Actually the MMX233 is better because can probably be slowed down using setmul.

If your motherboard's BIOS support booting from CDROM you can install the CDU release of DOS 7.1 that way

I can't promise you "perfect" compatibility but I've run it for years with no problems

Well, if I wanted DOS 7.1 I could just install win98se and use that in DOS mode, but I would want to have DOS 6.22 on this... well, ideally, I'll see if I can dualboot DOS 6.22 on the 2gb partition with win9x on a secondary partition using the remainder of the HDD space, then I can do DOS 6 vs DOS 7 comparisons, but for now getting DOS 6 on this thing is my priority

DOS 6.22 + Win3.11 = 12 floppy disks, and then you'll have to add a bunch of things like network, TCP-IP stack, 32 bit disk driver, graphics driver, Sound Blaster drivers and so on. So you'll need quite a lot of floppies.

You can get a Gotek floppy emulator. Just load floppy images onto a USB drive and click a button to switch between floppies.

Nice machine. Good choice in sound card and video card. Thumbs up. And desktop case. Love it.

Personally I only run MS Dos 6.22 on my machines, up to and including my Pentium-166. And I am only running with 16 megabyte Ram, as it is more than plenty for MS Dos 6.22.

jheronimus wrote:

DOS 6.22 + Win3.11 = 12 floppy disks, and then you'll have to add a bunch of things like network, TCP-IP stack, 32 bit disk driver, graphics driver, Sound Blaster drivers and so on. So you'll need quite a lot of floppies.

You can get a Gotek floppy emulator. Just load floppy images onto a USB drive and click a button to switch between floppies.

Yup. Go for gotek, if you have no Disks and drives that are working. I am using floppy disks untill all my disks are dead, and then I will keep holding on to the drives them self, just in case I need to use them for some reason.

That goes for all my systems that uses 3.50 inch drives/disks.

Phil @ philscomputerlab.com has a lot of resources for installing DOS 6.22. Depending on the games you'd like to run, you could downclock your cpu as much or little as possible. With a few exceptions (mostly newer DOS games with SVGA modes), the slower you can get your Pentium (P75-P100), the better speed compatibility you will have across a broad range of DOS games. It is true that MMX cpus have many more options for slowing down with gerwin's SETMUL utility (which can get you some options in the 486 speed range in addition to 386), but to get the slowest speeds, you need a slower cpu to start with. I have a P200MMX which can run Doom as slow as 4.3 fps. But I recently played Wizardry 6, which still ran a little too fast at that speed, so I ended up swapping in a P120, then since it's multiplier unlocked, I manually clocked it to a P75. This let me disable all caches and get about 20% slower, with a Doom framerate of 3.3. I will probably keep the system as a P75 as most of the games I'm interested in right now won't take advantage of any speeds faster than that. If I change my mind, it's not that hard to swap the P200MMX back in.

kolderman wrote:

Actually the MMX233 is better because can probably be slowed down using setmul.

A p54 Pentium can as well, although a PMMX has additional options for being slowed down.

Win95 is more period correct but Win98 is also fine. Just dont install the IE Desktop Enhancement from IE4.
The dos included with Win9x is fine for gaming and Win9x makes Win3.11 pretty much redundant but get simply wanting to play around with what you missed.

Trick is to install dos first, and yes you can definitely copy all the Win3x disks to a folder on the HDD and install from here.
For this you'll need to format c:\ as FAT16
Once dos/3.11 is up and running install Win9x and it'll ask if you want to keep your existing setup. This will enable an option in the Win9x shutdown window to boot into previous version of dos.

Found another floppy with raid drivers in a dfi lanparty box, backed tem up and formatted it, and it had bad sectors too... what the hell is going on!? Guess there's no getting around it, I gotta find a sealed pack of new floppies for sale. So, theres no way to install DOS from a CD or even better straight up copy the files to the HDD somehow? Like, idk, install it on a VM, then copy the files to the HDD?

Which OS are you formatting with?
Which OS is it not working in?
What is the exact error message?

Is this the problem?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/1400 … gnized-by-windo
.

Im just using my win98se build which is my only other PC with a working floppy drive, and I see this

BTW found out DOS is supposed to be portable, I'll try to install it in a VM and then copy the files over to the DOS PC HDD and see if that works

Maybe not the floppy disks are bad but the drive. It may just need some good cleaning.

Progress report, bought a new sealed box of Dysan floppies, those format to 0 bytes in bad sectors, so problem definitely wasnt in the drive. Was able to install DOS 6.22 + WFW 3.11 and also Win95 dualboot, but as it turned out something's wrong with the PS2 mouse port on the mobo, couldn't get my mouse to work and I don't have a COM port mouse. So I ended up formatting everything and just throwing a win98se on it and a USB hub pci card so I can use an usb mouse. Had some trouble figuring out how to get the SB Pro 2 to work, but I think I did it, plays midi files and outputs sound now, even tho weirdly it doesnt show up in device manager, but oh well, if it plays sound its fine I guess. But I'd say this build is a fail, not just because I now have to use DOS 7.1 instead of 6.22, but more so because I was unable to add a voodoo card, its too long and the cpu fan gets in the way... which combined with the ps2 port not working, means I really need a better motherboard

p.s. as it turned out the S3 Virge is a Hercules Graphite Terminator 3D, or at least thats what everest detects it as... cool name for a 3d decellerator 😀

p.s.2. well, something's not right after all, under windows I can play canyon.mid and hear it, but installing tnfs se, says it doesnt detect a sound card and theres no sound in-game. Guess I didn't install the sb pro 2 correctly then, but how should I

God Of Gaming wrote on 2020-09-03, 13:20:

Progress report, bought a new sealed box of Dysan floppies, those format to 0 bytes in bad sectors, so problem definitely wasnt in the drive. Was able to install DOS 6.22 + WFW 3.11 and also Win95 dualboot, but as it turned out something's wrong with the PS2 mouse port on the mobo, couldn't get my mouse to work and I don't have a COM port mouse. So I ended up formatting everything and just throwing a win98se on it and a USB hub pci card so I can use an usb mouse. Had some trouble figuring out how to get the SB Pro 2 to work, but I think I did it, plays midi files and outputs sound now, even tho weirdly it doesnt show up in device manager, but oh well, if it plays sound its fine I guess. But I'd say this build is a fail, not just because I now have to use DOS 7.1 instead of 6.22, but more so because I was unable to add a voodoo card, its too long and the cpu fan gets in the way... which combined with the ps2 port not working, means I really need a better motherboard

p.s. as it turned out the S3 Virge is a Hercules Graphite Terminator 3D, or at least thats what everest detects it as... cool name for a 3d decellerator 😀

p.s.2. well, something's not right after all, under windows I can play canyon.mid and hear it, but installing tnfs se, says it doesnt detect a sound card and theres no sound in-game. Guess I didn't install the sb pro 2 correctly then, but how should I

Hi
Have you checked the pinout of your PS/2 mouse connector? You might have to rearrange the wires as they unfortunately weren't standard. Looks like someone already checked for this board here: Shuttle HOT-569A: Is this PS/2 pinout correct?. Have you been able to find a manual for your board?

Now that you have a working floppy drive, I don't understand why you can't use DOS 6.22 if that's what you would like.

I had a Shuttle HOT-591P back around 2000 which has the same issue as yours with the CPU cooler and long PCI cards. If I remember right, the advised solution was to get a low-profile, copper Socket 7 heatsink that doesn't need to be so tall as to block the cards. Looking on Amazon I saw one designed for rackmount servers that should work.

Do any sound cards show up in device manager even if not your SB Pro? Remember that card is old enough it isn't Plug and Play. Windows doesn't necessarily detect it automatically and bug you for a driver. Win9x can detect non-PnP ISA cards when you run "Add New Hardware," but the reason it takes so long (and can hang your machine) is that it probes for every supported card through brute force. If you run SET before launching your DOS game, is there a BLASTER= environment variable? Could you upload a picture of your sound card with enough resolution that everyone can see how it's configured.

And by the way, as to the question about learning DOS, I would recommend picking up a copy of the book Running MS-DOS 6.22 if you can find one.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-09-05, 01:57:

Hi
Have you checked the pinout of your PS/2 mouse connector? You might have to rearrange the wires as they unfortunately weren't standard. Looks like someone already checked for this board here: Shuttle HOT-569A: Is this PS/2 pinout correct?. Have you been able to find a manual for your board?

This is the bracket I bought, it has ps2 and two com ports, with what looks like all the correct headers for this mobo

I haven't even considered a chance that the pinout might be incorrect. Damn. It's possible I guess. Not sure I have the tools to check if the pinout is wrong tho...

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-09-05, 01:57:

Now that you have a working floppy drive, I don't understand why you can't use DOS 6.22 if that's what you would like.

well, not having a working mouse is a bit of an issue, plenty of DOS games need a mouse

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-09-05, 01:57:

Do any sound cards show up in device manager even if not your SB Pro? Remember that card is old enough it isn't Plug and Play. Windows doesn't necessarily detect it automatically and bug you for a driver. Win9x can detect non-PnP ISA cards when you run "Add New Hardware," but the reason it takes so long (and can hang your machine) is that it probes for every supported card through brute force. If you run SET before launching your DOS game, is there a BLASTER= environment variable? Could you upload a picture of your sound card with enough resolution that everyone can see how it's configured.

I have a couple of Yamaha isa cards with ymf719 chip, I tested one of them a while ago, idk about dos but win98 seemed to have built-in drivers for it so it worked out of the box without me needing to install or configure anything at all... I might put it back in, if this sb pro 2 cant be made to work properly under windows, but really without solving the mouse issue I cant do much with this machine

Here's the sb pro 2. Seems to work correctly under DOS, and Doom worked on it and played some nice fm synth

You can try manually installing the SBPro using the "Add New Hardware" wizard in Control Panel.

And yeah, the lack of PS2 ports is why I'd never use a rig that doesn't have them built-in. Those motherboard headers tend to be finicky, and for me, using a mechanical ball mouse was one of the worst experiences from that era.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-09-11, 10:13:

You can try manually installing the SBPro using the "Add New Hardware" wizard in Control Panel.

And yeah, the lack of PS2 ports is why I'd never use a rig that doesn't have them built-in. Those motherboard headers tend to be finicky, and for me, using a mechanical ball mouse was one of the worst experiences from that era.

I actually tried to "add hardware" the sb pro, but got a bsod when I did, so that didn't seem to work for some reason. BTW I tried testing the pinout with a couple of wires, battery and a speaker, and yeah, indeed the pinout is wrong, at least on the first pin thats supposed to be data its ground instead... sigh... so thats whats going on... I wonder if theres an easy way to swap the wires without having the proper tools for the job... I'll try. And I guess i'm putting the yamaha and keeping the sb pro for a 386 or 486 build some day

p.s. yay, fixed the ps2 port pinout, now ps2 mouse works (at least in current win98 install), gonna have to wipe the hdd and install dos 6.22 and wfw 3.11 again 😀 now if only I could sort out the sb pro 2 as well..
so, I click add new hardware, select sound, creative, sb pro or compatible, click next and get bsod "a fatal exception 0E has occured at 0028:C0027A5E. The current application will be terminated."