Hey people! Pretty ”new” to this vintage PC business, and haven’t been playing with DOS and old PC hardware since my 286-486 days back in the early 90s. I just managed to get hold of a beautiful(!) Tulip system (matching case, monitor, mouse and keyboard). This is a 486 DX2 66, AMD I believe, but I haven’t checked under the hood yet. 20 Mb of RAM. On-board VLB S3 VGA. Soundblaster and Creative CD ROM. 😀 Three questions:

1) It powers on okay but I get a ”System battery is dead - Replace and run SETUP” message. What exactly does this mean? What does this battery power? Is it for the BIOS settings? How difficult is it to replace? Can someone point me in the right direction when it comes to which battery to get?

2) If I resume boot process I get to a ”Novell RPL BootROM” (see pic) menu with some boot options. Where is this menu installed? Will it disappear if I format the disk and reinstall DOS?

3) The on-board VGA card: Can it be overridden by a separate graphics card installed in a slot?

Looking forward to getting started on this system. 😀 Many good memories (and some bad ones) coming back!

Thanks!