First post, by God Of Gaming
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Hello fellow vogoners,
To preface things, my family not being able to afford computers during my childhood, my first PC came when I was in high school and was already running windows XP at that point, so I ended up missing probably the most interesting era in PC gaming. In the last couple of years, I've been fiddling with win98se builds trying to fill in that gap, and got used to win9x's quirks and how to best deal with that OS and the hardware of its era, but now I'm trying to expand even further down into the DOS era and I find it quite confusing and foreign and could use some assistance.
I'm almost done with my first DOS build, here's a quick photo I took earlier:
The parts I'm going with:
Shuttle HOT-569A motherboard (430TX socket 7)
Pentium 150 (I also have P233 MMX but I think the P150 will be more suitable for now)
64MB PC100 single sdram stick
S3 Virge 325 PCI
Creative SB Pro 2 CT2600 (I also have some card with Yamaha YMF719 chip, probably Audician 32 or something similar, but sb pro 2 probably has better game compatibility)
Seagate 10gb HDD (pulled from og xbox, the smallest capacity HDD I currently have on hand)
CD burner and 3.5" floppy I had on hand (not in photo)
Antec SL300SP 300W PSU with strong 5v rail (recapped)
I configured the motherboard jumpers to hopefully make the P150 run at 100mhz, which from what I understand is the preferrable speed for a Pentium to run at for DOS purposes, so that disabling caches can make it approximate performance of a 486 and a 386. I made a 2gb FAT16 partition on the HDD trough a Linux liveboot using gparted, and added boot and lba flags, which should hopefully get around the HDD being too large for DOS, I've used the same trick to install win98se on a 320gb HDD by making a 128gb partition with gparted so hopefully this works.
Now, the problem is, this hardware is probably more suitable for win95 and I'll surely have much easier time installing and setting that up, but I want DOS 6.22 + win 3.11 on this to, well, learn how to work with those, and also since I suspect DOS 7.x that comes with win9x probably doesnt have 100% perfect DOS game compatibility, so I wanna be able to test that out for myself. But since I've never installed or used pure DOS in my life before, I'm not too sure how to do that, to begin with, today I found out the 4 floppy diskettes I currently have all have bad sectors, bummer, I'll need to look for a new floppy. Is there any way to install DOS 6.22 + Win 3.11 from a CD? Or even better, if possible, can I just liveboot Linux again and copy the files straight to the HDD? If that would work? And how do I go about it exactly? Or is floppy the only way to install them properly? And how do I set it up after that? Drivers and configs and stuff? I'm really lost with DOS...
I'm also quite lost with the SB Pro 2 CT2600, it has lots of jumpers on the cards to configure IRQs and DMAs and stuff, that I'm also quite unfamiliar with and have no idea how I'm supposed to set it up. I'll really appreciate some assistance in getting this PC to work, help me please 😀