VOGONS


Reply 41 of 50, by BinaryDemon

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rasz_pl wrote:

This is pre APIC (1992 82489DX) so needs very custom OS support to work. It probably wont even run non vendor specific NT install.

Wow, I never even heard of a system like this before. Very cool. Can it run standard DOS/Win9x (single cpu only, of course)?

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 42 of 50, by compgeke

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NT 4 should run on it, I have a copy of the HAL and the SCSI driver for it here. I actually threw in a hard drive from the other NCR with NT4 and it starts to load before crashing down with unaccessible boot device. Not surprised. It was mainly designed for AT&T Sys V Unix though.

Reply 45 of 50, by foey

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Wow - please keep this thread updated! Amazing machines.

Cyrix Instead Build, 6x86 166+ | 32mb SD | 4mb S3 Virge DX | Creative AWE64 | Win95
ATC-S PIII Tualatin Win9x Build :- ATC-S PIII Coppermine Win9x Build Log [WIP] **Photo Heavy**

Reply 48 of 50, by kithylin

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rmay635703 wrote:

Some benchmarks of the time rated this system faster than a p90 on just a single dx50 processor on many of the benchmarks, memory speed was very high

judging by how the start up screens shown on the previous page says "Interleave 0" and "Bank 0" and "Bank 1". If this system does "Interleaving" on the ram it may be a very early implementation of NUMA with dual memory banks, one for each CPU in the NCR System 3450. I don't know if it actually does this, but if it did, then that would be the reason for unusually high memory performance. I'm mostly speculating here but it could be how it works.

Reply 49 of 50, by compgeke

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I don't think I ever updated on the 3450. I ended up buying one of the 6V lead acid batteries for the CMOS, but that's not helped much. Unfortunately I get stuck at CPU card EPROM checksum failed at every cold boot. Gotta clear the CMOS device table and CMOS settings and it'll work until I restart.

I have had DOS running on it as well as the beginnings of the NT installer. Unfortunately the NT4 installer just crashes out, probably due to being the multiprocessor version and not having the HAL loaded. There's a HAL for NT4 but I don't recall whether or not I tried it. Some Day(tm) I might go back to fighting with it more, I gave up when I couldn't get floppy working a few days ago.

I'll start a new thread soon(tm) on the 3434. I've been having somewhat better luck with that in terms of actually working, but driver support and OS support is iffy at best. If anyone knows where I can find a Clarity video card, that'd be absolutely amazing and solve half my problems.