lot. It's about building something great, trying something new.

All retro games are new to me - I got my first computer in P4 era. Well, except for Turok 2, Wild Metal Country, HOMM3 and Fallout - I played those a lot on my then-new PC. So I rather pick games for the build, not build for the games. If something specific does not work well... Well, I have a lot of extra hard drives for DOS 6.22 😀

Jorpho wrote:

RacoonRider wrote:

The speeds at which I am going to run the system/CPU are as follows:

I doubt you'll use even a quarter of those speeds for more than fifteen minutes either. I'm just trying to think realistically here.

First of all, I wanted to boast a little 😁 I actually have been given a new old stock device to control it from the front panel, so I guess I'll pick some different speeds from time to time.

Considering apps, I don't need much and I'm certainly not buying any business apps for it.

It's Russia, baby 😁 We no buy no stinking software 😁

Aaaah, Russia, all I can think of are the Russian beauties and Vodka. And Mig-29s. And the domes of St. Basil's Cathedral.

I must admit, the cold winters, vodkas and Russian beauties make an explosive cocktail! 🤣

It's just that seeing as how this site is dedicated to gaming, OS/2 is of little practical use in that regard. There were very few games ever released commercially that are OS/2 native. Once in a while you might see one of the handful of commercial OS/2 games on ebay and there's a PD/Shareware CD floating around out there somewhere that resurfaces on occasion, but apart from those few there's nothing. The only use I can see for OS/2 as far as games go is running Windows 3.x games because OS/2 is a more stable platform than Windows but even then Windows doesn't crash so much that it's a massive issue.

sliderider wrote:

It's just that seeing as how this site is dedicated to gaming, OS/2 is of little practical use in that regard. There were very few games ever released commercially that are OS/2 native. Once in a while you might see one of the handful of commercial OS/2 games on ebay and there's a PD/Shareware CD floating around out there somewhere that resurfaces on occasion, but apart from those few there's nothing. The only use I can see for OS/2 as far as games go is running Windows 3.x games because OS/2 is a more stable platform than Windows but even then Windows doesn't crash so much that it's a massive issue.

OS/2 native apps/games is not really the point. If you want better stability than DOS with the ability to do DOS multitasking, along with Win 3.1 multi-tasking, then OS/2 was a great solution back in its day, if you could afford the extra RAM to run it well. My personal experience with Windows 3.1 that things that hit the hardware really hard would just not run very well, or at all, in a DOS window/session in Win 3.1 whereas they ran with absolutely no problem in OS/2 Warp. This wasn't the case with everything but was the case with enough stuff that Win 3.1 was not as attractive a solution for me, back then.

OS/2 Warp 4.0 reminds me of NT4.0 - Stable NT architecture with optimized Win95 UI, but yet, too applications-and-stability-oriented that it has some compatibility issues with games/multimedia mostly due to driver issues. It's hence, not the choice of gamers/multimedia users. But it's still rock solid otherwise.

Got it!

$35 + $15 shipping

Wow!

If you're feeling adventurous, you might want to take a look at Odin. It was a Wine-like project to run Win32 applications on OS/2 Warp. I recall Quake 2 (& 3 iirc) running via it. Of course you're not going to be playing Quake 2+ on a 486. 😉

Wow! Thanks!

When Win95 first came out, I hated it and promptly returned it. Rather than suffer with DOS/Win3x any longer, I spent the money and bought a copy of Warp 4. I ran it up until the end of 1997 when I finally switched to Win95B. The only two native games I ever ran on it were Entrepreneur and the original Galactic Civilizations. I remember running plenty of DOS games with Warp 4, but I also remember having to play with some settings to get them running correctly. If you asked me today how I made it happen, I couldn't even tell you. It's just been too long. I have fond memories of running Warp 4 though.

Wasn't the Windows NT architecture heavily based on OS/2, to the point that versions up to Windows 2000 had backwards compatibility with certain OS/2 applications?

Well... I installed OS/2 yesterday and had some fun with it today. Later I discovered I accidentally deleted CD-ROM drivers that are located (guess where) on a CD-ROM, so I decided to remove CF card and install it clean on DOM. Bad idea. Fore some reason Matrox drivers refused to install due to floppy read error. The same damn floppy I installed them from the first time. So I abort, reboot - Bang! - 2 errors in config.sys prevent OS from starting. Reinstalled, tried again from a brand new floppy - same result. Will try installing from C: drive tomorrow.

btw, how do you access DOS partitions? I see only A:, B:, C: HPFS Partition in media, while there is also FAT Primary DOS partition on the disk.