First post, by SBB
- Rank
- Newbie
I just finished building my first DOS machine!
Specs are as follows:
Pentium 200Mhz MMX
Biostar M5SAA Socket 7 motherboard
Coolermaster Socket 370 cooler
64MB Samsung SDRAM
RIVA TNT PCI 16MB video card
Sound Blaster Vibra16 (CT2900) sound card
10GB Western Digital IDE hard drive
Hitachi-LG IDE DVD-ROM Drive
GOTEK USB Floppy emulator
Generic 350W PSU
and of course MS-DOS 6.22!
I decided to go with a late Socket 7 board as it means that I can use a modern case, PSU, and have a PS2 mouse and keyboard which are easier to get hold of. The coolermaster CPU cooler I purchased was extremely loud at stock speed (6000rpm!) but I quietened this down by using a 7v fan resistor cable.
The build was fairly straightforward apart from the motherboard is very strange with hard disks. Originally I tried a 40GB hard disk with a 32GB capacity limit jumper set, but the system would not boot up. I tried without the capacity jumper and the system booted, but MSDOS was detecting it as a 504MB hard disk! I then found a modded BIOS (https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-Biostar-M5SAA-128GB) but it did not seem to help at all, still 504MB disk in DOS. I swapped to a 10GB hard disk I found in an old machine and this detects as 8GB ... but for DOS 6.22 this is fine.
I had a problem getting the creative "DIAGNOSE.EXE" utility running on the sound card but this was down to an old version of the software (Problem with MPU-401 on SB Vibra (CT2900)).
This machine runs late DOS game great! I ran PCPlayerBench in VGA mode and got a score of 49.8FPS which is right where it should be for this hardware. I have the ability to disable the caches in the BIOS to slow the system down for speed sensitive games.