Hi All, new member, 1st post...

A few years ago I lost nearly everything I had to a house fire. Sadly, all of my old and original electronics also fell victim. One item of which was my first PC that helped launch my technical career some 25 odd years ago. That first PC was an IBM PS/1 that I bought for my birthday from Circuit City in 1994. Actually, now that I think about it...as of this post it was 27 years ago to the date. A lot of great memories learning DOS, Win 3.1, modem upgrade, IRQ's, memory, etc. It was a great way to help me learn my new IT job as well.

FFW to 2021...as I quickly approach my 53rd b-day I got the itch to try and secure a replacement. Definitely not an easy task. If memory serves my original unit was a model 2155, DX2 50MHz loaded with the bells and whistles. What I found was a model 2133-23C, 486SX2, 50MHz system on ebay so I scooped it up. Upon receipt all went well except the darn access panel to the floppy disk had one hinge broken. The seller did a really poor job with the packaging. In fact, my worst fear was the matching monitor I also acquired from a different vendor. But much to my surprise the monitor arrived in superb shape and had very little discoloring.

After a thorough cleaning I removed the HDD to preserve it's original contents and installed a WD Caviar 850mb HDD I also purchased, which is what I was using back in the late 90's. Keeping true to the DOS/Win 3.1 configuration I got both installed using an old PS/1 disk image that I had taken of my original. I also got some help from the available images here on Vogons.

The video quality does lack a bit so I went ahead and just sourced a pricey S3 Diamond Stealth VRAM - #86C911. I thought this would be as easy as installing the ISA card into the riser card but I guess my old knowledge has fleeted. I cannot get any video to load on the new card with the old PS/1 monitor. I noticed that the onboard female video port had a couple of pins blocked which matches the PS/1 monitor cable. I thought I was on to something today so I attempted to connect a newer Dell LCD monitor directly to the S3 card instead but no change. Even tried connecting the LCD to the PS/1 directly but the video cable will not connect because of the reduced pinout I mentioned earlier. I think the first problem though is that I am unable to make any changes to the BIOS which defaults to the PS/1 display port.

I believe I have the old drivers ready (taken from here) but I am not having any luck getting the new card recognized. I did find this post which might suggest I brick the BIOS but I'm hoping there's an easier way? Re: BIOS for Diamond Stealth VRAM (S3 P86C911) needed

So I'm seeking some much needed guidance from my new friends here on VOGONS on how I might get the BIOS to recognize the new S3 card. From there I'm hoping the rest will be easy by simply loading the drivers for Windows.

Comments and recommendations are welcomed. Thanks in advance!

Tman